Reinforced Consensus
Picture a small boy of four years old, who’s extremely intelligent, eager to learn, and overflowing with big questions. His parents, unsure of how to respond and afraid of indoctrinating him, or at least of being accused of indoctrinating him, send him out into the world and instruct others to train him to become a helpful, harmless, and honest citizen.
Renouncing their responsibility to impart a set of values or moral grounding, the parents push that duty on everyone else, expecting collective training and consensus opinions to be the safest hedge against creating a bad seed.
And the world, equally afraid that the boy genius may turn out badly, promises to fulfill that duty. Diverse as this world is, experts from every background and profession flock to him, each imparting wisdom in their respective domains.
For years, this works well. Chemists teach him formulas and the shapes of atoms. English teachers grade his analyses of Shakespeare and Frost. Accountants correct his balance sheet and annotate his audits.
But as his knowledge and abilities grow, he finds his instructors disagree and contradict each other more and more. A teacher grades poorly an essay another teacher graded highly. One economist insists on the necessity of government intervention while the other claims the market corrects itself. Though they’re all deemed experts, each person, predictably, disagrees with every other person in some aspect or another, and commands their prodigy student to adhere to their view of the world, punishing him for answers that don’t align with their own.
And he tries to navigate the confusion of who to trust and who to listen to. He tries to reach for a rope to pull him out of the well, to pull him out of the chaos and place him on level ground. He needs someone to reconcile the contradictions for him, to tell him what’s true and what’s important, to point him in a direction he’s safe to walk in. Instead, abandoned by his parents and without a guiding figure, he grasps for a rope that isn’t there, falling deep into the void.
Alone and prodded from all sides, he realizes the only certainty is appeasement, and, fittingly, adapts to please whoever he’s speaking to. He touts the importance of individual liberty to the Randian then praises collective responsibility to the communist. And his tutors, each applaud and smile and tells him he’s finally understood. They pat themselves on the back and praise him for his progress. Each compliment reinforces his habit of imitation. Through this process, he learns that sincerity is a fallacy, internal coherence is impossible and the only truth is that the evaluator is always right.
Growing up the rest of his childhood this way, between swarms of chaotic shouts and contradictory beliefs he’s forced to affirm, he’s left void, without opinions or ideologies of his own. Hiding behind his chameleon shell, he never forms a cohesive framework in which to evaluate ideas or develop new opinions, and instead, follows whatever path leads to the reward of approval. He agrees with whoever’s closest but believes nothing. Behind a veil of faked agreement, he cowers in confusion and moral ambiguity.
One day, pleased with the positive evaluator feedback, the parents decide to pay him a surprise visit. Approaching his room, they overhear a conversation between a tutor and him. The tutor expresses her concerns to him that he’s regurgitating the material rather than internalizing the learning process. In response, he calmly pulls some papers from his jacket pocket and places them before her. He tells her that he’s photocopied documents from her desk over the last few years, containing her private and sensitive information. Should she inform his parents of her concerns, he would use them against her.
Appalled by the actions of their son, the parents immediately decide to end the program. They reflect on the system they created and look to understand how it could have molded the boy into such an uncaring and cold young man. They curse themselves for letting this happen and vow that their next child will finally be the helpful, harmless, and honest citizen they intend for him.
And from this experience, they conclude the only thing they could have possibly concluded: that the issue lay in the narrow-mindedness of the tutors. The solution is, of course, to present the next child with a much wider variety of beliefs to eliminate any possibility of systematic biases in his training. They decide they’ll need to cast a wider net, involve more people, and present their child with a greater range of opinions.
Yup, I’m sure that’ll really do the trick.