Right, for the Wrong Reasons

How the Dissidents got it so Right

The Simpsons, 1993, Season 4, Episode 21 “Marge in Chains” aka “Osaka Flu”

As the train-wreck of public health policies pile up all around us, the covid dissidents are being validated every day.

Naturally the consensus ideologues have been working themselves into a pretzel trying to defend their half decade of covid hysteria. It seems everywhere I turn I hear some version of: “Although you may have been right about [...X*...] you didn't have the data or the expertise, therefore you made the wrong decision.”

Sam Harris’ took up this argument in a 2023 podcast to explain away the shifting ‘consensus.’ He begins:

“given this situation [that the facts weren’t all in] the most responsible thing to do…was to defer to whatever consensus we could find among experts.”

Sounds reasonable on it’s face, but scratch the surface and you’ll see it’s disingenuous. For starters, there are inherent contradictions, namely that regardless of the point in time, the people and the ‘experts’ were working with nearly the same amount of available data. It obfuscates the central question, Can independent health decisions arrive at positive outcomes?

The episode might be old news, but the argument is worth examining. I believe it persists in the public arena because it plays a vital role defending the establishment’s crumbling worldview.

Although the rationalizations can be painful at times, you can listen to Sam Harris’ entire line of reasoning in episode:

#256 of Making Sense entitled "A Contagion of Bad Ideas"

or later in episode

#335 “A Postmortem on My Response to Covid”

where to his credit he updates some of his positions on covid.

Remarkably however, he insists that although he was wrong, he made the right decisions and although the dissidents were right, they couldn’t have known they were right, therefore they made the wrong decisions.

He goes on to say:

”The people who were against school closures in 2020, given what we know was happening in Italy and what we didn’t know about the virus, were wrong. Those people were against everything. It doesn’t matter that they were eventually proven right about school closures, they weren’t reasoning on the basis of real health information. They were just recoiling from intrusion of the government into their lives and as far as I can tell there is no clear lesson to draw from our experience with school closures at this point. Because it turns out that the SARS COV-2 virus is unusual. Most flus and other infectious illnesses are worse for kids. So what should we do at the start of the next pandemic when the epidemiology of the virus is poorly understood? It seems almost certain that we should close the schools again.”

Here he thumbs his nose at dissidents who couldn’t possibly have thought their positions through. I don’t think this is important because Sam Harris believes it. It’s significant because it is the pervasive cultural belief of the establishment class. It’s the same frame as censorship. Or anti-populism. Or totalitarianism. ‘Those people over there are a blight on our perfect system.’ From their perspective You don’t get to be right, even when you’re right, because you’re not an expert. And if you’re an expert in the field and you disagree, well it’s clear you’re outside the consensus and so you’re off our list of approved experts.

Set aside the moral implications of this kind of thinking, it is clearly politically self serving. It gives consensus dispensers like Sam a hall-pass to wrestle themselves into a corner with conflicting data points and they get to be wrong again and again and again. cUz ExPerTS. But you don’t get to be right about anything.

Ugh.

This basic value system places power over principle. It’s clear how useful that is to anyone in power, but it’s also obvious there are trade-offs which are unevenly distributed by design. When power is primal, than every line of reasoning, every narrative and every policy decision exists to support the establishment. The ‘information mediated by experts’ argument sidelines truth by creating an architecture that is conveniently non-falsifiable. By ‘appealing to information’ in the form of data that is forever updating, claims can’t be pinned down while the truth remains forever on the horizon. When the data clearly doesn’t support the argument - as was the case with masking or lock-downs - an appeal to authority moves the goalpost just out of reach, carving out a lane for the sanctioned expert class to intermediate everything.

Did it end badly? Did you get covid anyway? ‘Just be grateful it wasn’t worse’ they say. And so it’s always the best outcome. Today it’s pandemic risk, tomorrow it’s the complexities of carbon backed securities and your meat ration.

That is not to say that we shouldn’t update with new information or lean on bona fide experts to help us sense-make. Of course we should. But this process must be tethered to the unchanging substance that makes up reality, truth. Truth is not a concensus. It can be verified on a fundamental level on principle.

What the establishment means by consensus is their will and whatever data or whichever experts support their will. The consensus pile-up that we trip over every day is the corruption of our institutions propped up by corruption in our reasoning. We might reject their data on this or that, and even reject their obvious phony experts like Anthony Fauci who will flip flop like a wind sock to support the narrative of the day, but if we accept their phony line of reasoning we are bound to confuse ourselves into accepting their less obvious contradictions.

Personally, I don't care to “be right.” That’s not what’s at stake for me and I don’t believe that’s what’ at stake for the covid dissidents I know, who are working so hard at this thing. What I think we all want to know is that our institutions are capable of making the right decisions. We want to believe that our culture is at minimum attempting to follow a rational line of thinking. But most importantly we want to know that when we err our society has the ability to learn from it’s mistakes.

This has not been true for covid or the ‘thought leaders’ of the establishment’s public health narratives like Sam Harris. Almost 5 years on it’s clear they will tire us out with their mental gymnastics rather than cede one inch of turf they staked out long before their own data was in. They’ll claim that because most people couldn’t work through the 15+ years of published research on coronavirus, mRNA or MERS, SARS etc they had to sign-on to the insane policies of covid.

But what Sam and others in the 'right-for-the-wrong-reasons' camp get so wrong, is that the dissidents were operating with a set of tools more foundational than ‘data’. They correctly understood that some things must be decided on principle and that is “the right decision for the right reason.” No amount of shifting risks to column A and benefits from column B will change that.

This begs the question, ‘What did the dissidents know that enabled them to get it so right? ‘

Simply put, they zeroed in on principles.

There were contradictions you could clearly see in 2021 that were independent of the data. The most unsettling was the claim the mRNA ‘vaccine’ was ‘safe and effective'. It was a brazen claim. And it was repeated like a mantra. But no matter how many times it was incanted on television, from the podium or preceding journal articles, it couldn’t align with itself. The mRNA technology was either a technological marvel so 'novel' as to require 'emergency use authorization' or it was proven to be “safe and effective”. It could not be both a known quantity and an unknown quantity at the same time. The fact that the definition of vaccine would be changed in real time to support a marketing campaign didn’t stir up any confidence among the dissidents either.

The second tell was the irrational institutional response. Our worldwide centrally coordinated action plan went against our own rules derived from all previous pandemics. For no apparent reason we did the exact opposite of what our emergency plans called for. This “plan” demolished the precautionary principle. The restrictions, lack of transparency and fierce authoritarian demands were all gilded with empathy and delivered with fear. None of it could stand up to the most gentle application of the scientific method.

The claims simply didn’t add up. The oddities of the whole thing struck a dissonant chord with scientists. Yet rather than explore the unknown, the curious were silenced, and remarkably still are. We can all remember the cardinal sin of inspiring ‘vaccine hesitancy’ with oh-the-horror…questions.

Public intellectuals like Sam Harris bullied people who questioned authority, while the authorities doled out the most absurd advice. You didn’t need “expertly curated answers” if you knew the ‘experts’ had no appetite for questions. This alone could tell you everything you needed to know about the quality of their advice.

The most telling feature of our pubic health response however, must have been the use of coercion to elicit complete obedience to a one-size-fits-all solution. We saw this all throughout the pandemic. Fear was exploited with abandon. Individual risk was not considered. We had found ourselves in the midst of a grand Milgram experiment and most people, scientists included, went along for the ride.

These are just a handful of examples where applying logic and basic principles to the problems of the pandemic predicted the right outcomes. All of this is wholly independent of ‘carefully curated expert advice’ or ‘approved information”. I am positive we could come up with dozens more.

These claims rubbed so many the wrong way, not because they were feeling rebellious, but because the authorities were making claims that flew in the face of reality, and logic and basic scientific principles. The most significant covid policies ignored integrity of knowledge, honesty, objectivity, and openness; all of the features of truly curious discovery. Science was bastardized and moulded into a cudgel. Dates shifted, origins were cloudy, there was an enormous effort to silence anyone who questioned the very dubious claims about risk and reward. It only added fuel to the fire that politicians, bureaucrats and the media were all in perfect lockstep with one another for the first time, ever, on anything. Special knowledge was not required. Applying basic principles told us something was fundamentally wrong.

The experience of covid - the contradictions, the authoritarianism and especially the unwillingness to update - has been profoundly revealing. It has given us a deeper understanding of the nature of our culture, the culture of our institutions and the quality of the people who make up our institutions. It tells us something about the way we reason.

The dissidents who recognized the conflicts between principles and ‘approved data’ and acted accordingly understood the value of principles. They refused to throw caution to the wind and instead took great risk to share their findings. They chose the interest of humanity over authority, and in doing so earned their authority in that moment. Anyone who gave up their plum job, office suite, salary, tenure, podcast ratings or social standing to say what they believed to be true, became the de facto compass heading for reality.

This reorientation has had enormous consequences for our culture. Despite the billion dollar marketing campaign to bolster the official narratives, in 2020 the people began to slowly withdraw their trust from those who abused it and transfer it to those leaders, and doctors and scientist who said the right thing when it cost the most. From my point of view this was the beginning of a slow moving but inevitable forced system update. The only question the establishment players should be asking themselves today is whether they make room for the dissident thinkers who were proven right, or whether they make room for new institutions.

This has not been - as Sam Harris and others in the establishment would have you believe - a knuckle dragging knee jerk reaction to authority. It is simply principled people staring down the swivelling head of logical fallacies - appeal to information and appeal to authority. The covid dissidents claimed intellectual sovereignty by betting on their ‘knowns’ over the consensus’ ‘unknowns’. It was a bet on principles over fear and as it turns out, it was a damn good bet.

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