The systematic attack on sense-making

Universities and media are destroying their authority.

(This post was prompted by two posts by philosopher Dan Williams.)

There have always been competing social visions of society within Western civilisation. This is a regular feature of human civilisations. There is nothing new in this.

What is new is a systematic attack on the mechanisms for adjudicating reality, an attack that is coming out of the universities and spreading through media and other institutions. The loss of a common “sense-making” apparatus is disorienting contemporary Western societies and undermining accountability.

Technological disruption

Some of this is the disruptive impact of new technologies. Historian Sir Niall Ferguson’s comparison of the impact of the personal computer and the internet with the disruptive effect of the printing press on Europe is an apt one.

Yet, it is also something of a misleading one. For the printing press had nowhere near the disruptive effect on China, several centuries earlier. This was because, in China, the printing press was used to help perfect the channelling of Chinese human capital—via mastering the complexities of Confucianism—towards the service of the emperor.¹ The printing press became a prop of bureaucratised autocratic rule—China pioneered the bureaucratising of autocracy, as distinct from more personalist regimes elsewhere.

Printing, 1568, Wikimedia Commons.

Among the competing jurisdictions of Europe, the printing press had a very different effect, a far more disruptive effect. For the unifying organisation across Latin Christendom was not a state, but the Latin Church. It was the fracturing of that unity that let loose massacre, murder and war—struggles not only over what was true, but how truth was to be determined; who had authority, via what mechanisms, to decide truth.²

The internet provides citizens with far more access to sources of information, not least because anyone can become a publisher. Even more than did the printing press, it undermines the institutional gatekeepers—which analyst Martin Gurri writes perceptively on.

The internet, via social media, also allows mobbing behaviour—shaming and shunning behaviour—following patterns that first emerge within the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s. As an extension of this, it also generates cancel culture—seeking to destroy the reputation, career and businesses of people for things they said or wrote, or were alleged to have so done.

The techniques of cancel culture were pioneered by lobbyists purporting to speak on behalf of Jews. Techniques that social media allows other activist networks to engage in: most dramatically Trans-activists. All of which has led to a situation where majorities of people in the US and elsewhere tell pollsters they have political views they are afraid to express.

As Coddled Affluent Professional observed on X/Twitter (October 10, 2024):

Wokeness is a liberatory movement for midwits.

It gives them *moral authority* over people who are smarter and more talented than they are.

The power to scold is a major reason why wokeness became so popular.

Cancel culture involves forms of aggression that people who regard themselves as peaceful—or as simply being moral, as showing social concern—can engage in. It fits the self-image typical to both women and Jews of themselves as peaceful people.

This is self-deceiving nonsense. These are vicious forms of social aggression that destroy livelihoods. We Homo sapiens are, however, easily up to the self-deception that hides our aggression from ourselves, to the extent of folk denying cancel culture is even a thing.

Self-deceptive rationalising moralisers

Cancel culture is not a technique of debate: it is a substitute for debate. Indeed, it is a mechanism for suppressing debate. We do not get a struggle over the facts of the matter, we get a struggle over legitimacy, over the authority to speak (and to deny speaking).

The use of terms of moral abuse—racist, sexist, misogyny, transphobic, xenophobic, etc.—pretends to be about matters of fact. They are far more about policing which facts one is not allowed to notice or, even worse, falsehoods that one must pretend to endorse.

De-legitimising sense-making mechanisms

What has made all this considerably more disruptive, however, is the way sections of the academy have developed and promulgated ideas that undermine, or even destroy, our socially-evolved mechanisms for adjudicating facts. Ideas and techniques against sense-making that have been developed to defend and promulgate systems of ideas that are toxic nonsense, hence need barriers against reality to maintain themselves. These systems of belief are mind viruses as economist Arnold Kling defines them:

A mind virus is not merely a set of beliefs with which we disagree. A mind virus is a set of untrue beliefs that includes a defense mechanism against truth-seeking.

Speaking of Mind Viruses

These techniques and ideas have spread through media and other institutions.

Philosophies and ideologies of social transformation are particularly inclined to this game, as they set power—the power to transform society—above all other moral considerations. As part of—indeed, central to—the project of social transformation, they seek to deny legitimacy to anyone who does not buy into their social transformation project. Hence all the techniques they have evolved to suppress debate and to evade, denigrate and suppress the inconvenient concerns of the citizenry. Herbert Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance is the classic text of this genre.

Along the way, we have seen mainstream media become actively hostile to expression of views—even if held by a majority of the citizenry—and to act as partisan discourse “bodyguards”. The Democrat Presidential nominee and serving Vice President has a somewhat awkward interview on Fox News because—as folk have pointed out—this was the first searching interview she has had in over four years.

Let that sink in. The serving Vice President, elected on the 2020 Democrat ticket, their nominee for President in 2024, just weeks before the Presidential election, has been shielded from serious questioning by mainstream media for years.

Similarly, Republican VP nominee Senator Vance is widely acknowledged to have outperformed Governor Walz in their VP debate. As commentators noted, it was precisely because Senator Vance regularly fronts up to hostile interviews—as a Republican, he cannot really expect any other type of interview from mainstream media (outside Fox)—while Democrat Governor Walz has not had to confront such. Hence, Sen. Vance could perform rather better.

Then again, the way the Trump-Biden debate blew apart the media construct of the with-it President Biden was striking. Given the odd timing—before either Party Convention—perhaps the debate was scheduled so as to enable walking away from a Biden who was going to lose? Though VP Harris, who has never polled as well as Secretary Clinton did in 2016, is not proving to be a strong alternative.

The issues extend way beyond such blatant, and pervasively one-sided, partisanship. Mainstream media has adopted the Pravda model of pushing approved narratives, adherence to which display one as being morally and cognitively sound. The consequence is that anything that undermines those narratives is regularly shut out, suppressed, or distorted.

The Pravda Media Model

Thus, we have disastrously cherry-picked—so highly misleading—coverage of police violence leading to anti-police activism that resulted in police withdrawal from high-crime localities and thousands of extra homicides. We had Covid pandemic policy distorted by attempts to question proposed measures being narratively bombed as “you want to kill Grandma!”.

A whole set of bureaucratic pathologies were able to run rampant in the public policy response to the pandemic: the threatening of clinicians to enforce conformity to bureaucratic messaging; the failure to focus on risk factors such as obesity; the denial of natural immunity through mandatory vaccination; the over-statement of risks to children and the metabolically healthy—all of which served one-size-fits-all policies that maximised bureaucratic authority while minimising dealing with awkward complexities.

These pathologies—and media complicity in them—had consequences. In Australia, approaching half of the excess deaths in 2021 were from non-Covid causes, while around a third were in 2022 and 2023.

Victoria was the mainland State with the most severe lockdowns—and a particularly compliant media. It suffered the highest rate of excess death of any mainland State, with non-Covid deaths being higher proportion of excess deaths than the national averages—half in 2021, 40 per cent in 2022 and 56 per cent in 2023. Moreover, that Covid deaths were “from or with Covid” means that some of them were due to public policy responses as well.

Attempts to have an informed debate about migration runs against intense media headwinds as views held by a majority of the citizens are dismissed as beyond the moral pale. This has been even more intense in Trans matters, where the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors has been passed of as “care” and “compassion”. A push not only without evidence to back it, but actively against available evidence.

All of these intellectual perversities have their grounding in academe. The more journalists are trained in University Faculties of Media and Journalism, the more the standing of journalists among the wider community falls.

Source.

This is a wider problem. The spread of University credentialism—which advantages Theory over practical skills—is a large part of epistemic decay by the de-legitimisation of inconvenient feedback. So we get journalists trained in Theory, not in their craft, and trained to think of themselves as some moral and epistemic elite compared to voters. We get teachers trained in Theory, not in their craft, and trained to think of themselves as some moral and epistemic elite compared to parents. We get nurses trained in Theory, not in their craft, so find the bed-pan reality of nursing confronting. And so on.

Even worse, we get folk trained in Theory for pseudo-disciplines where there is no underlying craft, so are only any good at manipulating organisations to push toxic ideas. Their advantage is that they have the motivational power of salvationist politics and coordinating power through shared use (and abuse) of language. This leads to the non-electoral politics of institutional capture.

Thus, we get massive shifts in “concern” for racism, etc—that is, far more use of terms structured to de-legitimise dissent and close down debate—that are absolutely not connected to what is happening in societies where racial and other forms of prejudice have been continuing to decline. Hence also the issue of hate crime hoaxes, as the demand for racism as a prop to social leverage exceeds its supply.

Source.

A problem in all this is the progressive delusion that the past can never have been better—a close relative of the fable of progressive innocence.

No, really, decline, institutional decay and decadence is a thing. This attack on the mechanisms for adjudicating facts and processing social concerns goes way beyond a “clash of visions”.

Queer theory, for instance explicitly seeks the destruction of childhood innocence. Queer theory provided the analytical infrastructure that presents the surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors as “care”, including the use of moral abuse to de-legitimise dissent.

In the academy, ideas—whether in their original or updated versions—whose adherents murdered or terror-famined tens of millions of people, and tyrannised hundreds of millions more, are still taught as true. Worse, they are treated as if they give their adherents some positive moral standing.

All these theories are grounded in blank slate views of human nature that are flatly contradicted by evolutionary biology, evolutionary anthropology and much other evidence. Hence the push to Lysenko such inconvenient facts out of medicine and biology.

For social analysis grounded in evolutionary biology, see…

This expanding attack on science—you know, that dreadful “white”, “patriarchal”, “cis-heteronormative”, “Eurocentric” structure of cognitive oppression—is an attack on the most effective mechanism ever developed to adjudicate facts. That this enormously successful mechanism works is, of course, the problem.

Alas, being toxic nonsense is an effective sorting device. If you have a well-grounded sense of the achievements of Western civilisation—and its constituent nations—this literature will likely be dismissed as un-evidenced bullshit: i.e., morally and cognitively grandiose claims made for their rhetorical power without regard for their truth.

If, however, you have any level of alienation from the society around you, then you can not only revel in the grandeur of your moral purpose and understanding, you can signal your commitment to such to the like-minded through your mastery of Theory and its attendant protective rationalisations.

If you are pushing ideas that demonstrably do not work, and lack any serious evidentiary base outside Theory, then the destruction and/or de-legitimisation of mechanisms that do actually work to adjudicate facts becomes a necessary part of the project. The shift to social constructivist ideas not only elevates the moral grandeur of Theory by grounding it in merely imagined futures. By actively de-legitimising reality tests, it protects such Theories from their falsities.

Trapped by Philosophy's worst features

In discipline after discipline, academics do not have to make ideas work—i.e. be grounded in reality—they just have to make them be persuasive. Remember, in the absence of effective or binding reality-tests …

In the absence of reality-testing, bullshit wins

Hence the deep problems of university training. This, btw, extends to medical training, where doctors receive minimal training in nutrition—and much of that poor—while going on to “treat” populations of deteriorating metabolic health precisely because of a industrialised food system that we are not adapted to.³

Similarly, one can tell that economics is not really a science: its Nobel memorials are not handed out—as the science Nobel Prizes are—on the basis of successful prediction, but on the basis of influencing (i.e., being persuasive to) the economics profession. Meanwhile, the septuagenarian surgeon older sister of a friend has to continue to do a couple of shifts most weeks at the local teaching hospital so she can counteract the nonsense that University Theory has put into new nurse’s heads.

A version of this attack on sense-making has happened before. History does not repeat, but it does rhyme. Scepticism about the ability to establish causation—a form of access to truth central to science—was pushed by Muslim thinker al Ghazali (c.1058-1111). The combination of al Ghazali’s attack on the human capacity to apprehend causal reality—which elevated religious knowledge over all other sources of knowledge—and institutional shifts born of Seljuk invasion and conquest reduced Islamic science to a pale shadow of its former self.

Books by scientists versus madrassa-affiliated authors: Source

As Critical Constructivism turns Western universities into “woke” (i.e. Critical Social Justice) madrassas, we can see the same intellectual and institutional processes playing out in front of us. Hence, as academic psychologist Geoffrey Miller informs us:

Almost every scientific journal has been publishing woke nonsense like this lately, ‘challenging’ this or ‘deconstructing’ that—usually challenging & deconstructing reality & truth.

Ordinary folks who try to keep up with the latest science need to understand this pattern.

The universities have fallen. The gov’t funding sources have fallen. The popular science magazines have fallen. Now the journals—which means the whole peer-review system—have fallen to wokeness.

Caveat emptor.

Colonising Education

The disastrous dysfunction of our universities is nowhere more obvious than in the Education Faculties and Departments, which have been invaded by systems of toxic nonsense that not only have no pedagogical value, they are actively pedagogically destructive. Ideas that manifest in pedagogical “theories” and “techniques” that not only lack evidence, but actively go against the evidence, yet allow adherents to flatter themselves as noble Social Justice activists.

In 2004, psychologist Richard E. Mayer published in American Psychologist the paper ‘Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning?: The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction’. In it, he decried the way Education academics kept re-packaging ideas that have been shown, again and again, not to work.

Fast forward to 2023 and the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results show that about a third of Australian school children have inadequate literacy. The Australian Education Minister announces a A$12bn package to, among other things, essentially bribe the public school systems to bring in explicit instruction—an effective approach to pedagogy in line with what psychologists have shown across decades to work. This would replace the—yet again repackaged—notions pushed by Education academics that do not work and which appear to be on their fourth or fifth iteration. So, no, three strikes were not enough.⁴

Sympathetic reviews of Isaac Gottesman’s The Critical Turn in Education applaud the sets of ideas he discusses as flowing through Education academe. Yet they are all sets of ideas not only without pedagogical value, but that are actively pedagogically toxic.

All of this colonising of Education Faculties—and then of school systems—of pedagogically disastrous ideas has been done on the basis of massive bad faith. This process of colonisation pushed ideas that did not remotely reflect the view of the citizens that were paying for all this and who entrusted their children to ideologically-colonised school systems.

Ideas that have no evidentiary basis worth mentioning to support them: indeed, went systematically against the available evidence. Ideas, moreover, that actively seek to increase social dysfunction so that the oppressive “dross” of contemporary societies can be burnt away and the transformational future can emerge like gold from the ashes: i.e., social alchemy theory.

Hence the systematic attack on the mechanisms for adjudicating facts, and on mechanisms of accountability.

Much of the anti “disinformation” push—also coming out of the universities—is  about protecting preferred ways of looking at the world from inconvenient criticism and inconvenient concerns. Fake news, even on a broad definition, is a tiny proportion (0.15 per cent) of US daily media consumption, and is dwarfed by consumption of mainstream news. It is a prop of convenience.

The convenient-moral-panic campaigns to block “disinformation” also go against both historical and scholarly evidence that censorship tends to promote conspiracism and entrench views among the censored. The hate speech laws of Weimar Germany enabled prosecuted Nazis to play the martyr game.

Cargo cult grant structures

There is a lot one could say about the institutional problems that gave rise to all this academic dysfunction. For instance, the innovation cargo cult that has led to spurious academic “innovation” funded by grants. Grant structures that have had many invidious effects—including, via daft citation metrics⁵ and straightforward financial interest, the replication crisis—and massive waste of public funds on toxic nonsense.

Universities and mainstream media want to maintain their authority, while evading responsibility for what they have done to destroy that authority.

Rotting from the head

Epistemically, societies are like fish: they rot from their head. For all the disruptions of the internet and social media, the fundamental epistemic problem of Western—especially Anglosphere—societies is the ongoing epistemic decadence and intellectual collapse of the universities and, from them, the media and the other epistemic industries (academe, education, media, IT).

The culture of the elite universities—and its attendant media—is creating an arrogant, incredibly insular, elite that treats much of the citizenry with open contempt, while corroding institutions.

Source.

What is needed is a root-and-branch purging of the universities. This means massive closures of worse-than-useless Faculties and Departments, breaking-up of universities and the regulation that universities should have been able to do for themselves, but demonstrably—and catastrophically—have failed to do. It also means stripping away requiring university qualifications for any job, apart from a very narrow range of professional qualifications and, even there, the revival of alternative means of qualifying.

Source.

The media and universities have not been losing authority because of malign forces beyond their control.⁶ They have been losing it because they have pissed their authority away.

ADDENDA: A comment I made here: A Machiavellian strategy is to get the universities sufficiently nervous, that they clean up their act. I am aware there are lots of scholars who do not buy into the nonsense, including those who quietly push back. (Particularly in Psychology, for some reason.)

But I am not inclined to forgive the evil nonsense (I used the term advisedly) of Queer Theory. Nor those systematically deliberately pushing for increased social dysfunction so that the transformed society can emerge from it (and no, I am not making that up: social alchemy theory is really a thing, even if not under that moniker).

As I have documented in the above linked post, and my recent one on underestimating domestic violence and the evolution of status strategies, the universities are throwing their credibility away. As the use of prejudice (i.e. stigmatising moral abuse) terms in scholarly abstracts soars, the popular standing of universities plummets.

References

J. Allen, B. Howland, M. Mobius, D. Rothschild, D. J. Watts, ‘Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem,’ Science Advances, 6, eaay3539 (2020).

J. Doyne Farmer, Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World, Allen Lane, 2024.

Jo Freeman, ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,’ Ms magazine, April 1976, pp. 49-51, 92-98.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public And The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, 2014.

Yasheng Huang, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, Yale University Press, 2023.

Jacob Mchangama, ‘The Sordid Origin of Hate-Speech Laws: A tenacious Soviet legacy,’ Hoover Institute, December 1, 2011. https://www.hoover.org/research/sordid-origin-hate-speech-laws.

Stephanie Masta, ‘Book Review, The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race,’ Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 2017, Vol. 6, No. 3, 128-131.

Richard E. Mayer, ‘Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning?: The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction,’ American Psychologist, January 2004, Vol. 59, No. 1, 14–19.

Bill Ottman, Daryl Davis, Jack Ottman, Jesse Morton, Justin E. Lane, Prof. F. LeRon Shult, ‘The Censorship Effect: An analysis of the consequences of social media censorship and a proposal for an alternative moderation model,’ Change Minds, 3/10/2022.

https://cdn-assets.minds.com/The_Censorship_Effect.pdf

Fleming Rose, ‘Words and deeds,’ Index on Censorship, (2012), 41(1), 55-62.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306422012440384

M. Sauder, F. Lynn, & J. M.  Podolny, ‘Status: Insights from organizational sociology,’ Annual Review of Sociology, (2012), 38, 267–283.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Kamden K. Strunk, ‘Review of The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race by Isaac Gottesman,’ The Professional Educator, December 2020, 44(1):1-3.

Yuhua Wang, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development, Princeton University Press, 2022.

Daniel Williams, ‘The marketplace of rationalizations,’ Economics & Philosophy (2022), 1–25.

1. The compass and gunpowder were also Chinese inventions that had transformative effects out of the competitive jurisdictions of Europe, but not from the Chinese unitary state.

2. So much of the history of progressivism has been an ongoing unlearning of the lessons of the Wars of Religion.

3. Farming was also something of a metabolic disaster, due to lack of adaptation, but—as industrialised processed food does now—it enabled access to food (well, in our case, food-like products) at much greater scale. BTW, the later adaptation—via high rates of infant and child mortality—to farmed food wears off as we age.

4. Australia has had public schools since the 1850s. Apparently, they still have not yet learnt to reliably teach students adequate literacy. Let that sink in. (In reality, it is worse than that, their performance has regressed.)

5. Citation metrics that replace what is useful—good teaching—with what is public while also enabling idea laundering.

6. The surge in prejudice (i.e. debate-suppressing) terms in scholarly abstracts tracks the collapse of US popular confidence in higher education.