Why did anyone think the “marketplace of ideas” would work?
The concept relies on the assumption that good ideas will outcompete bad ideas because people know good ideas when they see them. Just like the market evolves the best smartphone, it can also develop the best possible ideas.
It essentially posits a kind of system on top of normal human interactions, a bit like the blockchain. When you ask who is in charge, no one is in charge: the system is in charge. It’s like a perpetual motion device that is coherent and orderly but not governed.
This could not be further from the truth.
To see why, consider this question seriously: was Joseph de Maistre correct when he said sovereignty, like energy, is always conserved? If this is true – and I think his analysis has never been violated – then there is always someone in power, which means the entire concept of the “marketplace of ideas” is absurd on its face.
The key failure of the “marketplace of ideas” is that it can easily be perverted into becoming something that generates bad ideas. Another word for this might be “hacked”, which is when a machine is told to do something its designers never intended. Is the “marketplace of ideas” an unhackable system? Absolutely not.
The first way it can be hacked is through coercion. In this system, if a person publishes ideas that the information minister doesn’t like, the police will come to their house and beat them up. The precise selective pressure is: “speech that angers the minister is strongly selected against.” This makes the marketplace not one that filters good from bad ideas, but that filters ideas which are pleasing to the minister from ones that are displeasing.
The second way is through reward, or by using positive feedback. So an information minister will subsidise the institutions of media she likes (never forget that Orwell wrote 1984 after working at the BBC). This is the pre-modern way of hacking a marketplace of ideas. It’s ugly and it doesn’t really have legs. But that’s not the way the world works today.
The third way is through decentralised reward. Concretely, this means the state is leaking information and influence. When leaking information, that means things are coming out of the government through a hole that is not the front door. The state also leaks influence, since the pattern of the 20th century oligarchy was to move core functions, like deciding what is true and what should be done, outside the state to institutions like universities and think tanks. Specifically, this means moving decisions away from democratic control.
And where do the “leaks” go? To the press. In other words, there is no such thing as investigative journalism. All stories arrive on a journalist’s desk in the form of “tips”. Sometimes these are short emails and sometimes the package is an 800-page classified document. Either way, the best way to think about “leaks” is as an alternative form of subsidy. In a world obsessed with money, no one notices the corruption of “leaking” information to a media outlet, rather than to everyone at once.
The reason no one notices is because a decentralised reward system is actually remarkably stable (at least in a world without the internet, which tends to route around traditional information flows). After all, the number one purpose of government agencies is not to get bad press. However, as soon as this mindset is adopted, it shifts control of what government agencies can and can’t do to the press. It’s only a very small step from there to treating the media as a government agency.
Let’s make this a bit simpler. I’d say about two-thirds of all information in the first half of a NZ Herald newspaper is information stolen (sorry, “leaked”) from the government and sold to you, the subscriber. The NZ Herald cannot be competed with or replaced because its name makes it a quasi-governmental institution. A normal blogger doesn’t have the right to sell “leaked” information from the government and will be prosecuted if they try it. The NZ Herald only pretends to be a publicly listed company.
But let’s imagine you had a magic wand that turned the NZ Herald into a government branch called the Department of Information. The newspaper isn’t called the NZ Herald anymore, it is called The People’s Newspaper #1.
You would quickly realise that its role was simply to print the official opinions of those in power. Everyone in the government must listen to it. The paper decides what is true. In other words, it is not just “a” government agency, it is “the most powerful government agency.” The NZ Herald is essentially an inter-departmental memo service for the government, a way for messages to be sent efficiently without violating any laws. Even people in the business world use it for that purpose.
This is how the “marketplace of ideas” can be hacked under a decentralised reward system. Power is leaking into it like nutrients leaking into a lake. In such a polluted marketplace, ideas that are powerful and make you feel powerful are attractive for anyone who wants to “change the world.”
What flourishes in this polluted marketplace are not the best ideas but what the great Italian political scientist Gaetano Mosca called “political formulae” – whatever people think that ends up supporting the powers that be. If you are in Ancient Egypt and support the Pharaoh because if he forgets to do his rituals the sun will go out, that’s a political formula. Today, you might support the Labour Party because Black Lives Matter.
To be effective, a formula must have an emotional appeal. No one is questioning exactly how the sun will go out or what, exactly, the Labour Party will do for a particular group of people. The formula is: feeling good equates to supporting power. The maths always works. In a polluted “marketplace of ideas,” rulers will make you feel powerful in exchange for supporting them. Any idea that flourishes will have both characteristics.
If an article in the NZ Herald makes you feel angry or energised, understand that you are consuming a narrative which is coming from sources who work in the government. These tentacles of power spread all the way through government and quasi-government institutions and into our intellectual bloodstream. Black Lives Matter, for instance, is an insanely superficial political formula but it also means every suburban housewife can feel important and meaningful by going on a bike ride to support black lives. Do you see?
So what does this tell us about the “marketplace of ideas”? Do the ideas that are true, good and right have an advantage in this marketplace? They absolutely do. But it also tells us that in a polluted marketplace, ideas that are powerful, thrilling and meaningful have a much bigger advantage.
There’s a great book called Public Opinion by Walter Lippman which said the quiet part out loud, that the only way to rule people is with propaganda. Lippman outlined how the future of power was intellectual power which meant psychological power over people’s minds by telling them stories that make them do what you need them to do. He wanted to create a Platonic Guardian class.
Even though great stress was taken to design a system that no one was able to coerce, Lippman’s plan involved decentralising all the government agents. Now there are thousands of media outlets and universities in the West, but they all agree with each other as if they were part of the same Department of Information. They get grants but there’s no top-down coordination. And yet they are on the same page about everything. Maistre was right all along.
The thing is, this coordination is not a purely organic process. Some people know how this game works. For example, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, the first of the robber tycoons to fall in with the Progressive movement, decided to support legitimate US universities by giving every professor a pension for free. Philanthropy was the gateway to power because it let Carnegie decide what a legitimate university was. Good for him, but it kicked off a series of tighter and tighter squeezes on the “marketplace of ideas” until people began to be cancelled for thinking.
What annoys me about all this “cancel culture” stuff today is that people genuinely believe this problem started in 2010. No way. That analysis is off by two orders of magnitude. “Cancel culture” assumes there is a pure reservoir that drains down into the filthy orgy and stables of power. It assumes the “marketplace of ideas” cannot be influenced by information and power leaking from the state when of course it can be and obviously is.
But it all works fine if people keep believing that “cancel culture” is the main problem. After all, if the university/press cartel can convince its enemies that the problem they need to solve to defeat it is two orders of magnitude smaller than it actually is, then the cartel doesn’t need to do anything else.
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