Credentialed Unreality

in which I identify another pattern

the baking soda in my kitchen

My friend

Josh Slocum

told me to get baking soda for my kitchen.

He was over at my apartment, cooking dinner for me—a detail that may confuse the version of reality that some of you inhabit.

Online, Josh exists in a completely different world. In that world, he’s a raging misogynist and homophobe, despite being gay himself.

He has been convicted repeatedly in The Internet Comment Section Court of Doing A Misogyny. (Also of Doing Racisms and Transphobias and Homophobias, Oh My!)

His actual crime, as far as I can tell, is saying things out loud that you’re only allowed to whisper, and using the wrong tone while doing it.

A large contingent of the internet—mostly women and gay men who live in a certain pocket of progressive discourse—genuinely believe he is irredeemable.

Dangerous.

Morally radioactive.

They don’t just disagree with him. They believe he exists in a kind of moral inversion field, where everything he says is already contaminated.

His motives are presumed bad.

His facts are presumed false.

His tone, even if gentle, is interpreted as cruel. In their world, this is an unquestionable truth.

But in my world—in reality, in my kitchen, in the 3D world of flesh and blood and what my four senses plus my hearing aids can reveal to me—Josh is none of these terrible things.

In reality, he is one of my favorite humans. Aside from my therapist, who inhabits a legally protected world that’s about all me anyway, he’s the person I trust the most.

In reality, a human I know to be trustworthy, gentle, compassionate, thoughtful, and generous was in my kitchen making me a damn good meal.

And told me I needed baking soda. Not for cookies; for grease fires.

“You don’t have any?” he asked, alarmed.

“Noooo,” I said. “Should I?”

He blinked. “It’s how you put out a grease fire. You don’t throw water on it. You smother it with baking soda. Water just feeds a grease fire. If you have one and you spray it with water—” he correctly intuited that, given my tiny kitchen, that’s exactly what I would do — “You’ll make it worse and burn this entire building down.”

He explained it carefully. Not condescendingly. Just matter-of-fact.

I got on Amazon and ordered some within a few moments of his explanation, and now I have some.

I’m not stupid.

I just didn’t know.

Like a lot of people who raised themselves, I’ve picked up most of my adulting skills through failure, crisis, and osmosis. No one taught me how to manage a kitchen.

Or a car.¹

Or a bank account.

I’ve learned these things late, one lesson at a time.

A lot of abused children live this way—navigating the adult world like it’s a dark basement full of invisible tripwires.

We don’t know what we don’t know, and we only come to know what we didn’t know when the price tag for not knowing it gets rung up at the register of consequences.

Hold on to that. We’ll come back to it.

Another Self-Defined Schema? Really?

Yes, I know what this looks like.

Another schema. Another cosmology. Another dispatch from Substackistan with a glint in its eye and a half-loaded metaphor dragging the tail of some Big Idea behind it like a comically oversized wagon.

Guilty as charged.

Back in December 2021, I wrote an essay that argued the real American divide wasn’t political or religious or even cultural—it was epistemic.

Not Left vs. Right, not Democrat vs. Republican, but Team Mainstream vs. Team Skeptic: people whose default setting is to trust institutional narratives vs. people whose default is to doubt them.

I linked it above if you want to read the whole thing, but here’s the gist:

Team Mainstream sees institutions—media, medicine, education—as flawed but fundamentally well-meaning. They operate on a “trust unless proven otherwise” model, with a deep instinct to preserve consensus.

Team Skeptic sees those same institutions as fundamentally captured: politicized, corporatized, and often actively misleading. We trust individuals, not systems.

If we’ve been hurt, it wasn’t by accident—it was by design, or at least by negligence no one will ever be held accountable for.

The piece didn’t go viral or make me a bunch of money. It did something better: it helped a handful of people make sense of the world.

And it helped me make sense of myself. Which is what I’m doing again here.

And I want to confess that I am deeply aware of the danger.

Because there is a particular species of hubris that infects those of us who see patterns for a living.

If I am anything at all — a question that remains unsettled in my own mind and that I am nowhere near answering to my own satisfaction — I am a mathematician and an artist.

I want certainty, proof, and the confidence of being able to prove I have the right answer.

And I want beauty.

I like symmetry that tells a story. I’m a recreational number theorist, for fuck’s sake—the mystical weirdos of math.

The ones who stare at prime numbers like they’re tea leaves.

The ones who think modular arithmetic is sexy and know the exact emotional flavor of a pencil with the point just slightly too dull.

And yes, most math is still done in pencil. No matter how fancy your LaTeX setup is, if you’re thinking about math—real math—you’re probably scribbling something on a crumpled legal pad with three erasure smudges that each represent a different flavor of despair.

Or, these days, you probably have a backup Apple Pencil in case you drain the juice out of your main one.

But either way, still pencil. As with art.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m about to offer another frame.

Another pattern. Another moral cosmology that helps me make sense of the world, and maybe helps you too.

But first I have to ramble my way through the preamble like someone who took a wrong turn on the way to a thesis statement and stopped for snacks.

Just…humor me, k?

The pattern matters.

I’ve been visiting each location in Vermont as part of a Vermont 251 Club project. I just published number 8, about South Hero. Eight down, two hundred forty-four to go.

These long drives across Vermont have given me time and space to think. That’s one of the hidden benefits of my Vermont 251 Club project—when you’re alone in the car, half an hour out from a village that has one blinking light and two churches, your brain gets quiet enough for the signal to come through.

The signal, in this case, being: How in the bloody hell are we all still holding together as a country?

I thought about this in Middlebury, where the spoiled, rich college kids send speakers they don’t like to the hospital.

I thought about it in Windsor, too, where the American Precision Museum is a cathedral to tools, reminding me there was once a time when Americans built machines that made parts that made other machines that did something.

I left Windsor truly haunted by how far we’ve drifted, as a nation, from that material clarity—and how much harder it is to trust each other when we no longer build or touch the same things.

And nowhere in this country makes the point more viscerally than Vermont itself.

Where Nothing Pushes Back

Vermont is the axis of contradiction that makes the national fracturing feel personal.

It’s got the People’s Republic of Burlington, which really is cobalt blue, but the rest of the state is purple — or even, in the northeast Kingdom, pink-to-red.

Vermont is where, at the same gas station, you can meet a transwoman with purple hair wearing a “A Woman’s Place Is in the White House” shirt, standing in line behind a farmer with a Trump 2024 bumper sticker slapped over his Trump 2020 one. (Economical! Respect for the pragmatism, my dude.)

It’s where a man working a farm stand can sell apples from the same family farm his great-grandfather worked in 1907—only to hand one to a professor who, just hours earlier, delivered a lecture about how landowners like him should be liquidated for the good of the people.

And they both smile over the apples.

I’ve watched that smile. That flicker of mutuality, suspended briefly above a yawning metaphysical chasm.

Then they go back to their separate realities—realities that not only disagree, but don’t even intersect.

The divide became even clearer to me in my recent review of Butler by Salena Zito. In part of it, she touches on the statistical power of a bachelor’s degree — how the push towards college came at the same time that the outsourcing of manufacturing made supporting a family on a non-college education much more difficult.

College is the divide. But not for the reasons people think.

It’s not just about money or job access or who reads The Atlantic.

It’s that college is where you spend your most impressionable adult years immersed in ideas that are not required—and are often strongly disincentivized, punished, and otherwise discouraged from having any tether to reality.

Yes, there are exceptions. Mathematics departments still mostly obey the laws of objective truth. (Though somewhere, my perpetual pessismism forces me to suspect, someone got tenure for a paper titled “What Is a Prime Number Really?” with footnotes citing Judith Butler.)

But in most departments? Reality is long, long gone.

And the data backs it up.

Look at the political affiliations of professors across different academic departments. It’s not just a lean. It’s a gravitational collapse.

Yes, every department leans heavily left — it’s academia, what did you expect? But look at the departmental breakdowns.

In English literature, 88% of faculty identify as liberal. In sociology, it’s 77%. In political science, 81%. Philosophy, 80%. Psychology, 84%.

These are not subtle majorities. These are departments where you could read The Communist Manifesto aloud and get applause for courage—even if it’s your sixth time this semester.

But scroll down.

Mathematics: 69% liberal, 17% conservative.
Chemistry: 64% liberal, 29% conservative.
Engineering: 51% liberal, 19% conservative.
Business: only 49% liberal, with 26% identifying as Republican.

The closer you get to disciplines with material stakes — where truth has to touch the real world and either hold or collapse—the more the political skew begins to flatten.

Not balance — it’s academia — but it starts to soften.

Because you can’t argue a bridge into standing.

You can’t gender-theorize a server into compiling.

Acids explode or they don’t.

A dosage kills or it doesn’t.

Credentialed unreality thrives in the departments where nothing fights back because nothing was tethered to reality in the first place.

That’s not to say everyone in STEM is conservative or wise or free from ideological contagion. (God help us, they’re not.)

But their disciplines still maintain some contact with falsifiability.

With constraint.

With the basic humiliations of being wrong in front of a chalkboard, or in front of a lab, or in front of an angry patient who would like to not die today.

When you don’t have to touch anything real—when your output is language and your rubric is narrative—you start to believe that all truth is moral, and that disagreement is heresy.

And that’s how we get entire departments built on vibes, outrage, and credentialed delusion.

We have biology professors claiming sex is a spectrum and that humans are not a dimorphic species. Middle East studies professors pretending the livestreamed atrocities of October 7, 2023, never happened. Literature professors explaining how To Kill a Mockingbird is a white supremacist tract.

And I personally had to sit through three required classes earnestly discussing things like “demisexuality,” which I distinctly remember being made up on Tumblr—while I was on Tumblr watching it happen.

This isn’t rigorous abstraction. It’s detethered ideology.

A performance of seriousness with no expectation of empirical grounding.

The divide, as I conceptualize it, is something like a credentialed unreality.

A fluent, institutionalized, often prestigious language of ideas unmoored from testability, falsifiability, or consequence—but which confer enormous status on those who speak it well.

Credentialed unreality is where adults imagine a world where:

• The population is persuaded—or compelled—to agree.

• Dissent becomes harm.

• Silence becomes violence.

• Words reconfigure the world.

• Truth has moral valence.

• And power is righteous—if their side wields it.

It’s cosplay with benefits.

LARPing with grant funding.

Symbolic ideology enforced by the HR ladies.

And it’s everywhere now—especially among the professional-managerial class: politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, DEI officers.

People who neither make anything nor touch anything beyond their internet-enabled devices.

People whose days are shaped by consensus, not consequence.

Meanwhile, Team Skeptic still lives in reality.

Where code compiles or it doesn’t.

Where a miscalculation in a chemistry lab results in fire, not discourse.

Where getting a dosage wrong can kill someone.

Where missing one car payment matters.

So I’m going to name the framework now, before someone gives it a worse label and makes a TED Talk out of it.

Let’s call it The Reality Gradient.

The Reality Gradient

At one end: people grounded in material reality—trained by feedback, error, and stakes.

At the other: people immersed in credentialed unreality—trained by symbols, language, and social cohesion.

It isn’t good vs. evil. It isn’t even left vs. right, though Woke vs. anti-Woke comes closer than anything else (but is far from a perfect mapping).

It’s a clash of metaphysical operating systems.

And here’s the hard ask: try to understand that most of them aren’t evil or stupid. They’re something more like…unblooded.

They’ve never had to stretch ten dollars across four days.

Never patched a leaking pipe with YouTube and duct tape.

Never had to fix a brake light in a snowstorm with a socket wrench and hope.

When a nurse makes a mistake, there’s an investigation and a write-up. When a gender studies professor invents nonsense, it becomes a conference theme.

Out here, a bad decision triggers an audit or a lawsuit. In credentialed unreality, it earns you tenure.

The people who live in credentialed unreality have literally never been punished for being wrong.

They don’t know what they’re made of.

And they don’t know what you are made of, either.

But that doesn’t mean their perspective is worthless.

When you live too close to the meat and marrow and bone of reality, you can forget to look up.

You can become blind to symbolism, immune to metaphor, dismissive of narrative.

And sometimes, the people living in credentialed unreality point toward something real—even if they describe it poorly (and arrogantly).

It’s on us, on our side of the Reality Gradient, to do the sorting. The discerning.

To notice when a story smells like bullshit—but also when the steaming pile might contain a buried truth.

Because we’re the ones who know what reality is.

We’re the ones who know what a fire does.

We’re the ones who knew what to do when someone said, “You need baking soda.”

Growing Up Anyway

Here’s where I ask the impossible.

Because I refuse to accept that we have to live this way forever.

We are allowed to grow the fuck up. We don’t have to keep swinging from extreme to extreme like a solar-powered pendulum with ADHD and a podcast.

America is young. Still a teenager, really.

As a nation, we are a 13-year-old whose parents handed over drugs, guns, car keys, and an open liquor cabinet before leaving town for the weekend.

We’re careening from identity crisis to identity crisis, drunk on our own idealism one minute, burning it down the next.

But adolescence is not destiny.

We don’t have to live forever in this state of reactive chaos, ping-ponging between polarized selves.

We are allowed—at any moment—to grow up. To stop performing extremes and start choosing balance.

To find middle ground where everyone gives a little, acknowledges tradeoffs, and makes the kind of boring, painful, adult compromises that actually build something.

But that only happens if we can find a way to see each other clearly.

So I’m going to say something unfair now.

Really unfair.

Because the people I’m about to describe—the ones steeped in credentialed unreality—have been smug. Superior. Sanctimonious. Insufferable.

They have used their institutional power to punish dissent, to label disagreement as violence, to silence people like me and humiliate people like you.

They’ve earned every ounce of contempt we sometimes feel toward them.

And still.

I think we have to offer them Buddha-level grace.

Not all of them — not the worst of them, not the ones who argue that Jewish babies are colonizer and rape is resistance. I’m not saying we have to invite sociopaths in and give them trust.

I’m saying we have to recognize that most of them don’t know what they don’t know — and they don’t know enough to know that there’s anything they don’t know.

Their way of dealing with reality is to throw water on grease fires—because no one ever taught them better, and their lives have never made them pay the price for being wrong.

We have to give the normal-range ones—the ones who’ve caught a socially transmitted case of Cluster B, not the full-blown clinical kind—the only path forward that doesn’t end in fracture or war.

I don’t know how we get them to understand reality, but we have to try.

Because if we don’t try to bridge the Reality Gradient, no one will.

And because we’re the ones who’ve been humbled. The ones who’ve been wrong. The ones who’ve lost and scraped and bled and prayed and built.

We’re the ones who know what it is to suffer and survive.

And we’re the ones who know what reality feels like.

We’re the ones who know you don’t pour water on a grease fire.

Because someone told us the truth—and we didn’t argue. We listened.

We bought the baking soda.

Because someone who was supposed to be a monster stood in my kitchen, made me dinner, and cared enough to teach me how not to burn the building down.

That’s how truth works out here in the real world.

It doesn’t care who says it.

It just waits for someone who knows what to do with it.

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Want More?

I have more thoughts on this framing, but this is long enough so I’ll only produce part two if there’s real interest (i.e. this results in paid subscription conversions).

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Shamless, Obligatory Plug

Speaking of college, I’m still in debt up to my eyeballs for my mathematics degree. To try to pay it off myself, instead of waiting on the taxpayers to bail me out, I am selling high-quality prints of my drawings, including the one shown below and a pay-what-you-want Texas bluebonnet, here. I’m also selling the original of “Fight!” on Wednesday, August 6. You can bid via email: hollymathnerd at gmail dot com.

1. Guess who checked my tires and found that three of them had gone bald? That would be the misogynist who wants all the smart women to shut up or die again.