The Death of Authority

And the authoritarians waiting to crawl into the gap it leaves behind

In recent years much has been made in journalistic circles of the “death of expertise”.

It’s not that people no longer have it: it’s that it’s no longer welcomed or given credence. In government this takes the form of dismissing advice solely on the grounds it conflicts with a political standpoint. In the media it manifests in both-sidesing every debate, even if the talking heads arguing one position are doing so from a position of evident self-interest, political gain, or ignorance to the point of insanity. Over the Internet and world in general it leads people (who often seem to inhabit the third of those previous groups) to reject statements that might reasonably be thought to be based on prior knowledge and experience, in favor of “doing their own research” — i.e. a quick Google while sitting on the toilet before wallowing around in an echo chamber of similarly ill-informed contrarians with an axe to grind.

Yes of course there’s value in vox populi — but please let’s bear in mind that what they say may be hopelessly wrong. While it may be informative and useful to know what people ignorant on a subject think, it’s madness to base policy upon it.

It struck me to wonder, however, whether it’s not expertise that’s being rejected after all. Sure, there’s a huge desire for confirmation bias, and people will be more drawn to agree with those who’re providing arguments for something they already believe, however tenuous or fact-free those arguments may be. But it increasingly seems that what’s being rejected is not merely views that are unwelcome, but the very idea that someone else might have superior knowledge on a subject — even if you happen to agree: and further, the notion that this confers upon them any special status.

From this I wonder whether it’s not the expertise itself that’s being rejected, but the idea that expertise of any kind, whether it affirms your position or not, should have the power to constrain or even influence your behavior. And if expertise is therefore being rejected not in and of itself, but as a sub-set of “authority" — and thus at heart it’s the very notion of authority of any kind that is being dismissed.

If so, that’s kind of a big deal.

The last ten years have been tough on the notion of authority. It’s no longer clear where it resides, for a start. However much individual countries may try to cling to it through little-England debacles like Brexit or the America-first isolationism of MAGA, mirrored by the rise of intensely inward-looking ideologies over the world, the increasing omnipresence of the Internet — with its meta-communities that transcend borders — make the idea of “nations” increasingly vague. People are more likely to bond with like-minded others on the other side of the world than with folks down the street: your tribe is not formed of those who are geographically close, but the people who share your opinions on abortion, trans rights, or levels of taxation: people you can be instantly and constantly in contact with on the web. On a profound level this is making us feel less like we primarily “belong” to one national identity.

These communities are formed over social media, which are controlled by individuals. Are we therefore ceding authority to them? No. Sure, Elon Musk has a hoard of rabid little fanboys, obsessed with crypto and busy cosplaying being fascism-curious because it feels transgressive, but the vast majority of Twitter users think he’s a dick. Same with Zuckerman, who has FaceBook and Insta and Threads. These people may own the town squares, but nobody thinks of them as leaders. This lack of actual authority may in fact be part of why we like them, or at least tolerate their power.

Which drops us back down to the national level. I make no secret of my respect and admiration for Joe Biden, but he increasingly feels like an anachronism. A twinkle-eyed old white guy who likes his ice cream and reaches across the aisle to get things done and believes in a benign American exceptionalism and one nation under an affable and well-meaning God: how very twentieth-century of you, grandpa.

Five minutes spent watching the news in this country will quickly convince you that many of the rest of the people in government are assholes. This is partly down to Trump and his enablers and lackeys, who managed to critically destroy trust in government in a brisk four years. Of course that’s a simplistic claim — people have long (perhaps always) been suspicious of governments of any type, and in America in particular anti-Federalism sentiment was strong in the beginning and never went away and is now really rolling up its sleeves once more. But that speaks only to wishing for government over a smaller area: a preference for States’ rights.

More than in any point in my life there seems to be an active mistrust and dislike and rejection of any governmental authority at all. And this is coming not just from self-proclaimed “anarchists”, but everybody, left, right and center.

Those who’ve been governing have certainly helped bring this about. Take the United Kingdom. What a fucking farce the last decade of Tory rule has been, what a depressing cavalcade of incompetence, lies, and self-interest. Politicians there, and in the US, and in many other countries across the world, are now openly assumed to be grifting shysters — who cannot be trusted to manage a response to a pandemic, for example, because they fired or ignored all the experts, didn’t have the character not to panic, and appear driven wholly by a desire for political or financial gain.

Many spectators, perhaps especially the young, have stopped even looking to them for any form of authority — instead picking it up in dribs and drabs from influencers, TikTok “stars”, and other digital celebrities: few of whom have the betterment of society as a goal. Even the sainted Taylor Swift (for whom I have a lot of time — back off, Swifties) sometimes seems like she’s saying the right (i.e. liberal) things purely because they’re the right things to say in the circles she inhabits, rather than being born of fiery belief and commitment. She may very well believe them, but their expression feels uncomfortably close to tribal statement and marketing exercise.

And why not? That’s why a lot of politicians say things for those reasons too. That’s where opinions come from these days. It’s a performance. True expertise, a history of public service, a sturdy but nuanced set of intellectual and political positions?

Nobody cares.

Everything is surface now. It’s all meta. Everything’s happening everywhere, all at once. There are too many ideas and too few people prepared to try to hold more than one in their head at a time. What Hamas did was unforgivable, for example. So is what Netanyahu has done in response. College students have the right to protest what’s happening in Gaza. But they don’t have the right to be anti-Semitic in the process — and yes, some of them are being, and there are chaos agents infiltrating the scene for their own dark ends, making that look worse than it is: depressingly often, the bad guys are one step ahead of the good. We should absolutely not be living in a country where the police can march in and drag people out of peaceful protests, and this should be a very easy thing to seek unity over, but the whole series of events has sown so much division in the left — with the gleeful encouragement of the right, who cannot comprehend constructive dissent — that we are now at the point of shouting about shouting. Everything careers sideways, swept along by the media’s hunger for a new story every day, every hour: the fight has become focused upon students’ rights to protest — and left behind the original topic of Gaza. On this subject alone the conflicts and contradictions rapidly became so muddy that few have a clear fix on the issues, and the traditional political guidelines of “left versus right” are breaking down, further mangled by the increasingly strong horseshoe alliance of the far-left and the far-right. Screaming about screaming comes next.

Even if you hate Republicans, you can still mistrust Biden from the left because you don’t see him doing enough for the Palestinians. Even if you hate the Tories, you can mistrust Starmer because you’re firmly gender-critical, or any other reason. There’s no happy families-style sets of political ideas any more. They've all broken up into individual cards. In a way this is healthy, because the world is a complex place and no one-sentence answer will ever answer its bigger questions. But it also means that the vast majority of citizens, the fee-paying audience for the Political Entertainment Complex, no longer have any clue what the hell is going on... and what to feel about it, or what to do. In those circumstances people turn their back on what feel like increasingly nebulous authority structures, and instead focus on themselves...

… or whatever shiny object the complicit media’s dangling in front of them today. Our attention is atomized, monetized, mined-for-profit. Reality has been carved into a million special-interest niches, and there’s no space left for big ideas.

The place where I get my hair cut is on the other side of the harbor. During the pandemic, on the drive there and back, I got used to seeing a hand-made banner stridently hanging outside one house, decrying vaccines. As a quick and dumb shorthand I assumed the person was coming at it from right-wing views. But then when Roe vs Wade burst into the news the sign changed to one telling the government to keep their hands the hell off women’s bodies. Huh, I thought. Of course.

This is not right vs left. This is fierce individualism. This is a proclamation that no leader or group of people or over-arching ideology has authority over that person. America has always maintained a steady heartbeat of “You’re not the boss of me”. It’s part of why the country was populated and formed. But it feels not only that this impulse is getting ever-stronger, but it’s become one of the primary drivers of thought and emotion in this era, worldwide. Leaders everywhere are mistrusted and ignored. Past positions have become irrelevant, too: can you imagine Republicans of twenty years ago cheering Putin on? Unthinkable. But bodies of thought no longer cohere either across a society or over time. Those conceptual authority structures have lost their power. The very idea of “authority” — either vested in persons, or in identifiable sets of ideas, or traditions — is dying in front of our eyes.

You might think that a growing mistrust of authority would lead to greater individual independence and the advent of some groovy anarcho-syndicalist brave new dawn, but that’s not what history suggests. Generally it is merely a harbinger of a time when a sudden, shocking void — because though societal change grinds along slowly, often the major schisms they cause can appear to happen almost overnight — provides a space for a new authority that is more aggressive than the last, not less.

Trust me, I’m not harking back to some glorious era where everybody knew their place and we all trusted the boss. But these authority gaps are the very ones into which the Hitlers and Stalins slide, those fake fathers who need enemies both without and within, and will find them one way or another, and will not spare the rod.

That’s what scares me.

I am however no expert on society or politics, so I may be doom-saying needlessly. This could all simply be one of those periodic course corrections or cultural eddies that happen from time to time, but are hard to discern and discount from the inside — and it’ll all be fine, tra-la-la, I wonder what the Kardashians are up to.

What do you think?

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