In deciding whom to believe, start by listening to what people say about their own belief-generating procedures: how they come to endorse what they endorse according to themselves. A good first sorting procedure is to regard people as non-credible who straightforwardly present themselves as believing things for no reasons that bear on the truth of those things.
The only legitimate reasons to believe any claim are reasons that establish the truth of that claim. If, for example, you believe it because that's just the sort of person you are, no one should regard you as credible ever again, or at least until you are reprogrammed. The relevant material isn’t about you at all.
An example of this is people who say they believe things because they’re optimists. "I'm a congenital optimist," is one of the most common things for a politician to say, something that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden say almost every time they open their hopeful mouths. "Your response has to be to reject cynicism and reject pessimism and push forward, with a certain infectious and relentless optimism," said Obama in a typical flourish. He said that in 2017, at the dawn of the Trump era.
He was certain, because he's allegedly an optimist all day every day, that Trump was an aberration, NATO would rock on, the American economy would bounce back, and so on. He portrayed himself as believing all that, not because of any information about Trump, NATO or the economy, but because of the sort of person he is. Biden and Clinton are the same sort of person, according to themselves. Always hopeful no matter what. Seems unlikely for people enmeshed like the rest of us in a real world and who just got their asses kicked again, but so they say.
One thing that we ought to be able agree on is that the question, for example, of who will win the next election, or how fast the world is warming, or whether vaccines are effective, is not about your own moods. Those questions are about the world outside your head, not your serotonin levels. That you’re relentlessly and congenitally optimistic is really sweet! But it's neither here nor there.
Asked in September on The View if he would’ve won if he stayed in, Biden went with this: “Yes. I was confident I would beat Trump. He’s a loser.” Then he pitched Kamala: “She is smart as hell, No. 1,” he said. He added, “she’s tough, she’s honorable, and the thing I like about her—and one thing we share in common—is that we have an optimistic view in the future.” (Probably he means that she has an optimistic view of the future, but it's Joe so we have to decode.)
Joe and Kamala were magnificently optimistic about the magnificently optimistic American people. They lost badly, and maybe they should’ve focused on the questions of who was going to vote how and why, rather than the mood they were in on a particular afternoon. All these joyous, power-of-positive-thinking Democrats just got their alleged optimistic expectations dashed. Again. Maybe they should review their belief-generating procedures.
A magnificent example of believing for no reasons, and then arguing that this is a good idea, was provided last week by David Brooks, arguing that the next bunch of years will be a contest between institutionalists and anti-institutionalists. The former are an army of little Mitt Romneys, the latter a rag-tag band of Donald Trumps.
In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions—families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions—by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. Over the course of our lives, we inherit institutions, steward them and try to pass them along in better shape to the next generation. We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.
MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate—the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.
This is a fairly sharp description. But whether David Brooks or Mitt Romney or Matt Gaetz or Donald Trump, or for that matter you, is an institutionalist or an anti-institutionalist by temperament is completely irrelevant to any factual claims you might make. That you’ve convinced yourself that Kamala will win doesn’t bear on whether she will win. That you trust institutions doesn’t bear on whether those institutions are worthwhile. (And that thing about Jesus, a screeching anti-institutionalist if ever there was one, is just random.)
If you want me to believe you’re seeking the truth at all about anything, whether it's tax policy or vaccines or climate change or electoral outcomes, tell me about the relevant subject-matter, not about yourself, for God's sake. "I believe it because I am institutionalist" is just as irrational and anti-factual as "I believe it because I am an optimist." It's entirely factually irrelevant, and shows that you’re a fundamentally unreliable source of information because you form opinions on an irrational basis and are proud of that fact. After you say that you believe any particular thing because you’re an optimist or an institutionalist or a pessimist or an anti-institutionalist, you should be roundly dismissed as a source of information.
I’m talking to you, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, David Brooks. Come up with some reasons, or express your commitment to facing the truth about the world, not merely expressing your own alleged mood. I don't give a shit about your mood and I don't believe you’re as optimistic as you pretend. But whether you are or not is irrelevant to the truth of anything you're asserting. That you generate beliefs this way, and say so explicitly, discredits you in general.
To establish that factors like these—or facts about the believer's mood or personality—are irrelevant to the truth of the claims that people like Biden and Brooks are making, it’s adequate to look at what Brooks actually says. His “knowledge” that the institutions he's embedded in, and that wield authority, are legitimate has nothing to do with those institutions. His beliefs follow from his demeanor, his upbringing, and so on. They follow from what sort of person he is, but what sort of person he is doesn't bear on the truth of what he's saying.
"People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence" of the institutions they’re in, he argues. But as far as he portrays it, he'd be just as compliant to the institutions of the Confederate States of America or a re-education camp as to those of a democratic polity. The Khmer Rouge had standards of excellence too.
I doubt he really believes this on reflection, though I don't doubt that he has an impulse to comply that swamps all his other impulses. He proudly affirms that people like himself "climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be." But whether that’s a good shape to be in or not depends not on your mood or predilections, but on what sort of institutions you're embedded in.
This is entailed by the fact that we live in a real world and not merely in our own fantasies and hallucinations. Perhaps Biden or Brooks has declared their devotion to “science,” now and then. But whether gravitation will drag you back to earth is not a matter of what you hope or what you can convince yourself of, or whether you’re congenital optimist or institutionalist. And in this matter all truths about the world are the same.
Truths about the world are about it; fantasies and hallucinations are truths about ourselves. Whether we’re optimistic or pessimistic, or we’re pro- or anti-institutionalists has nothing to do with what’s true and false. To say anything true about the world, you'll need to get out of your own head.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell