The Permission Structure for Ignorance

The tariffs debacle is just another scaffold on a broader structure that has been carefully built over the last decade: the permission structure for ignorance.

Expertise is now widely derided, in favour of blind loyalty, bigotry and bluster. Economists can scream blue murder, but it’s fine to ignore them. Because we’re already ignoring experts in climate, vaccination, gender, war, immigration, the list goes on. The permission structure allows us to dismiss expertise, if labeled as ‘woke’, ‘globalist’, ‘deep state’ or ‘fake news’. Everyone with access to the internet has all the information at their fingertips. But it’s all for naught if we’ve been given permission to never seek out anything that challenges our biases and blind spots.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in questioning authority, questioning norms, questioning everything. I believe in lively and fierce debate. But I also believe that we can’t become foot soldiers in the war against expertise. As individuals, we are all at the mercy of the purveyors of information and misinformation: they represent the foundation of this permission structure of ignorance. To have any chance of countering them, we all need to become armchair experts ourselves. Experts in media literacy. Experts in history, lest we neglect its mistakes. And experts in epistemology: the study of knowledge, belief, truth, evidence, and reason.

It’s a massive personal responsibility. But it’s fast becoming the hygiene factor of every social interaction we have.


For the Instagram version, see here.
For the Facebook version, see here.
For the LinkedIn version, see here.