Sander and I have been pondering the phenomenon of conspiracy thinking ever since he started to work on our paper Insight in the Conspiracist’s Mind. My contributions were not that many, but they included the concept of ‘feeling epistemically excluded’. Here, I’ll try to explain, in a for me uncharacteristically straightforward manner, why this concept points to a solution of the many and varied woes of our times. As such it is an optimist’s take on material that seems better suited for pessimism. In a way it is then also my take on Sander’s theorizing. The concept works by validating the feeling of being epistemically excluded while allowing that this feeling itself was not valid. A bit like in the case of an autistic kid (or in fact this almost elderly autistic writer) who, after feeling they weren’t taking seriously, tumbled headlong in one of their spiraling meltdowns, and needed a time-out before he could be told why he was, in fact, wrong. Being wrong is a mundane thing that happens to all of us on a daily basis. Not feeling taken seriously is the kind of traumatic thing that bends one’s psychology towards the destructive. Separating the two is a precondition for constructive dialogue.
Now, before I start, I have to say that there are, obviously, cases of being epistemically excluded when feeling so is entirely valid. Such cases make for the history of minority struggle, and such struggle is necessarily destructive of the prejudices of the majority. Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon are just two examples - James Baldwin a third - of the necessity to fight for epistemic inclusion. My autistic kid (as I still feel it in my bones) would be simply right to throw a temper tantrum if people were denying him the right to weigh in on decisions affecting his future because he supposedly lacked affect. The necessity of struggle in epistemic matters - in being taken seriously - in itself explains the volcanic forces of the emotion of moral outrage. The point of this post then is that one can have the feeling, and be misguided in applying the accompanying rage. Every bit as much as one can really feel hungry, and be misguided in gobbling up sugar-rich foodstuff. If you are drawn into this post by its title, you will understand at the end of it that it is only apt that your thirsty curiosity for its promise will only be quenched at its very end (this post being very far from attempting to be epistemically sugar-rich).
So let me begin. Take an incel. He really feels not taken seriously. He finds himself in a patriarchal society qualifying for all the perks that his patriarchal examples display, but he has access to none of them. I am not mocking him. He did not choose to grow up trying to live up to these patriarchal examples, being denied any of their perks. He did not choose to remain celibate. He just lives in a time where culture has formed his brain to predict he will come out on top, and where he simultaneously is bitten by the reality of being mocked. Maybe you find I am too charitable with him. Is it so hard for him to see how patriarchal culture has oppressed, and still oppresses, women? So hard to adapt his expectations to this new reality - where women are epistemically included so as to, for instance, be able to say ‘no’, and be understood to simply mean ‘no’? Well, you see, the truth is that it is hard to adapt. It is also necessary, of course, but it being necessary doesn’t in and of itself make it less hard. At best it makes it inevitable. I say ‘at best’ since history shows that ethical regression is not only possible - it is far from uncommon. So common in fact that we are, now, in the midst of such a regression.
It is hard to adapt because, against popular opinion, survival is a two-faced monster, a bit like the Roman god Janus - an early figure for what feminism now calls ‘liminality’. Survival is two-faced because it requires both being adapted to how things are, but, at the same time, being open to how things will be. It requires accurately predicting how you need to behave now given the reigning cultural prejudices, and exploring behavior that, if normalized, would allow you in the future to act as fully empowered agent (say as one who in saying ‘no’ is simply understood as meaning ‘no’). Sander will hopefully come back here soon to explain the latter face of survival as that of maximum entropy and the former face of it as that of minimum free energy (actually, he came eerily close to this in this older post). For the purpose of the present post I can simply point to the fact of epistemic exclusion. Anyone epistemically excluded needs to survive in a world that is hostile to their survival and simultaneously aware that their chances of survival would be better in a world that takes seriously their epistemic input - just read W.E.B. Du Bois on double consciousness.
But: lifting some oppressed minority’s epistemic exclusion changes how things are for anybody not being a part of that oppressed minority group. Survival becomes liminal, also for the - hitherto dominant - majority that needs to navigate two worlds: one that promises him as an individual maximum empowerment, and one that requires him to increase the empowerment of individuals of other genders. The conflict is real and he can be forgiven for feeling epistemically excluded as, indeed, when he cries out: ‘What about me?’, he at best gets an eye roll signaling him to: ‘Just deal with it already!’. And, of course, he should deal with it, but this does not mean we cannot validate his feeling of powerless rage in having to navigate something that, for eons, was not necessary to be navigated for somebody like him. Now, did you notice something odd in this para? Survival went from being two-faced to something that turns individuals against each other! Suddenly we find ourselves in a clash of civilizations where one gender’s gain is the other gender’s loss. The invalidity of an incel’s feeling lies precisely in this turn to viewing survival as a zero-sum game between people like him , i.e. us, and them.
I did say before that this post was going to be uncharacteristically straightforward for me. I did not say it was going to be simplistic. In fact, it is a simplification of survival into a clash of civilizations that creates the mess we are in. This simplification makes it seem to the incel (as in fact to those merely eye-rolling him into compliance, sorry for this unpopular opinion) as if other people’s empowerment can only come at the cost of their disempowerment. Here, I have to make the (far from binary) distinction between those benefiting from the status quo and those who don’t. Imagine that you’re an incel who lives a precarious life as a son of working class parents being thrown in an out of employment, in and out of healthcare, in and out of unemployment benefits, … by the capitalist powers that be. You spend your young life enraged by the injustice that your choices are between a rock and a hard place. You hear the simplistic narrative that the predicament you’re in is the result of a culture war where gender activists keep you in the purgatory of precariousness. You take the clickbait. Then imagine you are a son of privileged parents and it is you who created this ragebait to protect your privilege.
And there you have it: it is perfectly possible to validate feeling epistemically excluded - in this case from our, literally poor, incel - and say his moral outrage is misdirected. In this case to changes in culture that have nothing at all to do with why he feels that way. As said, it’s hard to adapt and harder still in a fast changing world. Liminality is a border you have to cross to create more possibility, more over-all empowerment (i.e. more entropy), but it will also make you feel vulnerable, disoriented and insecure. You grasp at straws to give you a little security, trust; comfort (i.e. less energy expenditure). Take again the incel: you can roll your eyes all you want, just telling him to not believe in culture war fairy tales deepens his epistemic commitment to them. His insecurity is too high to - to use a key phrase in our conspiracy paper - entertain a long epistemic arc. Instead he gobbles up the sugar-rich fairy tale, actively trying to search evidence for it. Every bit like a person that feels too hungry and insecure to search for the best foodstuff - and that gets trapped in the abundant and cheap availability of sugar-rich foodstuff that immediately satisfies their hunger.
The problem in the latter case is not that they do not eat. Just like the incel’s problem is not that they are epistemically inactive. No, the problem is that he is, epistemically, too active as is clear from the enormous body of evidence he will cite in defense of his fairy tale thought. Surely he should direct his rage to those in power, those who shape our society to toss his parents in and out of a job, in and out of healthcare, in and out of employment benefits. In the analogy of this post’s title: he shouldn’t be tempted by sugar-rich foodstuff. But he is and that is a fact nobody can deny as long as this sugar-rich foodstuff is epistemically cheaper to find. This is, in a sense, the timeless story of fascism: to create sugar-rich narratives (epistemes) that are easy for vulnerable people to latch onto. Make no mistake: these are created precisely to prey on the people who were relatively privileged and now see that privilege being threatened by new societal change. The trick is to direct the rage of feeling epistemically excluded away from the powers that be and onto minorities who have always been oppressed but who create a successful counter narrative increasing the over-all supply of epistemic agency.
So, what is new if this is the timeless story of fascism? Well, each fascism has its own specific history, and the current brand is created by those capitalizing on a faster and faster (un)merry-go-round. The truth is they create conditions in which insecurity has become endemic to an ever greater portion of the world’s population. So endemic that a pre-revolutionary vibe threatening the powers that be is omnipresent. People are so epistemically hungry for alternative ways of making sense of this senseless insensitive environment that they risk to eat everything and explode in a fiery rage against what’s presented as inevitable: current day capitalism. In comes the brilliant idea of Ozempic in allowing an unhealthy environment to stay untouched but making it an individual’s problem to deal with it. Better still: you can make money on the individual’s need for a drug that is only necessary because you cannot stop making money on people’s inborn mechanism of feeling hungry. This, my friends, is the story of (tech) billionaires: thrive on the insecurity created by capitalism in supplying technologies that keep feelings of epistemic exclusion directed to sugar-rich narratives incriminating those oppressed.
Divide et impera. Maybe Trump himself is just another sugar-rich narrative for those who funded his electoral campaign? It keeps us busy whilst nothing really changes. It keeps us invested in zero sum games on steroids (including infinite doomscrolling) in which war is the only solution. (And here they go investing in military enterprises that exploit this sense of war as the only solution!) Of course this solution isn’t sustainable. In the end it diminishes the over-all epistemic agency by making soldiers of each and every one of us. If maximizing entropy is progress (and it is, but Sander needs to make that argument) then what is happening now is definitely regress. And maybe you read this thinking that probably this is our final regression. Maybe you got here because of a doomscrolling session in which you looked for how this world could end long before climate change will end it. Then I just ask you to see yourself as feeling epistemically excluded - and think about where to direct your rage. Will you direct it to making the system change to one that has a truly universal basic income - or will you let yourself be drawn into the zero sum game that it is time for specific rich people to suffer?
Let me circle back to my optimism. It is true that fascism has prevailed many times in the past. It is equally true that it proved itself to be unsustainable in the long run. And as imperfect as the change has been afterwards, as easily as fascism’s pain is forgotten and so on, minorities have created more overall epistemic agency in the process. They have shown survival is in fact two-faced and liminal (hence not a zero sum game). I’m not naïve, the ante has been upped meanwhile. We no longer need nuclear apocalypse in order for life to go extinct on earth. We just need to continue on the present path of environmental suffocation creating more and more uncertainty, and therefore tying us up more and more in short epistemic arcs, requiring ever stronger epistemic Ozempic as will be gleefully administered by tech billionaires optimizing their AI to keep us in epistemic rabbitholes (and not optimizing it for energy because as always speed - pun intended - is of the essence). Still, as long as there are counter narratives, there’s hope. It is the stuff of my optimism to believe counter narratives have the best survival odds. There would have been no life at all if the selfish zero sum gamete narrative were true.
And the way counter narratives happen to succeed is by way of technology. This is the beauty of the maximum entropy idea: they can weaponize their binaries all they want, in the end a non-binary escapes and transforms us into people that want to play more, and fight less. Because this is what is really going at present: the survival of those who call themselves the strong as against those whom they call the weak. And as survival is two-faced the strong don’t stand a chance of winning. Unfortunately, the odds are that they succeed in ruining it for every (living) body. But, hey, if you got this far in a long - meandering - post, the odds for survival - and therefore change - are a bit better again.