The Marketplace of Ideas is Bullsh*t

Heidegger has entered the chat

Most of this post is free. Thanks for your support.

There’s little doubt we are living in Babel-land. Discourse seems to produce a set of irreconcilable camps more or less shouting at each other, hearing what they want to hear, supporting their teams no matter what, desperately clinging to some hard belief in an attempt to escape madness as history is reaching a breaking point. A look at some of the recent outrage cycles should be enough to make the point: Darryl Cooper questioning aspects of the WWII narrative, Douglas Murray debating Dave Smith over Israel, James Lindsay calling everybody and their grandma “woke right,” someone using the n-word and getting cancelled… All of these dramas have led to rivers of digital ink being spilled on analysis, with little persuasion across the tribes to show for. Clearly, good ol’ “facts and logic” don’t seem to convince anybody to change their tack about anything.

A recent study brings home the point even more dramatically. Researchers in Zürich let loose an AI to argue people out of their opinions on Reddit, comparing how well it does to human posters doing likewise — with depressing results: the most important of which is how rare it really is that someone’s mind is changed, AI or not. Humans were typically able to achieve “conversion” in only 3% of cases. The AI did a better job with a success rate of 9%-18% — still low, but magnitudes higher. What makes this even more depressing is that the AI did not achieve these success rates by brilliantly gathering facts-and-logic and providing sources, but essentially by emotional manipulation: the AI tailored its message to the recipient, pretending to belong to the same group (“as a conservative…”) and adapting its narrative framework accordingly. It also boldly stated unproven facts, hitting its human counterpart with dubious but authoritative and emotionally charged statements instead of well-reasoned arguments. Not a good look. It also drives home that short of emotional sophistry, there is little that can bridge the gap between opposed opinion-groups, and even sophistry rarely succeeds, and is probably not sustainable.

Now, why do we seem to live in different realities, in different thoughtspaces, that are so removed from one another that we’d be excused to question whether we even live in the same dimension? That we even share the same world? There are a few different ways of looking at this.

As regular readers will recognize, one such way is that we all hold background assumptions which guide and limit how we think, what we can think. If one person subscribes to strong background assumptions, whether consciously or not, which another person doesn’t hold, communication about anything touching those assumptions is almost impossible, much less changing the “believer’s” mind. It is therefore a worthwhile exercise to lay bare these assumptions to understand what’s going on in discourse dynamics, as I have attempted in my piece about the so-called “woke right.”

Another way of looking at the issue, based on something I have argued in a previous post, is that language doesn’t quite seem to work like it is often framed today: language is not some sort of logical puzzle where each word corresponds to some external object, which our brains then computationally piece back together. In fact, this might be another one of those pesky unconscious background assumptions, yielding a particular outlook: namely that “facts and logic” can change someone’s mind, and that in the “marketplace of ideas” therefore the best opinion, the one best corresponding to the “facts,” will win out. If language worked like a logical puzzle consisting of true or false atoms, reducible to word units which “evolved” based on our interaction with physical objects, this would make sense: just as we can tell someone is right or wrong if he says “this grass here is green” by looking for ourselves, so it should be possible to “just look” to solve any dispute around more complex issues. But that’s not how language seems to work; and the simple examples philosophers often give (“the grass is green”) are best thought of as limit cases where it appears as if language is purely mediated by the physical. But something else seems to be going on.

Language seems more akin to a mild form of telepathy, or telepathy with crutches, if you will. When we listen to someone or read a text, we seem to instantly grasp the “thought form” whole. It really does feel like a direct transfer of a concept, including a subtext of associated feeling, a sort of shared connection to a subset of the being-cloud. That’s why even a short slang word or a smiley in a text message can carry such enormous meaning: the context puts us into a sort of shared mindspace, a shared thoughtscape, with innumerable connections to concepts, experiences, sensations, ideas and so on. Again, our reductionist background assumptions tell us we should break this all down into simplistic examples and then reconstruct from there what language is all about, but there is no good reason why we should do so: in fact, the complex mode of language seems by far the more interesting phenomenon, and the more prevalent.

Assuming all goes well, then, when using language we transfer complete thought forms quasi-telepathically. But what if not all goes well? Then the language we use points our interlocutor to a different part of the being-space than the one we tried to share. This can be just a misuse of the “telepathy crutch,” as when we don’t make it clear enough what we mean or we use ambiguous language and the like, in which case it’s often easy to rectify the situation: we clarify, therefore helping to connect the other person to the right thought form. However, there can be a deeper issue: what if the other person doesn’t have access to the thought form in question? Then communication can’t succeed. The person may lack the experience to make sense of what we said — experience not just in the sense of having lived through something, but also of having thought certain things, felt certain things while thinking about it, and so on. He therefore can’t channel the information from the cloud, so to speak; it is being that opens us up to that information, and if we lack the being, we will be blocked.

There are different reasons for such a limited state of being, and therefore lack of access to the thoughtscape. An important one is that we may feel so uncomfortable having certain thoughts that we can’t build up the experience of thinking them, which is necessary to get to the level of grasping-whole such ideas when we encounter them. We need to connect to such expressions of the mind by opening a channel, and we do that by allowing our minds to go there.

The problem we are facing here is that there are many ideas that, if true, would threaten the comfort of our preexisting belief system that orients us in the world. What helps, as alien as this concept may seem to many, is that it’s possible to think ideas without assuming them to be true — without agreeing with them. It is a sort of reverse suspension-of-belief: you go to a safe place in your mind, the observer; then you let that particular thought — exploring a certain idea — run in another part of your mind, keeping that super-awareness active in the background. This lets you connect to a previously unknown part of the thoughtspace — the being-cloud (thoughts, feelings and all) — while mitigating the danger of being consumed by it. Once you have it under your belt, you will then be able to whole-grasp this particular thought form later when someone expresses it or even just hints at it.

Such things are very difficult and cause much uneasiness, which is the price we pay for growing our understanding. But it will give us more and better access to the world of thought forms: which is especially important given that many of them are not right or wrong, but options that you can use to judge particular situations and circumstances. Put differently, there are many ideas that are true in some sense, but whose truth in our world depends on the specific context.

Growing your being is growing a mental-emotional-physical toolkit to react to reality unfolding, to produce wise and correct judgments. If you are consumed by one particular tool, one particular idea, you will apply it across the board and miss the mark in most cases; if you don’t have access to it at all because you fear even thinking it, you won’t understand it when others use it, and you can’t use it yourself if reality demands this particular angle, concept or idea. Overtime, this building of your toolkit will lead to a more coherent and integrated being, with a broad horizon from which to draw when confronting the specifics of an ever-dynamic reality. Part of the breakdown of public discourse into irreconcilable islands has to do with so few people being willing or able to do this.

There’s yet another — although related — angle from which to explore why the marketplace of ideas seems so dysfunctional. It also opens up a way to resist the nihilistic nightmare of reducing communication to mere power plays between groups, and rescue the idea of the importance of open and free speech.

*Heidegger enters the chat*

Martin Heidegger’s work is notoriously difficult, borderline incomprehensible, in fact. Anybody but those who get off reading hyper-complex texts, patting themselves on the back for their high verbal IQ as they look down on the peasantry for shaking their heads at it all, will feel much despair when engaging with the man. Yet there is a certain system to the madness: Heidegger seeks to break us out of some of our modern thought habits, which in many ways have built on ancient thought habits. This is what makes it so ambitious and strange.

Our initial impression that the marketplace of ideas fails because people “are living in different worlds” makes intuitive sense, but it is fundamentally incompatible with the modern materialist-physicalist conception of the universe. This view is so ingrained in us that even if we embrace mind-matter dualism, idealism or panpsychism, we still imagine the world as consisting of stuff “out there.” We picture objects, minds, cells etc. swirling around in the universe, doing this or that, having certain properties, interacting. Mentally, we live in “external space.” This is our fundamental ontology, and we can’t help but see it that way even as we try to break out of it.

Heidegger flips the script and tries to get us out of these ingrained patterns. For him, the world isn’t made up of physical things, but of experiences, or phenomena as they are called in phenomenology. This is why Heidegger tortures the reader with his barrage of substantivized artificial-sounding words, of which the German language is very conducive, like “thrownness,” “being-in-the-world” or “readiness-to-hand.” In his radically different way of looking at the world, these are the fundamental building blocks: they are the primary things out there, not atoms or walls or cells or genes or even mind. How we relate to the world is what actually constitutes reality. There is a hidden grammar of relations superimposed on our experience, which he seeks to lay bare. This puts us right inside the cosmos from the perspective of how we live in and relate to reality-at-large as participants, minds operating within the grammatical structure of relations. It forces our imagination to leave the position of abstract observer of the universe, and throws us right in it even as we simultaneously picture it from the outside. We cease, in other words, to be mere dots on the philosophical map, and become beings. Heidegger’s project, then, is the study of being and its conditions.

In light of our discussion about our Babel-esque world of isolated thought islands, Heidegger had this to say about language: “Even when explicitly listening to another person's speech, we first understand that which is being said, or more precisely, we are already with that thing (being) that is being talked about.”¹ What he’s getting at here is that we don’t listen to sounds and cobble meaning together in our brains; rather, our understanding as a primary building block of reality comes first, and this understanding is already with that which is, the experience or phenomenon the speech refers to. Or as he puts it elsewhere: we dont understand because we hear, but “the Dasein hears because it understands.”² Not our ears, or sounds, are what drives our understanding. It’s the other way around: understanding as a building block of reality is what drives ears and sounds. And so we can understand because we are already with that which is understood, as beings in this world.

In other words, language isn’t the medium of our communication; the ground of being is the medium. Hence communication is immediate, transferring reality-chunks connected by a deeper level underwriting our being.

If our understanding depends on us already being there, it’s easy to see why communication seems so powerless at convincing others. In some sense, as many a wise man has figured out, we need to know already what we are to learn.³ That deep convergence of experience needs to be there, a shared world, a shared web of relations. For communication to succeed, it must follow the grammar of being, the landscape of the thoughtspace. We tend to get hung up on words, definitions, statements and their truth values, facts and the like — but all of these matter little if the hidden structures of being put a big invisible roadblock between people.

Before we tie all this together, there is one other Heideggerian idea to consider, the “one” or “they” (German man) as in “one does this or that.” The world of the “they” is basically the lowest common denominator pseudo-ground of being, an artificial floor of existence nourished by low-level interactions, forming the societal background consensus, as it were. In these low-level interactions we don’t really establish a connection to that which is talked about; meaning remains in a state of “hovering” or “float” (Schwebe), without much understanding going on. Such communication is more about nurturing the lowest common denominator state necessary for social life. While playing a useful role, this mode of interaction can also pull us into unquestioned assumptions, into group thinking and blind group allegiance. We may think ideas we encounter in this mode are our own when we really haven’t made them our own, we just absorbed them in a state of “hovering.” This state is why we superficially share a world with all other humans, while on a deeper level, we live in different worlds.

So, what does all that mean for the so-called marketplace of ideas?

If our “thought islands” are not rooted in disagreements about this or that fact, but are grounded in the deeper structure of being and our relative access to it, our unique web of relations within it, clearly an “open marketplace” won’t lead to the best ideas winning out, at least not in the way we usually think. Rather, it’s that differences in being will become apparent over time.

Contrary to what the more left-brain-hemisphere ideas springing from liberalism have us believe, we are not atomized individuals. In fact, this illusion depends on suppression, on keeping us down, on trapping us in Heidegger’s hovering state. In reality, we naturally seek the dreaded “collectivism,” not as some pseudo-collective communist identity or such, but as beings seeking deep connection to the ground of Being, which also means to others sharing that connection, that quest. In fact, we are already connected, and the quest is to actualize this state by moving beyond the superficial “hovering state,” which, while enabling us to share the world with those really living in a different world, presents an obstacle to our quest. What happens when you open up the marketplace of ideas is that these dynamics will manifest, creating different groups talking past each other, for they literally use a different medium of communication even as they use the same words.

We tend to make the world conform to our presuppositions, when it should be the other way around. Hence liberalism, to the degree that it presupposes atomized individuals, wants to make it a reality. When communication is opened and being-groups harden instead of dissolving, it’s therefore natural for liberals to try to suppress discourse, to deplatform, to promote the idea of “expert gatekeepers.”

Now, does this mean the “open marketplace” will neatly sort us into different being-groups, according to the depth of our connection to the ground of being? Not really, unfortunately. Heidegger’s “they”, the not-quite-understood concepts absorbed and proliferated in the “hovering state,” doesn’t just apply to society at large, but to smaller groups, too. So the initial collectivization, the splintering into groups following the opening up of communication, has many superficial elements. Fuelled by our online existence, people find their niches, their corners, their “online communities,” and the dynamics of the hovering state will lead them to absorb certain views as a function of these groups’ social needs and drive towards cohesion. The dreaded tribalization follows — and so, different groups form, believing in different things not as a result of depth-connection, not because their members have made these beliefs their own, but because of social dynamics. It’s just that the “background chatter,” the language hovering in a superficial state leading to superficial cohesion, happens in chat groups instead of at social functions, with much more splintering potential than in the pre-online world. Different groups and “tribes” proliferate.

This general tendency towards tribalization not despite, but because of open discourse, is also what has fuelled the dubious claim that identity and truth itself are just about power: one tribe’s quest to enforce its narrative over others. This analysis is not entirely wrong as an acknowledgement of tribal dynamics, and as an argument against the naive concept of the marketplace of ideas; but it leaves out the differences in depth of our being-connections, and how this medium can mitigate mere power dynamics. Which leaves us with room for optimism.

Paralleling the fundamental duality of morality and being-orientation (see my piece Moral Realism without Obligation), we might see a true convergence of beings according to their depth-connection to the ground of being. In this world of ours, it manifests more as a trajectory than a state. There are those on a path towards being-expansion, while others are headed towards being-contraction. The first are those who at least have the potential to change their minds, to be drawn in the right direction by an open marketplace of ideas. Not necessarily because they are convinced by “facts and logic,” or by emotional manipulation like our poor redditors, but rather by a recognition of shared being. (Facts and logic are still relevant, of course, but it is via a recognition of shared being that we are able to take on board new and difficult facts, not via mere computation.)

Eventually, groups based on superficial cohesion, on Heidegger’s “they,” will bleed and dissolve, while those sharing a deeper ground of being will find each other. It may take time, though, as everything does in our realm.

The “marketplace of ideas” may be bullsh*t, but open communication, free speech, is essential, and it works: just not the way we often think it does.

In the last section, I’ll discuss what all of this might mean practically, and how the framework presented here can help us make sense of and deal with the Babel-like cacophony we’re subjected to on a daily basis.

Become a paid subscriber to unlock the rest — and to support my work here! Thank you all.