Unfalsifiable Belief

The Elites Are CERTAIN That They're Right... But Reality Isn't Cooperating!

How does the progressive intelligentsia react when confronted with dangerous or extremely unpopular new laws or policies passed by their supporters? They don’t argue in favor of the changes. They rarely try to reframe the debate. Mostly they just choose not to talk about the subject. For millions of professional folks caught in a restrictive and morally suffocating information ecosystem this defense strategy actually works. After all, they KNOW they’re right! All the rest is merely details…

There are some things that only dominant narratives can achieve (or even attempt). There are certain habits of thought and messaging goals that require so much elite buy-in and messaging volume that they are effectively impossible for most constituencies to sustain. Building a firewall around friendly voices and trying to keep your believers separated from counterfactuals in a kind of memetic herd is difficult and requires a great deal of cultural heft. It also requires a group of people who have little meaningful contact with their ideological opponents. A distinct class, segregated from other layers of society, works nicely.

Ironically, having this much cultural power can prove to be a kind of Achilles heel in the long run. Endlessly focusing on the other guys and studiously ignoring the flaws and absurdities of your own coalition (for there are always some) can turn your movement into a brittle and shallow thing. If that happens, cultural power will be all you have (plus perhaps political and financial power). If your ideas are no longer compelling or broadly popular, but they are well-subscribed to by the elite, then your choices are (1) modify your positions to better conform with popular sensibilities, or (2) use increasing amounts of funding or censorship or compulsion to enforce your vision.

(1) (Modification and compromise) seems to be very difficult for the elites to manage. Some of the reasons for that surely lie in their exorbitant class privileges, and also in their self-image: benevolent and enlightened technocrats fiddling with the dials and healing the hurts of a beautifully diverse and complicated society. Their worldview is, fundamentally, a moral vision more than a political one. Politics involves trade-offs and compromises, and negotiations with reality and with opponents. Only a moral vision could maintain such a stark dichotomy of right (progressive) and wrong (conservative), and paint opponents (ALL opponents) as either bad or ignorant, and (most importantly, in my opinion) generate the kind of psychological validation and sense of comfort that the modern progressive worldview provides.

That is why progressive ideas are proving to be so difficult to shift. This is a collective, status-driven phenomena, and it is connected to people’s sense of their own ethical nature and their place in the world. To acknowledge that the program which they have been advocating is contributing to a wave of profound ignorance in public schools and the accelerating dissolution of the family (to choose two arbitrary examples which are, in my opinion, undeniably true), plus many more ill effects, would confront them with an obvious-but uncomfortable-fact: that they are fallible and self-centered and not-very-well informed people who have mostly been forming opinions based upon what helps themselves, and makes them feel good. Any admission of error would amount to a confrontation with the fact that their values have done tremendous harm, and that’s a heavy psychological lift for most people, especially when they can continue to shelter in the crowd and draw certainty from their collective belief: “we can’t ALL be wrong!” Sure you can. In fact, if you look at the performance of these elites and the organizations they manage, it’s a certainty that they’re all wrong about a great many things. It’s just a question of which things.

The second possible choice, besides accepting fallibility and opening oneself up for change, is to revert to coercion and compulsion. If you go down that road, eventually compulsion will be all that you have at your disposal (and, since it is the easiest and most powerful tool of the state, it will begin to be used more and more). That is the direction that Great Britain and Germany are travelling today. The British psy-ops and advertising campaigns and NGO initiatives and profoundly anti-democratic policies (anti-democratic in the sense of being against the policies that the people badly want) aren’t working fast enough, and resistance is rising. Efforts are being redoubled, of course. Just look at the at burst of elite excitement around the release of Adolescence.

Police cannot prevent mass thefts or knife crime in Britain. Truthfully, they aren’t trying to. They have other priorities. This is yet another development that progressives simply will not talk about. NO ONE defends these kinds of policies-they simply deflect and ignore… and pivot towards a subject or problem that’s easier for them to discuss.

Capitulation or open debate are unacceptable; open debate would mean a de facto abdication for the elites, for their values and ideas cannot survive in open contests. (That is why their institutional credibility and credentials are so important. Notice that the ‘experts’ never want to simply debate the skeptics or dissidents in open forums.) They understand that they might very well be wrong about policy A or effect B, but they’re sustained by the (deeply felt) moral righteousness of their worldview, and so closing ranks and going after critics unmercifully and telling little (big) lies and cutting corners and siphoning money away from dissidents and toward supporters are all justified, ultimately. It’s the same old consequentialist slippery slope (the ends justify any means when the ends are so right and wonderful) that has been employed by abusive utopians for two centuries.

The strangest thing about the progressive memetic landscape, to an outside observer, is the almost organic self-protective mechanisms which emerge, bigger than any individuals or institutions, but identifiable all the same.

I suspect that we are moving into a new stage of human history: the era of families and communities and political parties is ending, and our future (if we continue) lies in the movement of vast and inexorable cultural and financial trends, playing out across dozens of countries and billions of individual decisions. Do you feel that you seem to be losing power and agency and a firm grasp on your life and your future? Just a bit? Now imagine that anti-agentic factor cranked up to a magnitude of 10. That is our homogenized, bureaucratic future, if we allow it. That is Blobworld.

One of the prominent defensive reflexes is the “blind spot pivot”: something very dubious, or extreme, or unpopular is happening. Progressives ignore it (they don’t defend it or reframe it so much as they just choose not to discuss or acknowledge it at all), and then they pivot to entirely different issues and focuses. Naturally these focuses are more comfortable for them to address and consider. There must be some level of awareness of what is happening (it is individual people working to suppress and distract from these debates, after all) but that doesn’t mean that it’s overt deceit, or some master plan. It could be as simple as people avoiding the topics which make them uncomfortable. I think if it were me, recognizing that dozens of emerging policy questions made my worldview seem incoherent and faulty, and that considering them made me uncomfortable, would prompt some kind of change. We must remember though, the rigid moral vision: these policy changes are all based upon core assumptions that cannot be questioned. It doesn’t matter if state governments are taking psychologically distressed kids out of the custody of their parents based upon the precepts of gender ideology: trans rights are human rights. That is how the psychological mechanism operates” “I am right. I know I’m right. My beliefs are correct and compassionate. Those who oppose me are morally wrong, and incorrect. I am right. I know I’m right.” This is mantra substituted for Socratic dialogue, and it shouldn’t be surprising that it is exceedingly popular among the people who consider Socrates (and the entire Western canon of analytical discovery) invalid. No mere policy failure or crime statistic or poll result can contend with that kind of moral certainty. In fact, nothing can. The certainty persists… but-because the certainty is actually completely inconsistent with reality and ongoing experience-so does the discomfort.

This is a very durable ideology… but it has no mechanism to reform itself or to react to the changing conditions of reality. There are too few inputs and too few feedback effects. One would expect such a belief system to become more absurd over time, which is what we’ve seen. Now we’ve also seen that ‘the elect’ won’t willingly surrender power. They will struggle, and old norms will be discarded. And the entire time, they will feel exhilarated and righteous: (bureaucratic and timid and passive aggressive) warriors, against modern evil.

One Example

There are many examples of this kind of reaction (willful ignorance + silence) today. Every day brings a dozen new instances of the blind spot pivot. One interesting recent one is the debate (or lack thereof) around CO House Bill 25-1312, which establishes unpopular and controversial (and completely unscientific) axioms of gender ideology as decisive factors in child custody battles (which applicable). It has gotten quite a lot of coverage in the conservative media ecosystem. Rather than promoting and defending their policies, though, the left has mostly been quiet. That’s curious strategy to take if you feel certain that your reforms will be beneficial. It’s almost as if the left has decided to let their activists run roughshod over and through traditions and norms and standards of evidence… and they have decided to help them, by keeping the changes quiet, or minimizing them, or burying their victims and their ill effects.

Colin Wright

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Earlier this year, I testified before the Colorado legislature in opposition to House Bill 25-1109, which would have required death certificates to reflect decedents’ “gender identity,” rather than their sex. The proposal was self-evidently absurd—death certificates are legal documents, not tributes to decedents’ subjective sense of self. Nevertheless, the legislature passed the bill, which awaits Governor Jared Polis’s signature.

Now, Colorado lawmakers have gone a step further. A new proposal, House Bill 25-1312, would make “deadnaming” and “misgendering” children—that is, not using their preferred name or pronouns—a factor in child-custody disputes. Under the Kelly Loving Act, parents who refuse to use their child’s chosen name or pronouns, even out of sincere concern for the child’s well-being, would be deemed to be exercising “coercive control,” and therefore liable to lose custody.

Instead of ensuring children’s safety, this bill would mandate speech, codify a radical ideology into law, and weaponize family courts to enforce compliance.

The bill is framed in terms of preventing “harm” and “abuse,” which relies on the popular claim that “gender-affirming care” is a form of suicide prevention. Despite the frequency with which such claims get repeated, no good evidence exists suggesting that “gender-affirming” treatments—social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgeries—are grounded in rigorous, evidence-based medicine. On the contrary, every systematic review conducted to date has concluded that the evidence supporting these interventions is of very low quality.

By insisting that parents affirm their child’s identity, the bill pushes the “social transition” aspect of “gender-affirming care,” which entails changing a child’s name, pronouns, clothing, and behavior to align with his asserted “gender identity.” Proponents often portray social transition as a benign and cost-free intervention. But as Mia Hughes, a senior researcher at Genspect, noted in her testimony before the Colorado House Committee against the proposal, “affirming” a child in his delusion sets him up for a lifetime of regret:

There are consequences to lying to a child. A parent telling their sweet effeminate boy who liked Barbies and princess gowns that he can be a girl may solve his distress in the short term. It is, after all, not easy to be different. It may seem to be in that little boy’s best interest to use the female name and female pronouns, and a court may decide that he is better off with the affirming parent. But this is short-sighted. Social transition comes at such an enormous cost in the future. . . . Socially transitioning children sets off a chain reaction that can lead to becoming a life-long medical patient. Therefore, this bill has got it backwards. Socially transitioning a child is a form of coercive control that strips away the child’s sense of self, robs them of their bodily integrity, and violates their right to go through puberty.

Hughes is exactly right.

Psychologist Kenneth Zucker, an expert in gender dysphoria, similarly warned in a 2019 paper that social transition can inappropriately cement a child’s cross-sex identity. In that paper, he predicted that social transition would “increase dramatically” the rate at which transitioned children’s gender dysphoria persisted compared with children with gender dysphoria not socially transitioned.

He proved correct. A 2022 study by Kristina Olson and colleagues found that a shocking 97.5 percent of transgender-identifying “youth who socially transitioned at early ages continued to identify that way.” Nearly 60 percent of such children will continue on to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and many will pursue surgeries. In the years before widespread social transition, by contrast, most young children with gender dysphoria—about 80 percent—eventually desisted and accepted their bodies as they grew into adulthood.

Rather than view socially transitioned children’s persistent gender dysphoria as a red flag, activists hail it as validation. Azeen Ghorayshi, writing about Olson’s study for the New York Times, said that the results reflected “societal acceptance of gender diversity” and increasingly supportive parents, both of which allow “transgender children” to “thrive in their identities.” Olson, in an interview with Healthline, argued that the persistence rate debunks the notion that “a five or six-year-old who is insisting that they are a gender that does not align with their sex at birth can’t possibly know their gender, or that this is just a ‘phase.’”

These are deeply flawed interpretations. If social transition were truly a harmless way for kids to explore their identities, we’d expect a significant number to decide eventually that they aren’t transgender, given the numbers that historically desisted when left alone. Instead, nearly all those who are socially transitioned persist in the rejection of their natal sex.

I’ve often asked supporters of gender-affirming care: If 97.5 percent persistence after social transition doesn’t concern you, what number would? I am still waiting for a response. The truth, for many activists, is that any outcome serves as proof that gender-affirming care is working.

These kinds of legislative moves would seem curious and ill-advised to a political operator. After all, these are divisive issues and they are basically indefensible in mixed company. NO ONE is debating doubters and critics and trying to convince them that these are well advised and helpful policy changes. It’s simply not happening. There are those who believe, and they love this stuff. Then there’s everyone else. The believers now understand that these kinds of changes are not popular, so they prefer to keep them quiet. They effect radical changes when there’s an opportunity, and then they pretend to take old notions like decency and common sense seriously when engaged: Of course we’re not going to try to take kids away from parents! That would be extreme. 20 years ago, such a though was literally unimaginable. Either we’re doing so well as a civilization because we have access to all of this new and useful social insight (it just emerged in the past decade! Lucky us…) or we’ve veered off the optimal cultural path.

These aren’t political moves. This is a psychological and a class-based phenomenon, which is playing out in state legislatures (and classrooms and therapists’ offices and universities).

This is what happens when a group of people becomes so certain of their rightness (both moral and epistemological) that literally nothing can convince them otherwise. Kids with gender dysphoria should be treated as if they’re trans and parents who push back should be disadvantaged in custody disputes. End of story. The number of shaky propositions and questionable assumptions underlying these beliefs is truly alarming. If these ideological constructions were buildings, they would have to be evacuated immediately. But they are not buildings. They are the real and active faith of our ruling class: We are right. We know we’re right. Our beliefs are correct and compassionate. Those who oppose me are morally wrong, and incorrect. We are right. We know we’re right.

The increasingly fraught and dysfunctional environment of public schools does not trouble them. The collapse of working-class marriage rates and all birthrates do not trouble them. The rising rates of suicide, and psychological distress (and, indeed, specifically gender dysphoria) among young people do not trouble them, for nothing could trouble them. They are busy, executing the ideas and plans they learned in college, to the benefit of the bureaucratic superstructure. Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way: not doubts, not data… not even a growing wave of human suffering.

It must be nice to feel so self-assured. Too bad it’s a feeling that can only be purchased at the cost of a kind of low-grade collective insanity:

We know we’re right.

They know they’re right. That kind of certainty justifies a great deal of aggression, hostility, and even violence. After all-it’s only violence against evil. Right?

Beliefs must be in regular contact with reality. They must be falsifiable, or they will eventually go off of the rails entirely, with possibly devastating consequences.