Most public debates would be transformed by shifting the focus away from the information being exchanged, and…
Most public debates would be transformed by shifting the focus away from the information being exchanged, and towards the question of who we trust. And why. In reality most of us don’t know much about anything, except those things that are part of our own jobs. /1
We can take a healthy interest in the work others do. But the overwhelming political movement of our time isn’t about misinformation and disinformation. As if societies run on information - they absolutely don’t. They run on TRUST. A healthy, social thing. /2
Recognising that expertise has to be distributed, in a complex society, there’s far too much for any one person to know well. Meaning we rely upon a trust of others to know the things we don’t know, and to act on them accordingly. That’s what our institutions are. /3
It’s how they emerged, the infrastructure of trust. The way societies delegated expertise in all of the different areas of life. The dominant political movement of the past 70 years has been an all-out assault on these institutions, by attacking the trust that creates them. /4
By dismissing them out of hand as ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’. Replacing them with the ludicrous idea of everybody knowing everything about everything, and mobilising that magical universal knowledge using social media, to run societies. From the ‘bottom up’. /5
Or so the fantasy goes. I don’t know about you, but in the several different jobs in my own career, often there are too few even competent in the work they ARE qualified to do. Let alone them having mastery of all the areas they have nothing to do with. /6
My own response to cookers and other universal know-alls now is nothing to do with the information they’re trading with. I simply ask them what their area of training is, what they work on day to day. And ask them why people should trust them. /7
And not trust the people actually trained in and working in the field in question. And ask them if the people in those fields are coming to their workplace, to cast doubt on the work THEY’RE doing. (The answer is almost always no.) So what gives them the right to do it? /8
Why this fundamental lack of respect for the work other people do? This astronomical hubris at thinking they’re a universal expert, on everything? I find focusing the discussion away from information and facts and back on the social violations of trust is much more productive. /9
To put it back on people, to ask them if they would enjoy climate scientists for example coming to a building site, if they’re a plumber, to criticise and question their plumbing work? It would make them furious. These are basic questions of respect. Social questions. /10
Not questions of information and facts. That’s a dead-end. What’s the point of arguing data and facts from a whole range of fields most of us know very little about? This highlights the real political strategy in play, to destroy all hierarchies of trust. Our social rules. /11
And replace them with a unidimensional trust in a Great Leader of some kind, an influencer or a Trump. Because this politics doesn’t remove trust, it corrals it. Makes all of it detour around a handful of grifters looking for social domination. /12
They destroy the peace and calm of a life where we don’t need to be constantly thinking about and evaluating everything, because we trust others to do things for us. And our institutions have checks and balances built in to protect that trust, to ensure it’s not being gamed. /13
Or rather they try to restore the peace and calm of life by making all trust detour via them. So that they become a single source of truth, which is really a single point of trust. This is how societies work, and always have. Via trust, mediated by status. /14
Society is social. All of it. To fix bad things, we need to focus on the social, always. On the basic social ways we interact with each other. Not slug it out over data, and try to know and do everything ourselves. /end