by rachofsunshine | 2025-04-14 14:40:19+00:00
I think this is the wrong framing. They're not trustful or distrustful of authority in some abstract sense. They don't think in those terms. They think in terms of discomfort and of fear. "Is what this person is asking me to do unpleasant for me?" or "is it scary to me, in that it involves something I don't understand or creates uncertainty I can't cognitive-dissonance my way out of?"

Doctors ask you to do things that are unpleasant, involve things you don't understand, and create uncertainty. Your doctor says "hey, your blood pressure is high, you need to eat less salt, but that may or may not solve your problem." If you believe them, you have to measurably damage your quality of life, you have to trust in a bunch of medicine that you don't fully understand, and you now have to worry about whether your health will ever improve (when there is a very real chance that it will not). Or you can go "actually doctors are all quacks and if I just eat Natural Whole Foods(TM) I'll be fine" and have an approach that asks you to do things that make you feel good, fits within an intuitive model of the world, and creates artificial certainty.

In isolation, this isn't new. What is new is that:

- The asks have been unusually unpleasant in recent memory. COVID lockdowns are a particular focal point for a reason: they were psychologically painful and involved a distant and low-probability threat in the minds of most people. (To be clear, I think they were clearly correct policy - but that didn't make them fun.)

- The world is a lot scarier and more uncertain than people are used to, so acknowledging the facts has a higher emotional cost.

- The truth is more muddled than it used to be for most people. They're bombarded with an enormous amount of misinformation. Even if you're good at filtering misinformation and avoid uptake of 90% of it, the 10% that gets through can erode trust. And institutions - while still on balance the best source of information available to a layperson - have been abusing that trust enough that some suspicion is warranted.

- Propaganda is channeled through social connections untraceable to organizations. You might not believe a youtube video if it tells you about chemtrails, but you might believe your friend, who heard it from a friend, who saw it in a youtube video. And algorithmic targeting means you can be served exactly the propaganda that strikes your biases and vulnerabilities.

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The authoritarianism you're talking about, on the other hand, says:

- You should not be asked to do anything new or process the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. In fact, the things you've already been asked to do were unfair and targeted oppression aimed at you.

- The world is scary, just like you feel it is, but in a narrow and controllable way. You have agency over your fear, and a champion who fights for you, and you won't (say) die of a random disease because of a bad roll of the dice.

- The truth is simple: I am telling you the truth, always, and our enemies are telling lies, always.

- You don't need to listen to authorities who are scary and untrustworthy. Just listen to your neighbor or your favorite TikTok creator, who you trust and feel safe around.

In that sense, it doesn't feel authoritarian, because it isn't authoritarian to them. It asks them nothing, and in some cases, less than nothing. It oppresses someone else, asks someone else to sacrifice, removes someone else whose presence may cause cultural discomfort or cognitive dissonance, and promises simple, certain, free solutions. This is why you see people affected by layoffs or tariffs or whatever going "wait, um, there must be some mistake, obviously this couldn't affect me" - that really is what they believe.

That's not to say that there are not very serious problems with the status quo. There are, and that's part of what's fueling these (malignant) solutions.

I made a comment about a month ago [1] that applies again here: the average person is usually good at identifying problems but terrible at identifying solutions. And when the average person has been able to identify problems for decades and institutions have failed to solve them, they're less likely to hold the line against misinformation and mob rule. That goes double when the average person's life has gotten significantly more uncomfortable and scary, reducing their appetite for self-sacrifice in a world that is extracting more and more of their well-being.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43265532