Is Our Knowledge System Collapsing?

The thesis is so extravagant and so encompassing that we are tempted to dismiss it. Ted Gioia, a music critic, as it happens, has written a screed for the Free Press. His thesis is that what he calls the knowledge system is collapsing all around us. Of course, it is not very clear what the knowledge system is, and it is certainly not clear what will replace it. 

Roughly speaking, Gioia suggests that work involving thought, especially work involving big thought, has failed. For reasons I do not need to detail the prestige of the academia and the media have collapsed. From the notion that everyone should learn to code to the simple fact that more and more supposedly scientific studies cannot be replicated, one concludes that the public confidence in people who work with their minds and who manipulate symbols has disappeared.

After all, in whom do you have more confidence? A professional plumber or a gender studies major. Haven’t you been struck by the fact that a certain politicians are married to the notion that reality is what we say it is, that it has no basis beyond our ability to manipulate other people’s minds.

And then, when the building collapses or the city goes up in smoke, knowledge workers never take responsibility for what went wrong. They always blame someone else.

At that time, ethics becomes disparaged and dismissed.

Take another example-- what is more important: a better engineered product, one that people will buy and use and recommend, or a better marketing campaign, better advertising and better control over the public mind?

So, it appears that a certain segment of the intellectual world has been at war with reality, especially with empirical reality and facts. And you might suggest that its success has been its downfall. 

As we see in today’s Los Angeles, the flagrant lie-- about demonstrations being mostly peaceful-- being peddled by California politicians has discredited them and has exposed them as deceivers. 

Of course, those who promote such lies and who want to control your mind will never admit to their subterfuge. Reality checks are not dispositive for people who believe that reality is what you think it is. 

The goal of this idealistic delirium is quite simply to produce a new international order based on the notion that people will cohere for thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings and believing the same beliefs.

It all involves producing a form of social cohesion that does not require communities and especially nation states. It is Platonism, updated and gussied up. But it is straight-up idealism, based on the premise that reality is what we think it is, and that it has no existence beyond our belief systems. Whatever do you think that transmania is about if not the attempt to force you to think that reality is merely a question of belief?

Gioia is doubtless correct to see it all as a knowledge system. We should add that it is reconstituted Platonism, where ideas prevail over reality. And that means, the system is instituted and granted authority by a motley crew of philosopher kings. They tell you what to think, how to think and what to do about it.

If Gioia is right the system is, I would say, fragile. Since you cannot prove or disprove the truth value of ideas you are obliged to take it on faith. And you will continue to do so until bad things happen and you need some serious help.

Once you run out of excuses for failure, once the evidence of failure is simply too flagrant to ignore, the system will break down. If you tire of substandard construction you will start to ignore those who have the most grandiose theories about how to build things and will look for a good contractor.