The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

by Martin Gurri

People on the left believe that science is a tool of Big Business,

For people on the right, science has become the handmaiden of Big Government, raising climate and environmental scares to justify the imposition of ever more restrictive political controls over every aspect of life.

The revelations in the CRU emails likely drove the public one more step down a path in which its perception of science and the scientist have been radically transformed.

The failure of the scientist to live up to his exalted image has eroded the legitimacy of his position, I suspect to a fatal extent.

the deep conflict between the public and authority is not merely political but total. No established institution has been forgiven, not even science, once the most revered.

The public, in command of the information sphere, has found corruption everywhere at the Center, and has wielded its new persuasive power to attack the legitimacy of every authoritative institution. The criminalization of scientific error was just one clash in this war of the worlds.

Lehman Brothers

went bust. In the economic carnage that followed, the expert and political elites betrayed astonishing levels of cluelessness, and did so at center stage, where the whole world could see.

trust in economic experts had vanished, probably forever.

governments craved control, and the experts, in exchange for a place in the hierarchy, offered to demonstrate how it could be imposed.

The expert-bureaucrats who staffed these agencies made specific claims of competence. They held that the vast throng of amateurs involved in economic activity regularly succumbed to a disorder John Maynard Keynes had labeled “animal spirits” and Greenspan called “irrational exuberance.”

2008.

Every institution in the system failed catastrophically,

a total bankruptcy of the elites—only the public paid the bill.

Warnings about a housing bubble abounded before the fall, but the people who voiced them had been ignored or marginalized.

Barack Obama’s election to the presidency offered this class one last chance at redemption.

The experts in the new administration, it turned out, had performed no better than their discredited predecessors.

The failure of the elites in 2008 took place before the bewildered eyes of the public. A feeling of betrayal, of having been lied to, thus compounded the general fearfulness about the future. Of course, the public had connived in the impossible expectations heaped on the expert-bureaucrats. The public assumed that someone would be in control, demanded that the institutions of prosperity function smoothly, but left the dirty details to the machinations of the Center. Few complained during the fat years, but when the crack-up came, an unconquerable sectarianism shielded the public from any sense of responsibility, and allowed it to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the people in authority.

The expert-bureaucrat had been discredited and dethroned. The alternative to the expert, however, was always another expert:

my dilemma is how to square the revolt of the public and the crisis of the institutions with the apparent survival of capitalism.

Anti-capitalism was never an alternative to capitalism. It was another path to negation—when pushed hard enough, to nihilism.

The prosperity of Tyson’s Galleria, and of similar gilded places all over the globe, indicates that the public in revolt hasn’t been notably anti-capitalist, anti-business, or even anti- any particular corporation, no matter how unpopular or powerful.

The public has imposed a single all-important demand on business, the same as it has done on government, politicians, educators, media, and service providers: that every transaction treat the customer as a person, with active tastes and interests, rather than as a passive and undifferentiated member of a mass.

Companies which cater to idiosyncratic tastes have flourished.

Amazon,

Starbucks,

innovation has caused an atomization of demand, and atomized demand has driven ever faster rates of innovation in nearly all fields of economic activity.

the flood of innovation

something resembling an extinction event for individual corporations.

In the current environment, as I understand it, businesses have proved no wiser, more far-seeing, or successful than other institutional actors. But capitalism, as a whole, has made more productive use of the failure of its parts than most institutions under assault by the public. To borrow Taleb’s terminology, capitalism appears to be “antifragile”: it “regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.”

If the question is whether the individual corporation stands in a similar relation to the mutinous public as do all the hierarchies of the Center, the answer must be, “It sure looks that way.”

The heart of the matter is structural. Today’s companies were organized for the industrial age.

if certainty is a function of authority, then a symptom of authority’s decline will be a radical and generalized uncertainty surrounding important questions.

According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore.

This state of affairs invites counter-revolution by the established order. Again and again, in subject after subject, accredited experts have attempted to regain control over the levers of epistemic closure.

At every opportunity, institutional actors attacked the public on the grounds of its uncertainty: for example, the public stands accused of cocooning into a daily me, of conducting a “war on science,” of indulging in unprecedented partisanship, and more. Such nagging gives the game away. The counter-revolution of the authoritative elites has floundered, because the elites are themselves tormented by that terrible splinter of doubt.

You would expect, in a time of ...

the most trivial assertions to be attended with much noise and thunder: absent authority, every message must be shouted to have a hope of being heard. Stridency will infect every mode of communication, but will be most disruptive of political rhetoric. Just to keep an audience, politicians and commentators will have to scream louder and take more aggressive positions than the competition.

a second symptom: impermanence.

our relationship to technology.

Now, it’s about the capacity to absorb open-ended change.

You would expect the loss of a stable existence on earth to drive a search for fixity on a higher sphere. If this is the case, a rise in the appeal of fundamentalism will testify to the experience of impermanence.

Uncertainty and impermanence are symptoms of social life under the conditions of the Fifth Wave.

The previous chapter extended my hypothesis to virtually every domain of human activity and every exercise of authority once considered legitimate. The conflict, I maintain, is everywhere. Particular skirmishes, like Tahrir Square and Climategate, are what philosophers call “epiphenomena,” surface effects rather than causes, the crack and rumble of a dissolving glacier. Underneath these events, and far more consequential, has been the strange reversal in the relationship of the public—ordinary people who are interested in an affair—and the elites.

Most pressing, in my view, is the evolution of democracy in an atmosphere made toxic with negation and distrust.

Democratic governments have failed, and have been perceived to fail. Their replacements, too, have failed, and have been perceived to fail. Individual political figures have been discredited and discarded, but at some point the entire system must become implicated in failure—the cumbersome machinery of representative democracy will then appear, to those impatient for change, as part of the reason for failure.

Government can only be said to fail relative to its own claims or the public’s expectations. If democratic governments really have failed with increasing frequency—as I maintain they have—then the balance between claims, expectations, and reality has somehow gotten out of whack.

The rhetoric of democratic politics seems to have gotten out of whack with the reality of what democratic governments can achieve:

From the perspective of the reflexive negations of our own times, it seems surprising how completely the news media bought into the president’s terms. No member of the White House press corps mocked the fiction of non-intervention. No secret documents were published in the press exposing the depth of CIA involvement in the Cuba operation. Few if any media voices were raised to object that the secrecy blackout was politically self-serving.

A Gallup poll taken two weeks after the incident gave him an 82 percent approval rate, a 10 percent improvement over the previous poll. “The worse I do, the more popular I get,” Kennedy joked.