Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'.

The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good. It makes smart people threatening -- it breeds resentment toward them.

However, if you have a roomful of people who define their position in opposition to the 'smart' person, your beliefs are the ones that matter, regardless of what the truth is, so you get to feel like you've won the argument. Most arguments are not consequential, so this practice doesn't really cause meaningful short-term harm so there's no negative feedback.

Over the long-term, this herd mentality is how people learn to navigate the world, and you end up with a giant mess.

I think the current thing is a little bit different, though. It has gone from "academics are bad" to "anyone who knows how to do a thing is unsuitable to do that thing", which is a far more extreme viewpoint.

I got a little carried away with this response and it's a little off-topic, but I figured it might be worth posting anyway.

I think this has to do with the nonlinear growth in the human-facing complexity of the world over the past 30 years.

Humans aren't getting more intelligent (they may not be getting dumber either, but at the very least, the hardware is the same), but the complexity of the world that we have to engage with has undergone accelerating growth for most of my lifetime. The fraction of this complexity that is exposed to 'normal' people has also grown significantly over that period of time with the 24-hour news cycle, social media, mobile internet, etc.

It's obvious that at some point in this trend any given person will start running into issues with the world that are above their complexity ceiling. If this event is rare, we shrug it off and move on with our day. If this becomes commonplace, we start to drown in that complexity and desperately cling to sources of perceived clarity, because it's fucking terrifying to be surrounded by a world that you don't understand.

The thing that the right has done really well and that the left has generally failed to do in my lifetime is to identify sources of complexity and provide appealing clarity around them. This clarity is necessarily an approximation of the truth, but we NEED simple answers that make the world less scary. People also, as a general rule, don't like to be lectured or told that they are part of the problem -- the right never foists any blame upon the people it's targeting.

In my lifetime, the left has pretty consistently fought amongst ourselves over which inaccuracies are allowable or just when we attempt to create simplifying approximations. Instead of providing a unified, simplifying vision for any given topic, the messaging gives several conflicting accounts that make it easy to see the cracks in each argument, and often serve to make the problem worse. If you're competing with another source of information that is simple, clear, and makes people feel good (or at least like they are good), you will always lose if you do not also achieve those three things.

In the vacuum created by a lack of simple, blameless, intuitive messaging from an (arguably) well-meaning left-leaning establishment, the intuitive (though generally wrong and often cruel) explanations offered by the right have found huge support and adoption by people who need someone to help them understand the world. Because both messages are approximations of the truth (and thus sources of verifiable inaccuracies) people just choose the one that makes them feel better.

tldr I think we've hit a point where:

- The world is too complex for many people to independently navigate

- People need rely on simplifying approximations of the world

- Media provides these approximations, often in bad faith

- Sources of credibility or expertise often provide these approximation in good faith, but can't agree on which approximations are the 'right' ones

- Good faith messaging often either fails to simplify or makes people feel bad/guilty

- People are sick of feeling bad or guilty

- People associate expertise with being scolded over things that don't feel fair or fully accurate to them

Thus people often reject expertise out of principle, and just believe whatever Fox News tells them because it feels better.

ALSO: People who believe the 'right' things are often pretty shitty to people who don't (it goes both ways, but the other direction doesn't matter for this post). I've been guilty of this. This just further galvanizes the association between expertise or the 'right' ideas/people and feelings of resentment/guilt/shame for these folks. They may not understand what you said, but the do understand that you were talking down to them, and they hate you for that.

You assume that people have the bare requisite knowledge to even accept a simplified explanation of complex things. For example, I said something like, "I can't believe they're shutting down USAID" to someone the other day and their response was, "what's USAID?"

This was an American. This caused me to think back to my schooling and you know what? I don't think I ever did take a class that went over all the divisions and (larger) programs of the US government. It was like you suggest, a simplified explanation (three branches and that's about it).

Clearly, that wasn't enough. Even something as simple as, "USAID provides humanitarian aid to foreign countries in order to give the US a strong influence in those places" would've been better than nothing.

Right now we have a critical US foreign influence apparatus in a non-working state and most Americans don't even know what it does and by extension, don't care.

You make some really good points in your comment. One of the most unfortunate (that I believe to be true) is:

> don't even know what it does and by extension, don't care.

Apathy is a problem in so many different social, political, and even technological systems - for instance, if people cared just a little bit more about digital privacy, the entire adtech scene probably wouldn't exist.

There is a lot in this that is phenomenally well stated. I don't disagree with most of it.

I'd point out that there was a lag between when extremely well informed people started to get the firehose of bullshit and when they became able to parse some facts from it; right about at that moment, the firehose was turned on the totally unprepared, uninformed mass of other people, and since that point it's been a power struggle over who controls this out of control hose. But that's not to say that, at some point, the incredible level of distrust among the confused and ill-informed won't turn against whoever seems to be pointing the hose at them at the moment. If simple answers are what people need, then information overload has its own logical way of overwhelming whoever is trying to control the flow of information.

Thanks for sharing this. I've been slowly coming to this conclusion, though I haven't lived in a red state since I was 16.

Your description fits our current world, IMO, far better than every other narrative I've seen. Some of those narratives feel good and fit OK, but they fall apart at the edges. The idea fits with why Hilary Clinton was so hated, better than anything.

On a personal level, I've become much more wary about seeming smarter. When I help and engage I try to do it in a way that doesn't threaten. I'm quick to say when I don't know something. I offer to help "figure it out" with others rather than preach.

Another comment somewhere in these threads talks about how social media has accelerated our problems by 10 or 100x. I think that's true for this, too.

I'm in a red state and I hard disagree with your generalizations. Even in red red red states Kamilla got 30%-40% of the vote. Trump got 40% in California.

I think you should re-read what they wrote. Asserting that you're part of a group of people who agree with you (aka conformism) is what they're saying is common in places that hate intellectualism and are scared of individualism. You're kind of just doing what they said you'd do.

Not just that, but your post is almost a perfect example of the attitude which most of the Germans in the book "The Germans 1933-1945" ended up regretting, if not on moral grounds, then after it led to the destruction of their country.

This is a very good description of the paranoid, mob-mentality anti-intellectual subculture I've seen wax and wane in America throughout my lifetime. And I grew up in the 80s surrounded by people who were rejects from this anti-intellectual culture, who were smart enough to think all kinds of unauthorized thoughts for themselves. I believed that, above all things, this rejectionist safety-seeking and fearful mob mentality was old and that it was inevitable that its smarter progeny would rebel against it.

It's really only when you look at it through the frame of the Weimar Republic, or, the 60s youth in Argentina or Chile or the 50s in Hungary or right now in Russia or China, that you see how fragile individualism is, because it is so damn easy to whip up a mob against anyone who thinks differently, as you're describing. What is so telling about this book is how the mob itself barely even thinks it's a mob. Most of the time it doesn't even think it's doing any harm or anything unpopular. That is the lesson that we need to learn as a species - not some vague idea of freedom, but that hard individualism is more valuable than easy camaraderie. There were about 50 years worth of Hollywood movies trying to reinforce this notion, but about 10 years of social media obliterated it.

Gove was right. The problem is that experts no longer have to explain or justify themselves or explain the level of evidence behind their opinions.

Expertise has also been politicised. Experts are picked who give the prior decided opinions, and those who have the wrong opinion are got rid of (e.g. Professor David Nutt).

Finally Gove was speaking in the context of Brexit, and arguing that it ultimately a question of national identity. DO people identify as British or European? I agree - it is more like whether people in Northern Ireland want to be part of the UK or the Irish Republic, or maybe Scottish independence, than anything else in British politics. lots of parallels around the rest of the world.

Covid policy had multiple examples of this, and of not consulting experts on a sufficiently wide range of subjects.

A lot of evidence based policy is like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMcZic1d4U

Not to politicise this discussion, but the country is called 'The Republic of Ireland'. The phrase 'the Irish Republic' references the 1916 Easter proclamation, and has specific political and even colonial implications in Ireland. It's frequently used on BBC news, but never in Ireland where it would have a similar connotation to 'the free state' or other radical republican delegitimisations of the Irish state.

So, to confuse the issue, the country is officially called Ireland (it's in the constitution!), and that is the name normally used in Ireland and in Europe. The UK government officially referred to Ireland as the Republic of Ireland until 1998 (it now calls it Ireland) and as a result people in the UK often call it the Republic of Ireland.

People calling it the Irish Republic usually have an agenda in doing so, yeah.

ED: > Not to politicise this discussion

I mean, this is on a thread about the Nazis; I think you don't need to worry too much about further politicising it :)

What agenda? I do not know enough about the history to understand the implications

How does one unambiguously refer to the country rather than the island without saying “republic”?

> What agenda? I do not know enough about the history to understand the implications

Traditionally, you mostly see weird names for Ireland in British media with an anti-Irish viewpoint (you saw a lot of this from the right-wing tabloids during Brexit, in particular). In particular ‘Eire’ and ‘the Irish Republic’ are red flags; ‘Eire’ has never been correct to use in English, and ‘the Irish Republic’ was never _really_ the name of the country at all. At best it comes across as ignorant (a bit like Americans calling the UK ‘England’) but in practice it tends to only be used by a certain type of publication.

(In particularly extreme cases you sometimes see ‘the Irish Free State’, presumably from journalists who are over a century old.)

> How does one unambiguously refer to the country rather than the island without saying “republic”?

Ah, well, that’s the trouble, isn’t it? In cases where it could be ambiguous, Irish media tends to say ‘the state’, but that doesn’t really work elsewhere. In practice where disambiguation is required “the Republic of Ireland” is a reasonable neutral term.

Right you are. Also, if you're Rob Synnott I'm pretty sure I remember you from back in the early blogging / podcast days. Hope you're well.

What podcast is this?

Was wondering that as well; I don’t remember ever doing a podcast :D

Even more confusing, the constitution defines the name as Éire, but using this term is considered passé or rude if you're not speaking English.

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/cons/en/html

ARTICLE 4

The name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland.

Sorry, I meant if you’re not speaking Irish

> DO people identify as British or European?

And that framing is where the trick is hidden. People are perfectly capable of accepting and having multiple identities. They can be a mom of their kids, a receptionist of company X, a neighbour of street Y, a citizen of city Z, a member of the flower gardening society, a supporter of football club Q, citizens of the UK and Europeans too.

In fact you don't have to choose between these identities. But when you frame the question like that it make sense that people would choose what is closer to them.

They can have multiple identities, but may not want to be British and European.any more than a Scottish nationalist wants to be Scottish and British.

This is a very common conflict for many communities around the world and rarely is “just be both” a satisfactory solution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separatism

America is a bit different and, for some generations, consider ourselves better than the ugly factionalism and national identitarianism that led Europe into centuries of pointless warfare. One can be an African-Mexican-Asian-Queer-Irish-Jewish-Italian-American without subjugating one's identity.

Basically that's because "American" isn't a breed, like Scots or French. It's a political choice and an identity which is (should be) open to anyone who lives here and adopts the Constitution as the set of laws they want to live by.

Ironically, this is why Yarvin and Musk and Thiel will fail in their attempts at overthrowing the US government to create "network states". The US is the original state founded on a set of ideas rather than identities. (Since, at least, the Roman Republic). That is its strength, and something difficult for Europeans to really understand.

I’m not sure this is correct; in general many people would think of themselves as X and European, where X is the country of origin or citizenship. The EU is not a country.

For that matter, the UK, despite being a country, has some aspects of this; while Northern Ireland in particular is complicated for historical reasons, plenty of English and Scottish and Welsh people would think of themselves as English or Scottish or Welsh AND British.

The anti mask, anti vax, anti chromosomal expression, anti 'tariffs are taxes' are beyond "anti-expert"

These positions are flatly anti-base-reality. If you want to frame them in terms of authority rejection, you could call them anti-first graders

> anti chromosomal expression

Genuinely couldn't figure out what this is a euphamism for.

> anti chromosomal expression

What's this? I've literally never heard this phrase before in my life.

A huge part of that is the lack of any effective communications education at all for the general population. Few realize that effective communications training is also ordered and logical thinking training. People with no communications training have disorganized emotional reasoning, unless something else formal comes along such as philosophy, mathematics or software, but then you get a technical specialist that cannot explain themselves nor their work to anyone other than a same education peer - exactly our current situation.

Expertise can be of great value, but no-one is an expert on every matter and the rest. And expertise don’t make anyone free of committing errors, or to be drawn in a corruption schemes.

We can have a thorough and deep expertise on some technical domain, and yet lake the sagacity and humility to judge where it won’t put us in better position than someone else dealing with an issue on the topic in a context the other person is already deeply acquainted with, while we are completely unaware of its many specificity.

On the other hand of course someone tightly coupled with a particular situation might easily miss some bigger picture that a relevant expertise could unlock.

I see this as very different from "i'm eating ivermectin because bigpharma wants me to buy their vaccines" or whatever it is people say. There are certainly fascism experts out there, but the one thing that I've noticed again and again is that they emphasize how effective fascism is at changing forms and tactics. Today, most of the countries we refer to as authoritarian or fascist are formally liberal democracies (by which I mean republics). And critically, many of the core symptoms—militarization of police, violent suppression of protests, demonization of outgroups (muslims, immigrants), worship of the military, disenfranchisement of voting rights—long predate Trump's political rise. Hell, we were an apartheid state in living memory, and the anticommunist propaganda here truly does rival that of fascist countries (albeit mostly an aspect of the past at thus point in terms of overt propaganda). To many Americans, fascism might seem natural and might feel like home, so an expert saying "this is fascism now" is going to get a very very wide range of reactions.

And even to educated, well-meaning americans, we have a really nasty habit of sweeping our evil deeds under the rug and forgetting what we are capable of. If Trump were to move forward with mass deportations, it wouldn't be the first time, or the second time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback is one particularly nastily named example. Many "experts" on tv don't read history and are oblivious to how close to fascism we already are.

It's also worth remembering that Hitler was a huge fan of America. Liebensraum was inspired by manifest destiny. We built this country on extreme violence, arguably to a unique degree (along with other anglo colonies). That muscle doesn't just go away. We've really only been a "liberal democracy" for about sixty years now.

So yea, I don't think you can write this off as anti-intellectualism or anti-expert, this is just who we are as a people.

> this is just who we are as a people.

I do not believe that. I believe this situation is engineered, and we have some very long game playing manipulators being very successful today.

Society engineering is real, and there are many players active in that game.

Societal engineering is not mutually exclusive with either confusion over what fascism is nor the many fascist traits that have always been in this country.

But yes, I think I would probably just call the societal engineering "for-profit media". Manufacturing Consent should be read by every adult in this country.

Do not overlook the largest player in this game, who is not "for-profit", well not directly, they are pure "for-power" players. That player is religion, primarily the manipulating faiths of Christian and Muslim religion, which is at the seat and center of anti-intellectualism.

Is this still true as it used to be? I of course see what you refer to, but I also know many highly intelligent and culturally literate people who are devout muslims and christians. Furthermore a lot of anti-intellectualism today is secular: flat earthers, people who call sugar "basically poison", anti-vaxxers, etc. I think this comes from a very different place: these theories/viewpoints distract people with a feeling that they're getting a look behind the curtain on how the world "really" works. And there is a good deal of overlap (think: tiktoker talks about the "secret code" they cracked in the bible) but I think these are distinct phenomena. I think the latter phenomenon is caused by low trust in society, I think, plus a hodgepodge of stuff like crappy faux-marxism ("every problem is just rich people", which although there is a grain of truth, does certainly not literally describe reality), laundered anti-semitism ("the world is actually run by lizard people cabals who are coincidentally jewish"), and new age speculation about stuff like mass psychosis. In fact i'd argue that "new age spirituality" seems to be a nexus for all of this (and curiously still overlaps with christianity), attracting both marks and conmen in crowds.

Or to put it another way, I don't see how Q Anon theories can be tied back to religion in any direct way, even if many posts do draw from antisemitism. I'd even put the "russiagate" stuff in this category—it's true that many of the allegations seem substantial, but feels highly disingenuous when AIPAC wields such naked influence over both parties. Surely by any metric that Trump is controlled by Russia, Israel's influence outstrips it by many orders of magnitude.

Tbh, some of it is also just inability to interpret media. Particularly coverage of politics. Watching cable or reading opinion columns you'd think the parties were diametrically opposed and represent two wildly different aspects of america—when it takes about half an hour of reading a sampling of how politics works in other countries to realize how similar our parties are compared to basically every other party system on earth (excepting Britain, I guess?). Interestingly, for a country that prides itself on voting and political opinions, we're actually quite terrible at ceding the conversation to "experts" who are often even worse-informed and less educated than many of us.

Chomsky has this great bit about how Americans will call into a baseball show as an expert to criticize everything. The coaches, tbe players, etc. most of these people don't play baseball at all but feel very confident and passionate. He then points out how those same people will not have opinions about how government should work and leave criticism and demands to "pundits" even though they are much better equipped to figure out if they are being represented well than they are to judge the performance of a professional athlete. I think the internet cracked that open and now everyone has opinions. I'm curious how much anti-intellectualism just comes from democratization of public discourse and little has actually gotten worse, we're just more aware than we were before.

I believe it is more subtle, it is the effect of intolerance, in general, on the education system, which appears most often from religious perspectives. This is multiplied by a generalized impressment of obedience to adults and authority in school aged children. Children are taught that certain thoughts and lines of reasoning are sinful to the degree they face damnation, which to many imaginative young minds equates to a terror brainwashing where they become afraid to think, crippling their critical analysis before it can develop. They are rendered old children with childlike understandings of life's unanswerable questions, which they get answered by their faith. They never develop working secondary considerations, and are gullible because of it. Such people are perfectly capable of becoming research scientists, doctors, even attorneys, because we have an incredible compartmentalism capability. As you point out they are incapable in interpreting media, and why would they? It's not their specialization. They can apply critical analysis and secondary considerations within their career, because it was hammered into them in that compartmentalization, but it is not innate to them, they are not natural critical thinkers. So politics using indirect language and wolf whistling Nazi signals is just right over their heads, they will argue with you how their candidate never says racist anything.

This is the part where liberals are, caught up in their own inherent contradictions, desperately trying to understand whats happening so they reach for things they do understand, meaningless pop psychology.

I didn't really want to experience that particular part of German history repeating itself but here we are. "Wer hat uns verraten?"

>there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout

Probably because the experts are telling them that if they want a future, everyone is going to have to compromise their current lifestyle. Not a popular message. People will always be sceptical and hostile towards people who say "you can't have X". People are always happy to believe people who say "Vote for me and you have as much X as you want!"

Tbh, the Matrix wasn't far off with the portrayal of Cypher. They just didn't expect half of the population to prefer the comfortable lie over the inconvenient truth.

> "you can't have X"

More like 'you can't have X anymore' or 'only rich can have X' that brings another level of resentment and emotional kneejerk reactions.

The problem is, if 'less smart' need to be baby-sitted through every single unpopular but necessary decision, this is a failure of democracy. Sure normal democracy self-corrects over time, but not when its pushed into some form of dictatorship where the only correction mechanism is death of those in power.

That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now, however terrible and drastic it sounds. The tyranny that this will bring on mankind will make any absolutely terrible period from the past look like a paradise, and have 0 doubts all dictators ever would gladly scorch whole Earth just to achieve it.

> That's why all researchers into immortality should be all locked up permanently in prison or to be sure shot in the head right now

... I mean, you could just ban that sort of research; slightly less extreme. Though, frankly, I wouldn't bother; it appears highly unlikely to get anywhere anytime soon.

> there's a deep strain of anti-expert feeling throughout, at least, the West at the moment.

Anti-intellectualism in the US goes back decades (if not centuries):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...

The first two US colonies were Jamestown (looking for El Dorado North; gold; riches) and Plymouth (religious society):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_...

* https://www.kurtandersen.com/fantasyland

The magical thinking of those two are the seeds of US society today and all the fruits (good and bad) can probably be linked to the ideas of one of the two.

I’m a huge fan of Asimov. Years ago I bought a back issue of the Newsweek that this was originally published in, framed it, and still have it hanging in my office: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...

> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.

See also book by Tom Nichols (a now-retired professor from U.S. Naval War College):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise

> “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”

I think a more apt description is the misconception that democracy supposedly means everybody gets their "equal proper timeshare of being considered correct".