What happens when large swathes of society stop trying to make sense of the world themselves and simply defer to “experts”? What happens when those “experts” actually have no moral grounding or sound scientific reasoning? And what happens when young people are trained to self-censor to the point that they don’t even notice that that’s what they’re doing?
In this episode, we sit down with Thomas Harrington, senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute and author of the new book, “The Treason of the Experts: COVID and the Credentialed Class.”
“There seems to be almost a perversion and a joy in making us obey and be compliant for compliance’s sake,” Harrington says.
We discuss what Harrington sees as the infantilization of society, the techniques of information warfare, and the cudgels of “disinformation” and “misinformation.”
Interview traier:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/thomas-harrington-the-treason-of-the-experts-and-the-cudgels-of-disinformation-and-misinformation_5252442.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Tom Harrington, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Thomas Harrington: Very nice to be here, Jan.
Mr. Jekielek: Tom, I’ve been reading your book, The Treason of the Experts: Covid and the Credentialed Class. I’ve been thinking about all sorts of problems with experts. Over the last few years, if there was ever a reason to not trust the experts, we have seen it in ample detail in almost every area. What is your book about?
Mr. Harrington: The book is about looking at things in terms of how we create social realities and who creates them. Sometimes, there’s this idea that reality just is. That’s partially true, but in the cultural realm, there’s always someone developing it and distributing it, who has more access to power. Those people generally are well-educated people who we hold up as exemplars of knowledge. They have a lot of power and they are deferred to quite readily.
In fact, these last three years, we’ve seen constant appeals to defer to experts. But what happens if the experts are not guided by a moral vision or not even guided by a sound scientific vision, and yet we continue to demand deference to them? That is what we’ve seen in these last two years, and it raises very troubling issues for me. It raises issues of trust. It raises issues of moral coherence on their part. To whom much is given, much is expected.
We are delivering a lot of our power into the hands of experts, and it seems there’s a flipness with which they have used the power we have given them. Worse than flipness, there seems to be almost a perversion and a joy in making us obey and be compliant for compliance’s sake. This is very troubling in a society. You need the intellectual class or the credentialed class to have the reality of their status back up the title of their status. It seems to me these two things have separated in these last few years, and that’s really troubling to me.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to qualify this. You’re not saying that all reality is subjective, and there’s no objective reality. You’re talking about the fact that, inherently, there’s always some sort of filter through which we see things and perhaps we aspire to see that reality more clearly, but you can’t see the entirety of an imperfection at any given point.
Mr. Harrington: This is one of the things that I’ve started to call the crisis of literalism. There’s the idea out there, and who knows whether it comes from multiple-choice tests or social media that says, “Yes, no. Thumbs up, thumbs down.” The process of seeking the truth is always an open-ended one, which, again, I won’t confuse with pure relativism. But it’s one of always getting closer to the mark, knowing full well that you never arrive at the mark.
It’s a journey that is very complex and always incomplete. It seems we’re being told, “There’s truth that is easily known and certain people have it.” Then, there’s the untruth of other people who are said to not have it, because only these people who say they possess it have it. That’s very dangerous on many levels for a society that wants to be democratic.
But it’s also very dangerous on a cognitive level, because it sends a very troubling message to a young person trying to negotiate the world. It says, “There’s nothing I can trust in my own sensorial experience of life that can get me to the truth. I always need to defer to someone else, and there’s a simple, packageable answer.”
That is a great fountain of abuse, and I would even argue it’s a bellwether of a generalized cognitive decline. One of the big words that we learned in graduate school back in the day—you learn the jargon in the world of literature studies and cultural studies—was polysemic. That is, a given word is polysemic. It simply means that it has various meanings and various levels of meanings. One of the things you need to become a good writer and a good observer and a good critic is that you have to be as aware as possible of all of the possible layers of meaning that a given word has.
Poetry is about unleashing your mind with its polysemic understanding of words, looking at if something tells you a very literal story or not, and then, being asked to employ what other hidden meanings are there. We’re slipping away from the search for hidden meanings. It was saying, “What’s the answer?” Well, the answer might not be apparent yet.
You might have to go through three readings to get to the answer. You might have to go through a whole checklist of what word A, word B, or image A, image B could be. You might have to collate them and think about it. You still might not be at the definitive answer, but you’re on the path toward a definitive answer.
That’s the process of dealing with the complexity of the world as I see it. The message we’re getting is, “No. These people have the truth, just defer to them.” You are told, “You just need to just shut up and do what you’re told.”
Mr. Jekielek: There is this strong push towards an identitarian vision of the world. If you are a certain type of person, then you have access to the truth. It doesn’t matter whether you actually have that access or what you’re really thinking. It’s your identity, according to some of these popular ideologies today, that gives you that access to the truth.
Mr. Harrington: It’s rife with contradictions, however. On one hand, I can go along with the idea that identities are constructed. That’s how we got to all these identitarian things, they are constructed. One of the big breakthroughs was that, “Identity isn’t necessarily always just there. It’s constructed.” Now we’ve gone 180 degrees in the other direction. Identity is now seen as essential and clouding out of all the other parts of your being.
Identity is always multilayered, polysemic, if you want to use that term again. It’s always multilayered and complex, and you have a number of identities that are always dancing within you. But now we’re saying, “No. One particular trait, skin color, sexual preference or sexual performance is the essential and immutable thing that needs to be respected.” It has a whole series of implied demands that go with it.”
We see this demand for being treated in a certain way. That gets to another big question, which is, “Do you really have a right to be treated the way you want to be treated all the time ? I don’t know that I do. I know in some fantasy world, I have that need or desire. I would love that. But in a complex society, tolerance is often the best we can get.
You can’t demand that other people reify or affirm the thing that you’ve decided you are, and then on command, have people embrace what you say you are. It’s taking away our freedom to interpret the world, in a certain sense. That’s one of the ultimate freedoms we have.
Mr. Jekielek: This is a sort of cognitive brutalism, for lack of a better term. This is what comes to mind.
Mr. Harrington: Yes. That’s a great term. It’s a dumbing down. It’s a flattening out. It’s a decoloring of the world. You can use all the metaphors you want. When I think of decoloring, I think of the images we were shown of regimes during communism, of decolored places. I finally went to Poland during communism. Of course, I found there was color there, but it was in a different key. Life was flattened out in the public space because of fear, because of the idea that you might say something wrong.
I’m not trying to say we’re in communism or necessarily going toward it, but there seems to be a prescriptiveness that leads to a tamping down on many of the joys of life. It is inducing a sort of sullenness. What’s the joy of talking to someone?
To try out things, to spar in a friendly way, to do so in the context of trust, and to do so in a way that’s playful. Play is often imperfect. But what if you’re told that if you’re being playful and you happen to go over a line with someone else, terrible things can happen to you just on the level of a verbal exclamation?
That is inhibiting people in their most basic sense. It seems a lot of people want us to become comfortable with that. The process of knowing the world is being mediated. Of course, we’re always mediated. There’s no such thing as the virgin gaze.
But it’s the question of how much mediation? How much real experience are we having? The real experience of friendship and dialogue is to let it rip and to enjoy it with the fewest number of inhibitions at that particular moment.
Now, we’re being told, and it seems young people have almost internalized the idea that one should always be on guard, because something could go wrong. You could say something that someone might not like. This is tremendously inhibiting, and it really stops the process of exploration in terms of the building of an identity.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned there’s a similarity with communist reality. I often recommend the film, “The Lives of Others.”
Mr. Harrington: A wonderful film.
Mr. Jekielek: It offered a window into what it would be like cognitively. What is it like to live in a society where you have to be on your guard constantly, because if you say the wrong thing, you could go to jail or worse? And that’s just life.
Mr. Harrington: Yes. Of course, that goes along with censorship. Censorship is the cudgel that is out there. Censorship and cancellation are the two cudgels that are being used against us. It’s absolutely remarkable how easily we’ve gone from free speech to asking, “How can I make my way around the censorship that’s here?” We have skipped over the outrage phase, which might have led us to a more vigorous protection. Granted, a lot of boiling frog-type dynamics were built into the censorship regime.
But if you’ve been looking for the last 20 years at our press, September 11th brought a quantum leap in this need to marshal people into categories and to prohibit certain things and certain words and certain positions from entering into the public sphere. In 2001, Susan Sontag, one of the great American intellectuals, wrote about having some questions about the way the new war on terror was being pursued, and she was hooted down.
We’re beginning to see that a lot of this hooting down is not as spontaneous as many of us would like to believe. With the recent Twitter Files, and the case that the attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana are trying now, we’re finding out that this was anything but spontaneous. There were a number of government actors working in concert with private actors to achieve a censorship that, frankly, for those of us of a certain age, is unimaginable.
You used to be able to say, “I have the First Amendment. Screw you. I’m going to say what I’m going to say.” We’ve gone from that to, “I have to be on guard because someone’s always watching me.” We went down this hole fairly quickly, and it’s very troubling.
Mr. Jekielek: This is the treason of the experts, I suppose.
Mr. Harrington: Yes. If you have been lucky enough to have a mentor in your life, what is a mentor? A mentor is someone who leads you along, who suggests, who looks at you and says, “What skills does this young person have that they are not aware of ?” They do an inquiry into that person and suggest and lead along, and then say implicitly, “How can I help this young person be the best version of themselves as I see it?” That is what an expert does. They do not impose a reality on anyone.
They are very aware of the power they have through their social title, but more often through their moral force. They realize that it’s a sacred thing that they have, and that it needs to be treated with the care that you treat treasures in your life, and that you don’t abuse it. They need to be very rigorous and be able to look at and check some of their ego impulses, and then ask, “Am I using this power to satisfy my ego gratification, more than I am to help the people that I say I am helping?”
It seems that that line has been crossed. There’s a lot of ego gratification that is interfering with what should be a real sober taking of responsibility for a gift of power. Power is a gift in a democratic society. It’s not something you own, and it’s not something there to make people obey you. It’s a gift you have that hopefully you can use in constructive ways that preserve the dignity of those who don’t have as much power as you do.
With the term treason of the experts, I’m playing with history a bit here with the title. It’s from a famous book that was written by Julien Benda after the First World War. He was an intellectual. As you know, the First World War was one of the great cataclysms in the history of the world, with violence that few people had ever seen.
When you go back and study it, you can look at what the violence was about, and the cynicism with which the violence was employed. Leaders marched their hundreds of thousands of troops so that they could get a tiny strip of land. It was an open auctioning of soldiers to be fed into the machine.
Benda wrote this book in 1927 called, “La Trahison des Clercs,” the Treason of the Clerisy. What he’s playing with is that in the world after the late 19th century, the church clerisy began to recede as an important element in society, to be superseded by the intellectual. The independent intellectual was made possible through newspapers and the publishing industry. The new clerisy, as he’s suggesting, are the free intellectuals.
He suggests that the role of the free intellectual is to always be rigorous and to always place themselves above their passions to the best extent they can and say, “What’s really going on here?” He wrote a devastating critique in the mid-1920s in which he takes on both the French intellectuals and the German intellectuals. He said, “They betrayed our trust. They acted as cheerleaders. They sent young men off to war to get destroyed, and became cheerleaders of gross propaganda.” He said, “Come on. We’ve got to reassume the responsibility that goes with having been granted a credential or a moment in power.” The first thing I thought about when this began three years ago was World War I.
Mr. Jekielek: This being Covid?
Mr. Harrington: Covid. The Covid triennial that we’re in now. In March of 2020, and you’ll see it in the first essay in the book where I say, “What’s going on here?” My mind immediately went to World War I. There were big forces that were pushing us in ways that didn’t add up. There were hidden hands in places making us do things that simply were not justified at the level of pure rational analysis. I was very grateful that I had studied a bit of World War I.
There’s another wonderful book where you can see some of the madness. It’s by Stefan Zweig, who was a wonderful intellectual back in that time. He talks about what happened in 1914 in Vienna. He thought, “We’ve reached the highest civilization that the world has ever seen.” He was a Viennese Jew. His friends had been integrated into Viennese life, and they were leading Viennese life in many ways.
All of a sudden, they were saying, “Don’t you want to go off to the trenches? Shouldn’t you be going off to the trenches? Shouldn’t you be excited? I’m going to go. Isn’t it wonderful?” He began to say, “What’s going on in this world that I thought was civilized?” I had the very same reaction in March of 2020.
Mr. Jekielek: Some people think that this is being done for their own good. It’s not that there are nefarious forces with their own agendas. A lot of these folks genuinely believe in this incredibly dystopian vision of the world, that this is really the right thing to do, and that it will be good for me and good for you. There is a line that I flagged in the book, “Ever more open disdain for the intelligence of the citizenry.” There’s hubris here. That’s particularly infuriating, isn’t it?
Mr. Harrington: Absolutely. It’s condescension, and I’ve always had a very thin skin for people being condescending to me. One of the nice things that my parents did in general was they talked to us as sentient beings almost from the beginning. It’s one of the things I’ve sought to do with both my children and with my students.
The condescending idea is that you need to dole it out and say, “If I told you, you might not understand. I’m coming from a place of complexity that you can’t understand. You’ll just have to trust me.” This is very insulting to people, and it’s antidemocratic. That’s just a fact.
The premise of democracy, as we understand it, and as it was formed in this country in the late 18th century, was that the farmer, the worker, and the lawyer were all citizens in the same measure. Granted, there would be a natural pecking order in terms of certain skill sets that would emerge. But in the public space, no one was inherently better or in a place to tell someone else what they need to know and how they need to live. It’s one of the great things about this country.
Now, there seems to be among the credentialed class an attitude that says, “Yes. I’ll be polite to people. I’ll be polite in a basic social sense. But in my heart, I know that poor person really doesn’t know what’s good for them. After all, I have nice degrees. I went to the right schools. I’ve really thought a lot more about things than other people.” That is very irksome to me, but it’s something that I see and feel all around me. If you carefully watch our credentialed elites, it oozes out of them.
It’s incredibly paradoxical that those who knew better than us got everything wrong. It was often people who live in a more direct physical world, who were using their inherent observational skills as to how dangerous this really was, who got it right for the most part. They were able to look past the hysteria that was induced and got it right. The smart people, who were quite strident in telling us to get with it or be declared an idiot, got it wrong.
That gets to a really interesting question as to how much our intellectual class has turned into a sort of self-referential hothouse where they all do each other favors. They say, “You’re in the club now. You have your degree. You’re of the good people. You know what the good things are. You know what quality is. How can we nudge these other people, who obviously don’t have the input that we do?” What never comes up is that the world of input and the way of becoming intelligent in the world is multi-faceted. Learning to listen to your body and the whole series of experiences that you have is very important.
Mr. Jekielek: Tom, you just elucidated why our credentialed class is easier to manipulate than the typical people on the ground, like the truckers that manifested in Canada and changed the world.
Mr. Harrington: In the book, there’s an essay called, “The Frightened Class.” I talk about this frightened class and the irony that the most privileged people in our society were the most frightened people in our society. The people that were benefiting most from this crisis were the ones who were the most frightened. In the essay I explain that it gets into a question of physicality.
In other words, when you went to college 20 and 30 years ago, there was the expectation that you would work a summer job. It wouldn’t necessarily be pointing toward the great doctor or lawyer you thought you were going to become. You were out there working as a mason’s helper in the hot sun.
Was it a brief thing? Did you know you were going back to school in the fall? Yes. But it opened your eyes to other ways of living and talking with real human beings who have a different intelligence built from different experiences. Christopher Lasch wrote about it in The Revolt of the Elites. Suddenly, you didn’t work in a hard job during the summer anymore. You got an internship at an investment office.
All year round, you were at your college, then you went to the investment office, and then you were back at your college. In the meantime, you didn’t have any experience with the other ways that people have to earn a living, and what that means. If nothing else, you can call it a lack of empathetic imagination, a term I love.
In other words, imagination is the only way we can empathize. We need to have a vision of what that person is going through with an eye on their dignity, and that they’re inherently the same as us. They’re having a different experience, but how much tougher is it? How much more difficult are their lives? And then, bring it back in and reflect on it.
At least in some way, that seemed to mitigate this tendency to declare oneself as all-knowing and all-seeing, and to create these hothouse environments where you hire your friends with the same credentials. You create bastions of groupthink in which going against the tide of what the supposed top dog thinks is very seldom seen as a good thing. We’ve created cells of groupthink that are, to a large degree, based on the socialization of our educational system.
Think of the desperation with which parents, I guess it would be my generation of parents, began obsessing about getting their children into school A, or school B. There was a time when you said, “Go where you can go. Learn things. See what happens. Ultimately, it comes down to your ability to perform as a thoughtful or effective person in the world.” That’s the compact that I remember. That’s not to say there weren’t some people who wanted to go to Harvard, and some who wanted to go to the state college in my town. The idea was, “We’re all going to take a path and we’ll find a way.”
All of a sudden it became, “No. If you’re not going to Harvard, you’re missing out.” The question becomes, “Why this desperation?” A lot of it has to do with our decline as a culture. Empires decline. Empires begin to produce parasitical classes at their endpoint. The Spanish Empire did so. “I want my child to get on the train, because I know the train might not stop again.” That may be, in all fairness, one of the things that is happening.
When I was graduating from high school in 1978, there was the idea, “You can go to college. You can get a job, one way or the other.” Maybe that desperation of seeing that there’s some people who get money and some people who are never going to get it began to induce a desperation. That, in turn, induced a sort of uber-fetishization of the college degree, and that created this sense of being all-seeing. After all, we went through the competition. We got into Harvard. Who could really be our rival?
Mr. Jekielek: You have a deep concern about the dehumanization of people based on identity and based on medical status. It’s not something that is not wholly expected in this society. We’re probably in the same boat here.
Mr. Harrington: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: But somehow, even at the highest echelons of power, people felt comfortable dehumanizing others.
Mr. Harrington: Yes. You’re right at the basis of so much of what I write about, which gets into fundamental issues. If you’re talking about dehumanization, you have to ask the question, “What does it mean to be human?” Then, it begs that you go into the history of what it has meant to be human, what people have said about what it means to be human. You can ask how we humans are different, how we flourish, and how we feel when we are flourishing.
There’s a word that I always tag along with it—dignity. It is a very difficult word to define, but if you say it and reflect upon it, a person will know if they feel that they’re in a state of dignity vis-à-vis the world. I agree with what you said. There seems to be a flippancy about the dignity of others, “Oh, vaccine-injured people, we’ll censor them and keep them out of the limelight.” But what about the suffering they’re going through? What about the people who lost jobs because of a vaccine that turned out not to have any social function, because it didn’t stop infection? And this was known.
Where is the dignity for the people that had to suffer from that? Where is the apology to those that had to suffer on the basis of this know-it-all-ism that turned out to be completely wrong? It’s amazing to me. If nothing else, for your own moral sanity, you would feel a need to repair this, or at least say, “I was wrong,” or “We were wrong,” and then, “We got things wrong.”
But what’s so striking to me is they have doubled down, “We’re not going to talk about it. We’re going to pretend it didn’t happen. On we go. Yes, there were a few things that happened then, but we’re not going to talk about that.”
I don’t think this is new in American culture. This is something I’ve written about recently. We have been trained to become good forgetters. Whatever you think about the wars initially in the Middle East, the facts are pretty clear. We destroyed a country called Iraq for no terribly good reason. We largely destroyed Libya for no good reason. At least, that has been divulged publicly. There may be private reasons why, in the case of Iraq, and you could argue in Syria as well, depending on how you look at the insurgent groups in that place.
Have we had a national conversation about the destruction that we inflicted upon the Iraqi people, and then said, “Oh, well. Sorry. Didn’t work. Bye.” If you can do that, what are a few vaccine-injured people? You can go in on false pretenses, destroy a country, lead to the destruction of one of the most ancient cultures on Earth, and then pretend it was a mistake. You can make a few light words, maybe at the highest levels, and say, “It was a mistake. They didn’t have those weapons after all. Oh, well.” Dead Iraqis. Destroyed country.
Mr. Jekielek: And dead Americans.
Mr. Harrington: And dead Americans who were put up to this task on false pretenses. You begin to ask, and this is where I go back and forth, “Were we ever able to atone? Was atonement ever a part of public life? Or was it always this way?” I have wanted to believe in my life that atonement is possible even in public life. We have these atonements 75 years later to the Japanese who were interned. We have the atonement for the bomb in Japan 75 years later. That’s the easy stuff.
How about the duty to repair all who were brought into these things and whose lives were shattered on false pretenses? This is serious stuff. What I don’t understand is how the elite class that made this happen through the collaboration of our media and government think they’re going to suppress the subterranean rage that is clearly out there. Do they think that they can suppress it into nonexistence?
It seems that they think they can. It seems that they think with just perfecting censorship, which they call weeding out misinformation and disinformation, they can disappear these things. They’re getting frighteningly good at doing so. But people know, if they trust themselves, what has happened to them.
Then, we get to another problem. The powers that be have to make people so that they don’t trust what they see with their own eyes and feel in their own bodies. This is what I’ve talked about as a hyper-mediated experience in life. You try to divorce people from their primal understanding of the world and what has happened to them.
Another book I’ve been reading is by an Italian psychiatrist, Casolari. He talks about the intelligence of desire. It’s this idea that if we get to know our desires and trust them and then learn how to ride them in a responsible way, we can begin to clear out a lot of the mediations and screens that powerful people want to put between us and what we know to be true.
That’s a very important idea. How are we going to get back to helping young people listen to or experience unmediated things without a screen, and without someone telling them what is the correct thing to think, even before they’ve had a chance to explore the issue at hand?
It’s really a hard problem. How do we get back to that? Through nature. I’ve never been a nature freak, but I find myself more and more drawn to nature. I’ve always loved it. But these last three years, I’ve made an effort to listen to nature, because you can have a more unmediated experience. Then, I come back to the more mediated world with a clarified mind. I’m more able to tease out what is real, and what is verging on direct experience and what is not.
It becomes a sort of game you play. You can say, “How can I get back to direct experience? How can I taste this glass of wine as if it’s the first glass of wine I’ve ever tasted? How can I look at the sunset as if it’s the first time I’ve ever seen the beauty of light, and thought about the immensity of where that light is coming from?”
For some people, it probably sounds like pie in the sky. I was never necessarily this type of person, but I find myself being drawn to it, because I feel the encroachments of this hyper-mediation on what used to be fairly direct experiences.
Mr. Jekielek: There’s a relationship between this mediation and censorship.
Mr. Harrington: Absolutely.
Mr. Jekielek: There’s a choice being made about what is being presented, what isn’t, and what’s being filtered. You mentioned the Twitter Files. It’s not just censorship we’re talking about. We’re talking about the shaping of a whole reality.
Mr. Harrington: Exactly.
Mr. Jekielek: Many in this credentialed class of experts believe in this certain reality. Those of us who were more skeptical at the beginning have learned over time that it is kind of an unreality. We have all these different competing attempts through consumer culture to tell us what to think about, so that we believe, we buy, we consume, and we comply, all the while thinking that we’re doing it authentically.
Meanwhile, there is an incredible amount of information constantly being thrown at us like we’ve never seen before. There isn’t time to sit down and reflect on what is the meaning of all of this? Is this particular interpretation reasonable? Then, if you go on this journey with skepticism, you realize there are all sorts of shibboleths, and not reality.
Mr. Harrington: Exactly. To turn a phrase, it’s a commandeering by interested parties of our desires that should be genuine, and that should be springing from a place of genuineness inside us. How do you get back to listening to that, and then, sorting out all of the attempts to channel that energy toward ends that benefit powerful people?
It becomes even more challenging if you’re not even aware that the process is going on. That’s when it becomes really frightening. I refuse to use the term misinformation and disinformation, which are just ways of covering up censorship.
They can censor enough so that a person growing up has very few experiences of direct sensory and intellectual engagement with the world. Will the memory of that sort of behavior continue? Will it be there to access at a later time? I’ve been going at misinformation and disinformation. When the term came out in 2016, I said, “What is this?” In some ways, this gets us back to where we began this conversation. It presumes a single meaning for every given statement.
In other words, the existence of misinformation presumes the existence of pure information that is unambiguously understood. No information is ever unambiguously understood, simply because of the incapacity of people to see it in exactly the same way. We’re all different. The idea of misinformation depends on a very primitive idea of information.
The fact that they could get so far, by telling people, without inviting them to engage in any inquiry of their own, by successfully casting aside information, not even giving people the chance to look into it, and censoring the ability to look into it, is simply amazing.
All inquiry is torturous. All inquiry takes a path. You go down one path and you see if it works. You go down another path, and if it doesn’t work, you go down the next path of interpretation. But it’s about interpretation, not the endless lack of truth, but knowing that the interpretive process is, in and of itself, always complex. What may seem self-evident at one stage of the process of inquiry might turn out to be completely false later on. And yet, you have someone intervening and saying, “No, that’s definitely nonsense.”
What kind of society, other than an infantile one, is that going to produce? I just wrote another piece called, “Infantilized R Us.” We have become infantilized. We allow these experts to say, “Don’t go near that. Don’t go near that man behind the curtain, because it might not be good for you.” “Huh? I’m an adult. I have thinking capabilities. Do you? Why am I being asked to not even go near what is clearly a complex problem that I, like many other people, have the ability to think through?”
Someone doesn’t want us thinking things through if they are using these cudgels, as I call them, of misinformation and disinformation. They are like, “Don’t go near the fire, child. Don’t go near the busy street, child.” Yet, so many of us accepted this and said, “Okay, okay. You’ve got credentials. You can warn me off. Thank you very much for warning me off, because I might not have been able to handle it.” What kind of citizenry is this?
Mr. Jekielek: Tom, as we finish up here, I’ll mention that this whole process of the last few years for me has made me much more of a free speech absolutist than I was before. There are things I find very reprehensible, like Holocaust denial, for example. In my mind, I thought, “There are certain things that are just beyond the pale.” But then, that means you’re giving the power for that decision-making to someone else. That’s an issue.
Mr. Harrington: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s much more of an issue right now. At the same time, it may be misinformation. Misinformation is a weaponized word, obviously. I often think about Communist China and the incredible amounts of weaponized information they use to affect behavior in incredibly destructive ways. It’s a reality that there are other powers at play which have incredibly malign intent. They have weaponized information itself. It could be partially true, but it’s mostly false. It doesn’t matter. The point is to elicit particular responses.
Mr. Harrington: Absolutely.
Mr. Jekielek: As a society, we don’t know how to deal with that.
Mr. Harrington: Right.
Mr. Jekielek: Our credentialed class hasn’t known how to deal with that. Maybe it’s a susceptibility to manipulation that we’ve been talking about. Maybe that’s actually been a part of it, but we need to deal with that. Mr. Harrington: I couldn’t agree with you more. I am a free speech absolutist, if I had to define myself. I’ve been saying in various writings over the years, going back to 2015 or so, that this is one of the most heavily propagandized societies in the world. It’s a very effective propaganda system. Then, the question becomes, and you’ve posed it very nicely, “What do you do?”
Do you grow up and say, “This is the world I’m living in, in which information warfare is constant, and therefore I’m going to have to develop some tools?” Or do you say, “That’s hard. I would have to really be on my toes. I’d have to engage parts of my brain that I’ve never engaged before. Can an expert just tell me what’s the good information and what’s the bad information?”
I understand that impulse. But what I don’t understand is that people don’t think through the implications of that impulse. Because when you outsource your critical faculties to other people, you’re outsourcing your power, and that power is not going to come back to you. You’re not only outsourcing your power, but you’re outsourcing practice in skills that you need, and that are going to atrophy through lack of exercise. It can turn into a very vicious cycle.
I fully believe that we are under information warfare from many sources, including from our own government. One of the things that’s self-evident over the last three years is that many of the information warfare techniques that were used on other people during our imperial missions have been brought home to be used on the American people.
That’s a very threatening and disturbing idea. The tendency is to say, “Oh my gosh, is this really my country? I don’t want to hear anything more about that. I can’t deal with thinking that my government is playing informational warfare upon me, a citizen.”
But it’s a fact. Robert Malone said, “We’ve been subject to industrial-grade psychological operations from a combination of forces, including our own government.” So then, what are you going to do? Are you going to continue to defer to the very people who are carrying out information warfare to tell you what to think? Or are you going to break away and tell yourself, “I’ve got to get back to basics about how I collate and observe information”?
It’s a lot of work, but democracy is a lot of work. I don’t see any way you can preserve democracy when large swaths of the population are outsourcing their critical faculties to supposed experts who have their own institutional interests, and not necessarily your own, at heart.
We’re at a turning point. Those of us that have the time and energy to do so, we have to say, “No. I’m not going to swallow their mediated realities. I’m going to go back as much as I can to the source and make my own decisions.”
Mr. Jekielek: We have to have trust in someone, and we have to carefully create fellowships, perhaps with the Brownstone Institute or with my colleagues at The Epoch Times. Because we can’t go out and try to figure out every single thing. There’s a reason I go to Harvey Risch for understanding certain elements of science, because I can’t always go to first principles.
Mr. Harrington: I agree with that in a practical sense. Maybe I should have said that you need to chase back your sources as best you can. You need to look at who are the power centers behind them, these censoring organizations. You do a little bit of digging, and you can find out exactly who’s funding these people that are telling us what’s true and what’s false. They are very self-interested entities. Yes, that’s a good amendment to what I said. First principles would drown us all perhaps, but we need to perhaps refine and trust our instincts about what types of people are trustworthy.
I was talking to one of our colleagues here yesterday, and we were saying, “If you get along in age and you observe people carefully, you can develop a certain way of understanding whether this person is rooted in a genuine, truthful approach to life or not.” That takes instinct.
That instinct, unless you exercise it over the course of a lifetime, you’re never going to develop it. Words are only one part of the communication that we get from people. I say that as someone who’s learned other languages, by also looking at the body and other things. We need to keep those skills alive.
Mr. Jekielek: All the more reason to limit this screen-mediated experience, because that prevents us from being able to exercise those instincts as much as we should.
Mr. Harrington: Yes. It flattens them out. It flattens out our human experiences.
Mr. Jekielek: Tom Harrington, it has been such a pleasure to have you on the show again.
Mr. Harrington: It’s been a delight, Jan. Thank you.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Tom Harrington and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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