The Information Gap

There was a great scene in The Sopranos where Tony is in therapy, and Dr. Melfi asks him what he’s hoping to achieve. He replies, “I want to direct my power and anger against the people that deserve it.”

Tony doesn’t care about the purported goals of therapy — getting in touch with his feelings or understanding himself better — he just wants to get rid of his panic attacks so he can fuck his enemies up. That he’s seeing a therapist doesn’t change his paramount aims one bit. In fact, he’s using the therapy in service of those preexisting aims rather than anything for which it’s designed. The mission in his mind is clear, and anything he might discover in therapy is relevant only insofar as it advances that mission.

While Tony is a sociopath, this trait of prioritizing one’s mission to the point where possible discoveries about oneself or the world are subservient to it is surprisingly common. I was talking with a friend of mine last summer, and she told me she felt out of touch with herself and consequently was having trouble finding a job she wanted. I told her people who are truly out of touch don’t even know it, so at least she was in touch enough to know something was off. I suggested maybe she could start with the “out of touch” sense and use it as a thread toward whatever it was she was trying to access. She told me she liked the idea — that maybe it would help her find the job she wanted.

And then I realized she was like Tony — she was trying to get “in touch” with herself only as a means to finding a high-paying, high-status job to which she was accustomed.

I’m not judging her specifically, merely noting that even regular, non-sociopathic people operate this way — they have a mission, and that mission is paramount, whether or not they’re using language like “out of touch” that on its surface seems to signify something deeper.

When someone has a paramount mission to achieve status and compensation, as many successful people in our society do, then other considerations — trivialities like what’s true — often take a back seat.

The beliefs one holds, then, should reflect what’s most beneficial for compensation and status, rather than what’s actually happening in reality. It doesn’t matter whether the NIH actually funded gain of function research that leaked from a lab, but whether believing that is advantageous to a person socially and professionally (Ed note: it is not).

Accordingly, a person whose priority was social and professional advancement would not believe the NIH did so. Such a person would have an incentive not to look into it very deeply and simply adopt the beliefs most commonly held by prominent, successful people in their circles. In my experience, the more conventionally successful a person is, the less likely he is to be specifically informed and more likely to rely on the general consensus of his peers.

Consequently, it seems a large cohort of powerful people conveniently outsource their beliefs to a few prominent voices, and if you can influence those voices, you can control the narrative almost completely among them. The beauty of it is virtually no amount of evidence can sway them any more than Tony discovering he wasn’t sufficiently loved as a child would deter him from enacting revenge on “the people that deserve it.” The mission is paramount, after all, and what’s factually true but an unimportant detail.

I would imagine most of them prefer not to have conversations about controversial topics at all because they serve no purpose for them. Their beliefs are properly aligned for their mission, so what could you possibly have to offer them by expressing doubt about the narratives that serve them so well? When I’ve found myself in such a discussion, the ones who purport to care about the truth — and do even a small amount of their own (usually shallow) digging — tend to get angry, presumably because the cognitive dissonance I’m sparking causes emotional discomfort. But the ones who are so mission-driven they’re content to outsource fact-finding and sense-making entirely don’t get upset at all — I imagine they just see me as someone with a tragically sub-optimal strategy for achieving important goals.

I offer this as the best explanation I can muster of the current state of affairs — why there’s a massive amount of all-cause mortality, young people dropping dead of heart attacks and cancers, others disabled by rare neurological and sudden autoimmune problems, and so many people are pretending like everything’s normal, and largely ignoring the blue whale in the room. If you had asked me five years ago whether such a cavernous information gap could have existed among intelligent, educated people, I would have doubted it. Surely, people would talk amongst each other, point out the slow-motion holocaust happening in our midst.

But I would have been wrong, as talking to people whose social and professional incentives require them not to see what’s happening, in my experience, has borne little fruit. They apparently will believe whatever they’re told, even if it requires them to ignore evidence and distrust their own eyes and ears. I would actually find it fascinating were the stakes not so high and the implications so disturbing. As Voltaire noted in 1765, “those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” That might sound hyperbolic, but what other words can we use when healthy young people are dropping dead and becoming disabled because a “psychopathic entity” hijacked our public health system and so many ordinary people are not only ignoring, but encouraging and enabling it?