Growing up is hard to do
Do not pay others to do your thinking for you
“Have courage to make use of your own understanding.”
So wrote Immanuel Kant in 1784, claiming his words to be the motto of enlightenment. Kant further points out that relying on others to do your thinking for you—outsourcing your decisions to people who claim to be experts—may be easy, but it is not mature.
“It is convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual advisor to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.”
I need not think, so long as I can pay.
Ask yourself, if you will, what you are paying for the ease of not having to think for yourself. I posit that many are paying not just with dollars, but with their health, and their morals, and their dignity. Indeed, in some cases, people have paid with their lives.
The Enlightenment brought reason to the forefront of decision making for a world that was ready to be freed from outdated beliefs. A couple of hundreds of years later, we are not living as autonomous, free thinkers. Instead, we have largely replaced the old authorities with new ones, while still believing that we are using reason to arrive at our conclusions. We flatter ourselves. It’s a risky delusion.
People from across political and ideological spectra are claiming the mantle of science, and of certainty. You can’t have both science and certainty though, and anyone who claims they do has revealed that they know nothing of science. If you would #FollowTheScience or claim that “In this house we believe that science is real,” while taking it on authority that the guys in the lab coats with the fancy degrees are arbiters of truth, then what you have adopted is a religious position, not a scientific one. And you most definitely do not have an enlightened position.
Many people who believe that they are on the “side” of science and enlightenment also believe that Trump is a threat to democracy, and to our very way of life. I may have once believed this myself. I like to humor myself that I was only suspicious that this may have been true, that Trump might have been a threat to democracy back in 2016, but I do not know how much nuance I actually had. I did advise my students, in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, that they were wrong to imagine that Trump’s election meant that half the country was sexist and racist; but I also shared the slack-jawed, glazed-eye look that was nearly ubiquitous in liberal enclaves then, and worried that we might be in for a scary ride once Orange Man hit the Oval Office.
Now, however, I believe that Biden—and whatever it is that is pulling his strings—is a far larger threat to democracy and the American experiment than Trump ever was. Biden has demonstrated a willingness to go full authoritarian. During Covid, he enacted vaccine mandates. People lost jobs, families, and lives to Biden’s anti-democratic orders.
And yet I have heard that it is irresponsible, even morally reprehensible, not to support Biden, a president who became authoritarian before all of our eyes.
I think it irresponsible to vote for such a man. But in some people’s eyes, that makes me the existential threat. (And supporting Bobby Kennedy is, we are assured, merely a proxy vote for Trump.) I would again remind people how Kant thought about enlightenment: have courage to make use of your own understanding. If all that you are doing is finding experts to make decisions for you, you have handed over the “tiresome job” of thinking for yourself, and you have abandoned access to the tools of the Enlightenment.
Inquiry is the heart of enlightenment. Absent inquiry there is no development of wisdom. As Kant also says, what enlightenment requires—and therefore what humans require—is freedom to think and to speak.
I have been scolded and slandered, demonized and demonetized, for using my freedom to think and to speak. My husband, Bret Weinstein, draws even more ire and venom than I do. Rageful hatred is thrown at him remarkably often and—at him or at me—it always sounds very much the same.
How dare you seek to understand what is true. How dare you speak what you believe to be true. How dare anyone else listen to what you have to say. This is not the time. Now is the time to fall in line, to comply, and to obey.
(What goes unspoken is: we will tell you when it is your time to speak.)
Education and seduction are etymological sisters, both from Latin. To educate is to bring out or lift up. To be educated is to be led forth from narrow, faith-based belief, into intellectual self-sufficiency. To seduce is to draw away. To be seduced is, often, to be led astray by false praise.
To those who are angered by Bret’s and my tendency to think from scratch and first principles, rather than from authority, and on sharing our thoughts with a willing audience, I say this: You want us all in thrall to the gods that have seduced you. You may think that they have educated rather than seduced you, and you may call your gods by different names—you may call them scientists or elected leaders or public health authorities—but they are the new gods. They act with impunity, they speak from authority rather than from reason, and they discourage skepticism and inquiry. These are the new gods, same as the old gods. You have been seduced by them. You have not been educated.
We—Bret and I and all those who seek truth—prefer to educate our audiences rather than to seduce. It is inevitable, though, that those who would lead by seduction, and those who have been seduced, do not appreciate those who would lead by education.
There are some scientific conclusions for which the evidence is so strong that I cannot imagine them changing. Evolution explains the vast diversity of life that we see on Earth. In animals that reproduce sexually, there are two and only two biological sexes. The Earth is not flat, it is not the center of our solar system or our galaxy or of anything extra-galactic. We are just here, evolving, trying to make sense of our world.
That said, I would remind us all of Richard Dawkins’ apt observation: failure of imagination is not an argument. While we cannot let the sophists win, by tying us in knots and wasting our time defending obvious points, we also need to resist certainty, even about things that we are relying on the most to be true.
There are some other scientific conclusions for which I once believed that the evidence was supremely strong, but my position has shifted as I have learned more. Prime among those positions that I once held but now doubt is this: vaccines that have made it to the market in the United States are largely safe and effective.
In a recent Q&A on Locals, a DarkHorse supporter shared this useful framing: Feel, felt, found. It goes like this: “I understand how you feel. I felt that way, too. But listen to what I have found…”
When confronted with my past self, or with people who sound like I used to, I might say: I understand how you feel about vaccines: everyone should take the ones that are recommended by the CDC, because that keeps us all safe. I used to feel that way too. But here is some of what I have found:
The rapid and extreme expansion of the childhood vaccine schedule in the U.S. was unjustified by changes in childhood disease prevalence. Furthermore, that rapid expansion was closely followed by rises in other childhood illness and disability.
Some of the newly added vaccines are for diseases that children are never exposed to. Americans without passports don’t get vaccinated against yellow fever; why are babies getting vaccinated against hepatitis B?
None of the vaccines currently on the childhood vaccine schedule have been tested against placebo.
The vaccine makers have complete immunity from damages caused by their products.
In some cases, the pathogen that has been identified as causing the disease in question, while both real and capable of causing devastating illness, does not appear to be the singular enemy in the public health story that we have been led to believe (see, for instance, The Moth In the Iron Lung for a surprising historical take on polio, which points the finger at agrochemicals that poisoned not just insects, but also people, with heavy metals).
We might well be better off cleaning up the rest of our act, rather than adding poison to poison, and hoping that two errors create healthy human beings.
I understand how you feel. I felt that way too. But listen to what I have found.
Sometimes I will be in error. I would not have you trust me simply because I think that I am right, or because I have scientific credentials. You need not listen to anything in particular that others have found. But if you are certain that your cherished beliefs are correct, and that they cannot abide scrutiny, be skeptical of yourself. Your certainty is a tell. Your certainty may be hiding an insecurity, which in turn may be covering an error.
Kant wrote, in that same essay on enlightenment from 1784, that “all that is needed is freedom. And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all—freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. But I hear on all sides the cry: "Do not argue!" The officer says, "Do not argue, drill!" The tax man says, "Do not argue, pay!" The clergyman says, "Do not argue, believe!"
It is not just our right, but our duty, to make public use of our reason in all matters. Do be curious. Do inquire. Do argue. And do share what you learn.
I need not think, so long as I can pay.
Above all, think before paying anything more to those experts who would take from you the gifts of the enlightenment.
Outstanding, as usual. The fact that you are willing to change your mind given new or learned facts, is why so many people trust what you have to say.
Well, this one's a keeper.