On Default Settings and the Real Divide
a dispatch from Substackistan
“The failings of our institutions need not lead to a total lack of trust in our institutions.”
—Sam Harris, in Ask Me Anything #17
I have a new hypothesis, one that I haven’t had time to dig into sufficiently (yet) to make it anti-fragile. But I find the process of writing to be quite clarifying, so here it is. If you strongly agree or disagree with any part of it, I welcome email responses. Reply to the email that got this in your inbox or email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com.
My Hypothesis
The US is quickly splintering into two groups, and it’s not the two groups you might think. It’s not Left vs Right, atheist vs religious, Democrat vs. Republicans, vaccinated vs unvaccinated, or even COVID-cautious vs COVID-so-damn-over-it.
The divide between the two groups is this: people whose default setting is to trust institutional narratives, and people whose default setting is to be skeptical of them; people who believe them unless/until proven otherwise and people who disbelieve them to equal measure.
For the purposes of this essay, I will call them Team Mainstream and Team Skeptic. I find myself, regretfully and having paid a high price in mental health for the time I spent fighting my “trade” from one team to the other, a member of Team Skeptic.
Team Mainstream doesn’t believe every narrative uncritically, and as the Sam Harris quote at the top of this essay shows, they can recognize that institutions have failings. Team Skeptic doesn’t disbelieve every aspect of every narrative uncritically. These descriptions, as well as those below, are of general tendency, not of every precise detail. Neither team is a monolith, and both the institutions themselves and our perceptions of institutions are constantly changing.
What Institutions? And What Does Believing or Disbelieving Mean?
Listing and defining all institutions would make this essay much too long, but here are a few examples of what I am referring to.
Medicine
Generally—the American Medical Association, the FDA, CDC, and other public health agencies are certainly part of institutional medicine, but so are Big Pharma and medical schools, and so is your local doctor and hospital.
Team Mainstream sees the institution of medicine as largely committed to finding and elucidating the best options for public health, recognizing that there may sometimes be competing incentives. Team Skeptic sees it as thoroughly corrupt, politicized to the core, beholden to moneyed interests, and while they may find and trust individual doctors, they do so in spite of and not because of any connections those doctors may have to larger institutions.
Thus, Team Mainstream believes that the COVID vaccines are safe and effective and we should vaccinate everyone as quickly as possible. Team Skeptic does their own research and finds sources that meet their own standards of trustworthiness. Some vaccinate and some don’t, doing their own risk assessments for their individual situations. (For example, I am not vaccinating myself but I strongly encouraged two friends with multiple comorbidities to get vaccinated, which they did.)
Extreme members of Team Mainstream have their own atrocities (I refuse to link to any of the child abuse videos of sobbing toddlers having masks forced on them by adults), while extremist members of Team Skeptic may believe in conspiracy theories about Bill Gates using the vaccines to begin tracking them in some manner that their smart phone doesn’t already permit.
Media
The institution of media includes the legacy media, including but not limited to the New York Times, Washington Post, and other newspapers; CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, and others that either explicitly or implicitly attempt to claim the mantle of “objectivity” or “fairness.” It also includes podcasts, blogs, independent journalists, and others who make no such pretense that they don’t have and/or are not deliberately furthering point of view.
Team Mainstream sees the corporate media as perhaps biased in some respects, but not necessarily to any degree that makes them unworthy of trust. They see absurdities like the infamous declaration of summer 2020’s riots as “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” as perhaps mistakes, but ones born out of the correct instinct; that being, to support the campaign for racial justice they see the events as representing. Team Skeptic sees the corporate media as entirely and thoroughly corrupt, nothing more than a politicized army of the same Democratic party to which the vast majority of journalist campaign contributions go.
Team Skeptic has many methods of gathering news despite their disbelief in institutional narratives. Some consume news from corporate media and media that explicitly has a point of view (like Breitbart or other conservative outlets) and assume the truth to be somewhere in the middle of the competing narratives. Others solely consume alternative media, trusting only fellow members of Team Skeptic.
Lower Education
Prior to COVID, the narrative on lower education went something like this: teachers are selfless heroes, badly underpaid, who give constantly of themselves for the sake of our kids, often spending much more time with our kids than their parents do and thus providing an inestimable contribution to our future.
Team Mainstream largely believed this narrative and many of them still do. The ones who doubted some aspect of it would still caveat any criticism with statements about how of course, education spending should be a priority, but….or of course, they support higher pay for teachers, but…..and so on. This a recurring motif of Team Mainstream: the fundamental need to affirm their allegiance to the narrative, even if just to differentiate themselves from the Other, is always present.
Team Skeptic saw the power of teacher unions, which overwhelmingly support Democrats, and the susceptibility of children to indoctrination by adults, and were far more skeptical about this narrative, tending to homeschool or private school their kids if at all possible.
Since COVID, homeschooling has exploded many of these narratives. Parents saw and heard lessons over Zoom for the first time. Critical Race Theory, mixed sex bathrooms, and other aspects of Wokeness in our schools have caused many members of Team Mainstream to admit to serious problems in lower education. The more dedicated members, like Sam Harris, find ways to rationalize it. (Example: he mentioned on a podcast that his 12-year-old daughter had been assigned to read one of the Woke CRT books—it was a young reader’s edition of Ibram X. Kendi if memory serves—but wrote this off as inconsequential because his own child was able to discuss the arguments with him and see through them. If he mentioned anything about the effect of these ideas on kids who are not being raised by Sam Harris or other parents with the time, money, education, and other resources to be able to unpack these ideas for their kids if necessary, I do not recall such.)
Team Skeptic has primarily either staked out the position that unless and until drastic changes come, their kids will not set foot in public schools or, for those parents unable to achieve this, started finding their own resources to de-indoctrinate their kids at home, paying closer attention than ever, showing up at school board meetings, and generally making it known that they are ready and willing to fight.
Observations About Team Skeptic in the Time of COVID
In observing my fellow members of Team Skeptic, many (but not all) share histories of great difficulty in our lives. We also tend to be people who grew up poor, working poor, or lower middle class, regardless of present circumstances.
We have led lives of constantly navigating risk, often with lopsided consequences. Often, it is all we know. A small example: I once made a mistake with money. Specifically, I forgot that I had swiped my debit card to pay a $5 charge on campus. That $5 charge caused another charge, a pre-arranged one to pay an important bill, to bounce. That bounce caused a fee from the bank. The fee caused two more things to bounce, and two more fees. A momentary mistake, just a few seconds of carelessness, caused a cascade of very harsh consequences.
I am neither exaggerating nor being hyperbolic when I say that by the time I was able to compeltely clean up that mess, several months later, I had been punished for my momentary lapse to a point where I’d have happily chosen a flogging instead, had the choice been mine to make.
This is normal life for members of the poor, working poor, and lower middle classes. We are people who have lost needed jobs for being late just once after annoying the tyrannical bastard who makes our blue-collar work life hell; people for whom an expired-license-plates-ticket sometimes means missing meals; people who have never had a safety net and don’t expect the government to provide one now.
We are people for whom other people’s decisions have always had the power to create disastrous consequences—and as a matter of course, not as a tragic outlier (like a drunk driver or mass shooting, which could happen to anyone).
Observations About Team Mainstream in the Time of COVID
In contrast to Team Skeptic, in the time of COVID, I observe that most (no, not all) members of Team Mainstream are people who have led relatively privileged lives. That is not a personal indictment, by any means. I hope to one day adopt a child from foster care and provide him or her with a privileged life. What it does mean, however, is that many members of Team Mainstream have little to no internal resources for dealing with potentially harsh and unfair consequences caused by momentary lapses—particularly, other people’s momentary lapses. The idea that other people’s freedom might cause them to suffer in any way, even an inconvenience like catching an illness that’s minor for most people, is anathema and something they feel entitled to protection from. This risk, in their minds, absolutely warrants government intervention to protect them.
Tyranny Is Probably The Only Path Team Mainstream Has
Team Skeptic is not going to be convinced quickly or easily to return trust to institutional narratives. Team Mainstream understands this, either consciously or unconsciously, and this is why so many of them are prepared to back tyranny, even when it’s inevitably and predictably going to backfire on them—and in spectacular fashion. The same people who’ve spent decades arguing for abortion rights and the decriminalization of sexual behavior between consenting adults with the mantra of “my body, my choice” are now demanding vaccine mandates. And they’re demanding them when every poll, as well as historical knowledge about midterm elections, tells them to expect Congressional power to change hands eleven months from now.
Why would they go to something so violative of principles many of them believe they hold (like bodily autonomy, or that employers shouldn’t have the right to dictate personal, medical matters to employees) and so obviously and predictably destined to backfire? I believe that it’s at least partially because they can tell that trust is gone and therefore persuasion will take far more effort than they’re willing or able to expend.
Some Unhelpful Traps to Avoid, If You Can
Team Skeptic should refrain from mocking Team Mainstream. Calling them sheep or otherwise being derisive will do nothing but solidify their loyalty to mainstream narratives, making defection far scarier. And mainstream narratives, despite our lack of faith in them, still end up being correct sometimes.
Team Mainstream should refrain from writing Team Skeptic off as crazy (yes, Sam Harris, despite the 1% baseline of schizophrenia in the population). Reflecting on how many things that were once crazy conspiracy theories (people in the United States showing their papers to go out in public, minorities being given preferential access to vaccines) are happening with minimal protest should give pause here, and sometimes it does.
A Prediction: Where We Go From Here
I predict that members of Team Mainstream are in for the worst of it, in the long-term. They have very few possibilities. One is that they are going to have to live in a world where more and more people experience painful conversions to Team Skeptic, while continuing to remain on Team Mainstream themselves. Another is that they loosen, but not abandon, their ties to institutional narratives, which will put them in conflict with Team Skeptic at a time when they will need to borrow Team Skeptic tools more and more to make sense of the world.
The path that would be best for everyone is that they find a way to make institutional narratives more trustworthy, perhaps by taking action themselves, en masse—running for office and rooting out corruption (suggestion: do not refer to this process as “draining the swamp”).
I predict that members of Team Skeptic will continue to find their distrust vindicated in many arenas, and this will be both positive and negative for them. Positive, because taking a position on Team Skeptic by necessity involves no small amount of a quality that some would call courage and others would call hubris—deciding that yes, as a matter of a fact, you do know better, at least about what is best for you and your children, than the experts spouting the institutional narrative. Negative, because modern life involves so much hyper-novelty that nobody can be sufficiently up to date on all aspects of it, and Team Skeptic is going to have to face being wrong on a regular basis—wrong about certain details, and wrong about some of the myriad individual scenarios that require sense-making from us.
But I do not believe Team Skeptic is going to end up being proven wrong, as a general statement, in our distrust of institutional narratives.
It seems highly unlikely to me that a day is coming at any time in the next ten years, and perhaps not in the next thirty or forty years, when the public schools will be more trustworthy than a local homeschool pod; when any four-year degree program will not contain far more indoctrination than education; when any weeklong period of output from the corporate media will contain half as much truth as its present in an average issue of the ‘Substackistan’ news from Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, or Abigail Shrier; or when public health declarations will turn out to be biased towards corresponding with empirical reality moreso than supporting any political narrative.
I don’t know about everyone else on Team Skeptic, but I would love to be wrong.
I would love to spend Christmas Dinner, 2061, telling my guests how silly I was, back in COVID times, and how I reacted to it by refusing to trust any institutional narrative for a long time, and how, in retrospect, I see that I was wrong—that our institutions continued to deserve my trust even when I withheld it, and that they, my guests, should learn from my error.
I would love to someday decide that maintaining faith in institutional narratives is absolutely part of striving on as elucidated in the Buddhist wisdom: “Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.”
That idyllic future wherein I get to laugh at how silly Team Skeptic was during this time seems less likely—far less likely—to me than one wherein someone stumbles across this essay doing research on an internet archive repository for a history class about the period when America used to be free.
If that day comes, I hope I am not alive to see it. Not because I regard myself as unable or unwilling to suffer tyranny: quite the opposite. Because if push comes to shove, then I hope to find the courage to die in the fight.
There’s a wonderful episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, “Statistical Probabilities,” wherein the Federation is at war with the Dominion, a powerful race that seeks order above all else. (Gosh…how familiar that particular obsession feels…)
There comes a point when it looks certain that the Federation will lose, and a group of brilliant thinkers, profoundly gifted humans, sends Dr. Bashir to Captain Sisko to make the case that the Federation must surrender. It will serve the greater good, and save many lives, to give up. This YouTube link has the scene.
Captain Sisko retorts: “I don't care if the odds are against us. If we're going to lose, then we're going to go down fighting so that when our descendants some day rise up against the Dominion, they'll know what they're made of.”
I, like many of my fellow members of Team Skeptic, have been given the gift of a difficult life. We believe that we know what we’re made of.
I fear that most of us, Team Mainstream and Team Skeptic alike, are going to get the chance to find out.