Jonathan Haidt on the Functioning of the Prestige Economy in Monomaniacal Ideologies

Discussion

Jonathan Haidt:

"Individual monomania is rarely a social problem. One person who is obsessed with butterflies or with a particular celebrity, or who sees everything in sexual, economic, or religious terms, is just an eccentric, although sometimes a tiresome one. The monomaniac may suffer a constricted range of emotions and experiences, but she usually imposes no costs on others (although there are cases of celebrity stalkers and lone-wolf terrorists). It is collective or group monomanias that are more worrisome for liberal societies because they create many negative externalities: They cause large numbers of people to behave in ways that are harmful and unjust to others. I’ll focus on two specific group-level effects of monomanias: making groups illiberal and making groups stupid.

1) Monomania makes groups illiberal.

The word “liberal” is a shape-shifting term in political discourse, but if we free it from the idiosyncratically American idea that “liberal” means “left” and focus on its core link to liberty, then dictionary definitions line up with common sense. Oxford Languages defines the adjective “liberal” as:

   1. willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas.

   2. relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.

In theory, one could be a liberal monomaniac—obsessed with a celebrity or an intellectual paradigm but perfectly willing to let everyone else have their own obsessions, or no obsessions. But moral and political monomaniacs generally travel in self-policing groups, and these groups are rarely liberal according to either of the two Oxford definitions. If you and your friends believe that everything is about power, and that the world is divided into the powerful people (who oppress others) and the powerless (who are oppressed), then you have a moral obligation to do something about it—all the time.

The “prestige economy” is the network of values and meanings within which people compete for status. In monomaniacal groups, the prestige economy rewards those who are most committed to the object of devotion, which has two major illiberal effects. The first is the “expansion imperative”—the pressure to apply the one true lens ever more widely. For example, one can gain points by interpreting glacier research and dog parks as manifestations of power structures. The insistence that the lens applies everywhere means that the preferred remedies must be implemented everywhere. This expansion imperative can explain the otherwise astonishing statement on page 18 of Ibram Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist”:

   There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.

In other words, if a high school teaches chemistry without discussing race, it is not “nonracist,” it is racist. True believers exert pressure on the leadership of the school to bring race into every part of the curriculum, and anyone who expresses doubt or raises concerns risks being publicly shamed and possibly fired. Monomanics sometimes demand that their focal value be installed as the telos of every organization.

This brings us to the second major illiberal effect: the incentivization of intimidation and cruelty. Within a group of people competing for prestige on adherence to a belief, one can often gain points by publicly attacking outsiders. This creates an incentive for individuals in the group to attack not just their enemies, who are often out of reach, but innocent people who happen to be nearby. This dynamic may account for the cruelty with which power monomaniacs turn on professors and administrators who try to help them, or who otherwise share their political views but not their monomania. The threat of job loss and reputational damage make everyone else walk on eggshells, and this fearful attitude is incompatible with the success of a liberal society.

2) Monomania makes groups stupid.

In a 2009 TEDx talk titled “Be suspicious of simple stories” the economist Tyler Cowen warned that stories impose a structure on events that distorts them and blinds us to the distortion. He was particularly concerned about moralistic stories that divide the world into good and evil. He proposed that “as a simple rule of thumb, just imagine that every time you’re telling a good versus evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more.”

As a social psychologist who studies moral judgment and motivated reasoning, I think Cowen is exactly right—for individuals. Binary thinking makes it hard for individuals to understand the nuance and complexity of most situations. For groups, I’d put the cost closer to 20 IQ points. Shared moralism creates a mutual policing effect that prevents the group from thinking well or changing its mind in response to new evidence. (Please note: I am not calling any person stupid. I am saying that smart people create stupid groups when they bind themselves together in a monomaniacal community.)

In 1859, John Stuart Mill laid out the case that we need critics to make us smarter, and that we should have no confidence in our beliefs until we have exposed them to intense challenge and have considered alternative views:

   ...the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it.

On Mill’s account, monomaniacal groups are unwise. They react strongly and sometimes violently to those who ask questions or present alternate views, which are said to be “dangerous” and even “violent.” In 2014, a young Canadian queer activist wrote an essay titled “‘Everything Is Problematic’: My Journey Into the Centre of a Dark Political World, and How I Escaped.” The author described the operation of “sacred beliefs”:

   If someone does question those beliefs, they’re not just being stupid or even depraved, they’re actively doing violence. They might as well be kicking a puppy. When people hold sacred beliefs, there is no disagreement without animosity.

By abolishing the right to question, a monomaniacal group condemns itself to holding beliefs that are never tested, verified, or improved. We might even say that monomaniacal groups are likely to be wrong on most of their factual beliefs and their diagnoses of the problems that concern them. And if they are wrong on basic facts and diagnoses, then whatever reforms they propose to an institution are more likely to backfire than to achieve the goals of the reformers.

In the early 2010s, I believed that a major problem in the academy was that there were too few professors in the social sciences and humanities who were not on the political left. I still think that’s true, but that slow-growing trend can’t explain why things changed so suddenly around 2015.

Now, I believe that the change in the academy—and many other professions—is the result of power monomania amplified by new technology. There has been a power monomania in some parts of the university since at least the 1990s, but there were disciplinary walls that kept the monomania contained. What happened in departments that emphasized activism had little effect on the physics department, or on the president of the university. But those walls collapsed around 2015. I have argued elsewhere that the collapse was brought about by changes to social media that began in 2009 and, by 2012, had created a universal outrage machine. This machine then dissolved the long-standing and essential walls around professions within which a sense of disciplinary standards and duties had, in prior decades and centuries, been formed and passed on.

Without these professional boundaries, every place became like every other place, influenced by the anger expressed on Twitter and other platforms. This is why my conversations with leaders are so often the same: A politically progressive leader, knowing that I have written about the new dynamics on campus, bitterly recounts to me her bewilderment and frustration about how her younger employees made escalating demands backed by public accusations and a presumption of ill will, thereby damaging the organization’s reputation, culture, and ability to achieve its mission.

I want to be clear that monomania is not just a problem on the far left. On the far right, we have seen communities becoming illiberal and stupid by following monomaniacs obsessed with communism, homosexuality, religion, immigration, and the national debt. But to return to the problem I encountered on my five-college book tour, I think that professors and leaders of educational institutions have a fiduciary duty toward their students that requires them to oppose monomania and lead students out of its stultifying embrace. A liberal arts education should expand minds and prepare students for citizenship in a liberal democracy, particularly in our era when the future of liberal democracy is so much less assured than it was just a decade ago."

(https://www.persuasion.community/p/haidt-monomania-is-illiberal-and?)