Braindead Cynicism Wins In The Marketplace of Ideas

No obviously everything isn't political!

Some false beliefs sound plausible but turn out to be false. Other false beliefs are so insanely ludicrous that it’s astonishing anyone believes them. But so long as they sound vaguely sophisticated and cynical, people will keep repeating them even after hearing the obvious and decisive objections.

One example of such a belief is summed up in a phrase as ubiquitous as it is idiotic: “everything is political.” It’s one of those phrases that’s uncritically accepted because it sounds vaguely edgy, and gives you an excuse to crash your Thanksgiving dinner with discussion of the Trump administration. But its actual propositional content is about as obviously false as anything could be. The view is accurately described by a word that you’re not supposed to say anymore but that maybe you can say again since Trump came to power.

I was recently at a meeting of a debating club of sorts at my University. The topic was whether everything is political. Bizarrely, nearly everyone seemed to agree that the answer was yes. Many affirmed the motion, few argued against it. And this was even after a friend of mine gave a speech lambasting the utter ridiculousness of the motion.

Everything is political??? Everything! Do you have any idea how many things there are? Consider some planet that was destroyed 8 billion years ago, that never existed at the same time as any politics existed in the entire universe. Was this planet political? Normally to be political, it seems one has to exist at the same time politics exists, just as something cannot be biological if it only ever existed billions of years before biology ever makes it on the scene.

Is the Pythagorean theorem political? As my friend who spoke noted, the fact that politics had something to do with the discovery of the Pythagorean theorem doesn’t mean the Pythagorean theorem itself is political, just as the fact that a person who dug up dinosaur bones wore a lab-coast doesn’t mean the dinosaurs worse lab-coats! Is some very large prime number that no human will ever think of political? Is Pangea political? Is the principle of explosion?

Honestly, the notion that everything is political is so ridiculous on its face that it’s embarrassing anything needs to be said against it. I feel rather as if I am arguing against the notion that there aren’t any birds or the self-sampling assumption. And yet this notion was uncritically accepted by a sizeable majority of Oxford students, even after hearing the utterly decisive arguments. Now admittedly, these were mostly PPE students, so they have an unusual proclivity for believing false things, but still…

(Note to PPE students: I kid, of course—you are all very special!)

It wouldn’t be so bad if this were the only obviously idiotic view most people held. But there seems to be a wide class of views that are wholly argument-proof. People simply can’t be reasoned out of those views by argument, even if the arguments have the force of a nuclear bomb.

For instance, I once heard Peter Railton give a lecture about why psychological egoism is false. Psychological egoism is the notion that people only act in their own self-interest. It’s totally ridiculous on its face. Sometimes, for instance, people give their life to save others. When they do so, they don’t believe that doing so is in their interest. Have psychological egoists ever met parents? Parents seem generally willing to subordinate their own interests to their children’s.

Not only do people often seem not to act in their own interest, they often act in ways that don’t advance anyone’s interests. People often desire that some work of art they made be appreciated, even after they die, even without believing that they will benefit from beyond the grave.

There is only one real argument for psychological egoism and it has the rather substantial defect of being demonstrably fallacious. The argument goes:

1. People always do what they desire.

2. If one is only acting for the sake of their own desires, they are acting self-interestedly.

3. Therefore, one always acts self-interestedly.

The issue is, of course, in the assumption that when one acts for their own desires they are doing so for the sake of themself. Provided one has a desire for things that don’t benefit them, they are not necessarily acting for their own sake. If one’s desires are for the interests of others, then when they provide for the interests of others, they are not being selfish. This is why it is coherent to say “I wish to do what you want to do today, not what I do.” One has a higher order desire for something that would fulfill fewer of their first-order desires. In other words, their desires are other-regarding, not self-regarding.

Anyway, during this lecture, Professor Railton was, with his characteristic cleverness, penetrating insights, and decisive philosophical acumen, explaining all the problems with psychological egoism. He explained many, many reasons the view is totally ridiculous. By the end of it, it was hard to believe that anyone still held the view.

But when a poll was taken at the end of the class, around 40% of the class still believed it. Only like 20% of people changed their mind. Despite Railton giving overwhelmingly powerful, simple, and obvious objections, people dogmatically clung to the view. It made me lose a bit of faith in human reason.

What do these views—psychological egoism and belief that everything is political—have in common other than being ridiculous on their face? They sound vaguely cynical and edgy! When you utter either, it sounds like you’re a sophisticated cynic seeing through the veil.

People like their identity as sophisticated cynics. Most people don’t think very hard about arguments. They go by vibes, to a truly astonishing degree, in forming their views. It’s no wonder they cling dogmatically to the aforementioned bits of obvious nonsense—though these views are clearly false, they have all the right vibes to be convincing.

These are like the belief that “everything is relative.” When you declare everything relative, you sound simultaneously tolerant and cynical. You see through the naive farce of “absolute truth”—whatever the hell that’s supposed to be (such people tend to very unclear about what they think absolute truth means). People will dismiss out of hand the notion that there is such thing as absolute truth even without having a very clear idea of what it is. Certainly if it’s simply the notion that there are truths that don’t depend on what we think about them, well, it would seem clear that there were neutrinos that existed before any humans had thoughts about them. If the claim is merely that what one believes is affected by their perception, well, that is trivial and disputed by no one!

In a world of vibes-based reasoning, it’s no wonder that some people can’t be talked out of some beliefs provided those beliefs have the right vibe. Ridiculous dogmatism doesn’t just apply to politics—it applies just as much to these odd bits of vaguely political piety. A veneer of cynicism defeats obvious arguments in the marketplace of ideas. The only solution to restore order to the marketplace of ideas is women crying about those beliefs.