Being wrong feels good

Why information is no match for bigots

Many of today’s most divisive disagreements are explained away as a knowledge gap. Each interlocutor assumes that they’re operating with a better data set. We seem to do this while simultaneously making moral assumptions about our adversary.

The apparent immorality of an interlocutor often feels incongruent with the humanity we know we share. We’re incensed to be engaging with someone who wants us to be wrong—a wrongness we consider would be a blight on our character—while they refuse the information we’re bringing to the table.

A friend may say that a certain country deserved a certain violent attack. We respond by attempting to explain—becoming amateur historians—the many facts they appear to be missing. We suppress an aggravation in the hopes that we may sprinkle little facts like birdseed across the lawn and that our interlocutors may take to our offerings like pigeons.

We assume that a knowledge gap separates the immoral conjecture from the moral one, and that our interlocutor, upon understanding the world a little better, will morally pivot from a justification of October 7 to a quiet, morose recognition of his own bigotry.

Contrary to what the Rabbi or the Priest or the Kantian may insist, morality is socially produced.¹ Good and bad are not designed but mimicked. We recognise patterns of behaviour that come to represent “goodness”, not for their innate qualities but for the assent they receive from those around us.

The knowledge gap we imagine governs bigotry is filled, as it always is, not with facts but with a very human inclination to be as human—as humane—as possible. It is not an incomplete set of knowledge that divides us, but an incomplete appreciation of what constitutes knowledge in the first place.

The amateur historian inside all of us quickly discovers this when his facts are dismissed. We tend to imagine knowledge as something each person holds individually, like a droplet of water resting in the palm of their hand. If we encounter someone whose conclusions trouble us, we assume we might enlarge that droplet—broaden it or deepen it—by pouring some of our own knowledge into their palm, allowing the two to merge.

Knowledge rarely works like this.

Each of us is less an independent holder of knowledge than a node within a broader knowledge system. These systems can exist alongside one another, sometimes running in parallel without meaningful interaction. Your knowledge may be impervious to mine, and my narrative incapable of recognising yours as real.

Knowledge about modern events is most commonly produced not through careful empiricism, objectivity, or research, but through mimicry: word of mouth, social media posts, trusted authorities, and information that maps neatly onto our pre-existing knowledge systems.

Human beings possess a survivalist impulse to appeal to the authority of community sentiment, with far less drive to investigate and falsify the scaffolding that binds us together—especially when that scaffolding is tied to a shared morality. Differences between knowledge systems are therefore debated as differences in morality, supposedly produced by one side’s superior access to information.

Yet we reproduce far more information than we investigate. Existing knowledge is performed into consensus through repetition and affirmation. From the peer-reviewed paper to the liked and shared infographic, we bend over backwards to reinforce what has already been socially accepted. We are not starved of knowledge; we are saturated with it. Our moral standing is often reinforced not by discovering knowledge, but by reproducing it.

To identify a knowledge gap as the most important variable in moral disagreement is therefore to assume that one simply knows more than another. While this may occasionally be true, it is rarely the factor that separates most debates. The more important question is not what one does or does not know, but how—and why—one came to know it.

When this distinction is ignored, bigotry can continue to reproduce itself inside its own chamber of moral certainty. Calling out bigotry as a failure to know what needs knowing cannot disarm the social and psychological forces that sustain it.

To disarm bigotry, one must first identify bigotry as bigotry, rather than dismissing it as a mere misunderstanding. Secondly, one must recognise that misunderstanding as a human frailty rather than a purely informational deficiency. And finally, one must offer the bigot an opportunity to find social and moral comfort beyond the knowledge system that produced the belief in the first place.

History offers countless examples of moral systems that appeared self-evident to those who lived within them. In some parts of the world homosexuality is still treated as disgusting; in others women are expected to live hidden from public life. For most of human history, moral discourse concerned not whether slave ownership was just, but merely the conditions under which one should treat the human beings one had purchased—as though they were livestock.

These systems rarely recognise themselves as such. From the inside, they feel less like social constructions than moral awakenings. Participants often experience themselves not as imitators of a prevailing sentiment, but as independent moral actors who have finally recognised a truth that others refuse to see. The greater the social reinforcement surrounding that conviction, the stronger the sense that one’s position is not merely correct, but morally urgent.

Where I live today, the prevailing moral discourse positions one state as exceptionally evil—often described as uniquely illegitimate—while stigmatising people associated with that nation across the world.

Human beings have always taken comfort in morality as it is handed to them, and great discomfort in moral criticism delivered by those whom prevailing norms harm.

Investigating these impulses is not new. Moral philosophy has accompanied humanity’s search for meaning for as long as such questions have been asked.

But in a world so tightly connected, there has never been such an ironclad grip on human certainty. That certainty is produced not by better knowledge, but by the global accessibility of shared data and shared moral cues—from Antarctica to Azerbaijan, Morocco to the Maldives, New York to Qatar.

It has never been so easy to be so simultaneously certain, wrong, and applauded.

Please consider becoming a paid subscriber for US $1.09/week here.

Or make a direct donation to the groceries account here.

1. I am absolutely open to the argument that morality exists beyond human behaviour, intervention, and intelligibility. The argument being made positions ‘morality’ human consensus—as this is what governs the conversations, behaviour, and laws being discussed.