Arguing with Authoritarians

    There are a few themes that come up again and again whenever I find myself arguing certain subjects with people on the internet and elsewhere, and I think I have finally figured out what ties them all together: authoritarianism. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because many of these people present themselves as very much anti-authoritarian, rejecting the advice of those elitist academics and urging you to "do your own research". But what makes them authoritarian isn't that they necessarily respect any particular authority; it's that they tend to approach things with what I'm calling an authoritarian epistemology, one that's more concerned with power than with truth.

    To start, it seems to me that the model of knowledge and how it is acquired works something like this: One person knows something, and then tells it to another person, and now that other person knows it too. This isn't a bad theory as far as it goes, a decent first approximation for a many simple interactions. Its chief failing is that it's incomplete, but I'll get to that later. For now, the point is that to the authoritarian, this is how it works: someone who knows (an authority) transmits knowledge to someone who doesn't.

    So why do I say the authoritarian is about power? Because in this model, the authority isn't just sharing knowledge; they're actually telling someone what to think. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that the other person has to believe them, because of course people give orders they're not authorized to give all the time, and people disobey orders all the time too. All I mean here is that the authoritarian tends to regard most or even all interactions this way, as attempted exercises of power by either an authority or someone aspiring to authority.

    And this explains why the "do your own research" crowd so bitterly resents people whose job it is to tell us stuff: the news media and scientists/experts. Because they see the transmission of knowledge in terms of power hierarchies, they take it as an affront when someone tries to tell them something. After all, who are these "experts" to tell me what to think? They're not the boss of me!

    Hence the sneering contempt if you happen to mention something that comports with the Official Story: "Hah! you believe the mainstream media?" See, when you regard every utterance as an assertion of power, then believing what people tell you is a sign of weakness, and conversely, refusing to believe what you are told is strength. It's a year-round form of April Fools Day skepticism, that sees discourse as a childish game of tricking other people into believing falsehoods while trying to avoid believing anything anyone might tell you.

    When you approach discourse this way, any argument becomes a personal attack, an attempt to exploit your perceived weakness. One may peacefully "agree to disagree", but by golly if someone tries to force me to change my mind about something, I need to defend myself, right? So it's almost inevitable that someone with this mindset will come to identify with their opinions.

    Which is another aspect of this authoritarianism that I've been troubled by for some time, the tendency to think of opinions as a matter of identity rather than the result of deliberative process. Ideally, describing yourself as a liberal or a conservative should just be shorthand for "my opinions on issues tend to be more [liberal/conservative]" but very often I find people saying things like, "I'm a conservative, so I'm against abortion" as if being conservative is the cause of the opinion, rather than a description of it. And just as often, I find that regardless of whether they consciously identify themselves with a group or movement, the authoritarians I argue with will try to pigeonhole me as belonging to whatever group it is they happen to identify as their opposition. 

    That's psychological projection, obviously, and of course we all do it to some extent. Indeed, it was projection of my own presumptions about what knowledge is and the purpose of debate that kept me so baffled about the authoritarian mindset for so long. I assumed they were arguing to provide evidence and logic that would lead me to adopt their view as my own, or to gain sufficient understanding of my own position so as to make a better informed decision as to whether to reject or adopt it. And so I was regularly astonished at the sorts of arguments they would make and what to me seemed like brazen hypocrisy.

    For example, I was recently arguing with someone who recited some mortality numbers she claimed were from Statistics Canada, intended to show that the pandemic wasn't real because there was no significant change over previous years. Since she hadn't provided a link or reference to the original source, I went and googled for some appropriate keywords, and found that Stats Can had in fact published a report on excess deaths related to the pandemic. Yet when I cited this source back, with a link, my opponent dismissed it as government propaganda that couldn't be trusted. Note that this was the very same government agency she had cited to prove her position, which she glibly dropped as not credible the instant it went against her. What could possibly be more hypocritical?

    But that hypocrisy disappears when you understand the authoritarian mindset, which values power and doesn't really consider "truth" except as the set of beliefs that distinguishes us (the good guys) from them, and which considers debate to be a kind of assault, a struggle to maintain one's own beliefs/identity against attacks while trying to weaken the resolve/identity of one's attackers. It's not about truth for them, but strength and determination, and all the little rhetorical devices we use in argumentation are just weapons to be used against the enemy, and to be deflected or dodged when they are used against us. There is, after all, nothing in the least bit hypocritical about trying to stab you with my epee while trying to parry your attempts to stab me. My opponent wasn't really making the claim that Stats Can is or isn't a reliable authority; she was simply trying to protect herself from having her Deeply Held Belief weakened by attempting to demoralize and discredit any belief/person (remember they tend to blur together beliefs and identities) that might appear to threaten it.

    I think this is why they use so many basic logical fallacies in argument, and why it doesn't bother them in the least to do so. If you call them on it, pointing out "That's an ad hominem fallacy", they don't pay any real attention to the substance of why ad hominem is a form of non sequitur because the conclusion ("you're wrong") does not follow from the antecedent ("you're stupid"). Rather, they just pick up the term "ad hominem", dimly aware that it has something to do with calling someone stupid, and use it as a weapon against you any time they perceive you to be calling them stupid. And there are countless other examples of terms with legitimate meanings that get coopted this way, stripped of nuance and wielded as cudgels not to prove any substantive point but to wear down and humiliate those perceived as attackers. 

    I'm not sure how best to deal with the authoritarian mindset. They aren't arguing to convince you they're right; they're just arguing to prevent you from convincing them they're wrong, and so all they need to do is spread doubt. (Same strategy as the tobacco companies "questioning" the link between cigarettes and cancer, or the oil industry "questioning" global warming, or creationists' "teaching the controversy", etc.) The sad irony in all this is that, to the non-authoritarian, doubt is already in plentiful supply, and it isn't a weakness but a core assumption about everything. You can't win an argument with me by making me doubt my position if you don't do something to reduce the doubts I have about your position.