We’re Addicted to the Feeling of Being Right

We live in a time of large-scale democratic reckoning, coupled with crumbling trust in public institutions and their elite functionaries. More people will cast electoral votes in 2024 and 2025 than at any other moment in human history: a so-called super-cycle election event that involves sixty-four sovereign nations around the planet—including India and the United States, most of Europe, and dozens of nations many people would struggle to locate on a map—accounting for 49 percent of the total global population. Together, these countries control most of the combined natural resources, financial power, and military hardware of the entire human project.

The results of this great tallying of political desire are, naturally, beyond any single person’s assessment. The many millions of votes being cast might also take years to show their genuine effect in public policy, cultural attitudes, and geopolitical shifting. But despite the obvious display of popular will, or maybe simply because of it, this is not a moment to feel much reassurance about the future of liberal democracy or transnational justice—what we might call the cosmopolitan dream. There are dark signs of rising right-wing authoritarianism everywhere, mobilization in rich nations against the flow of migrants, and entrenchment of economic disparity. Existential threats, meanwhile—from climate disaster, artificial intelligence, and old bogeys like nuclear war and fundamentalist rage—are the background noise of news feeds, doomscrolls, and the incessant demands of everyday life.

But elections are only a necessary condition of democratic accountability, not yet sufficient to the goals of genuine legitimacy. The challenges of global life also demand responsible, transparent institutions with effective regulatory controls. Until we decide to offload the work of such institutions to non-human agencies—a dangerous tendency—these systems will be staffed and controlled by imperfect humans. If the systems require expertise to function effectively, the granting of influence to such experts must be based on their reliable qualities or credentials. Trust works, in large measure, on assumptions about who people are, not just what they do before our eyes. We trust because we cannot observe and judge everything ourselves.

This becomes harder as the tasks of shared human aspiration and global survival become more decentralized, even as partisan differences show up more and more vividly. The presence of affective polarization in democratic nations has grown perceptibly since the turn of the millennium. This is the term political scientists use to describe negative feelings about political opponents. “Affective” because it is a matter of feeling: that the other side is not just divergent in views but beyond redemption, perhaps insane or evil. Actual policy differences may be less stark, but that does not matter when demonization of the other is the order of the day. People vote with their feelings. More drastically, they shape their worlds to fit those feelings. Division is as division does.

What today’s fraught circumstances urgently need, then, are the same countermeasures that societies have always required and, unfortunately, too often lack: trustworthy authority and leadership. When authority is absent, trust is impossible—and vice versa.

A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 75 percent of Americans perceived a shrinking of trust in government, while 64 percent saw the same shrinkage of trust between citizens. Those numbers got worse over the pandemic years and are no better now. Citizens “see fading trust as a sign of cultural sickness and national decline,” the study’s authors noted. “Some also tie it to what they perceive to be increased loneliness and excessive individualism. About half of Americans (49 percent) link the decline in interpersonal trust to a belief that people are not as reliable as they used to be. Many ascribe shrinking trust to a political culture they believe is broken and spawns suspicion, even cynicism, about the ability of others to distinguish fact from fiction.”

The background condition of this discussion is our current state of permacrisis: the collision of multiple critical problems whose conjunction renders effective response to any one of them impossible. Crisis demands a response, but too much of it strains our abilities. The permacritical state can, and should, be analyzed in terms of the Enlightenment imperatives that descend directly from Immanuel Kant’s landmark 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” where he defends a popular version of the rational universalism that has grounded two centuries of human aspiration.

This focus might strike some readers as odd or tendentious. Surely, an eighteenth-century philosopher, white and male and stuffed with the prejudices of his time, is no guide for today? I focus on the injunction offered at the end of Kant’s essay: the familiar Latin motto “sapere aude.” This is usually translated as “think for yourself” in English and has, more recently, been joined with another imperative—“question authority.” The two commands seem to fall naturally together, as do the basic notions of authority and trust.

We are all addicted. Whether it’s drugs, alcohol, work, weight-loss programs, shopping, online videos, gossip, gambling, apps, comic books, at-home delivery, or new phones—anything, really, that the heart desires—we can’t seem to calm a relentless inner urge, a longing that will not be satisfied.

The least visible but perhaps most harmful addiction is thinking ourselves right. This particular form of cognitive dependency is something we may style addiction to conviction, what I call doxaholism. The simple definition of the condition is this: harmful craving for and attachment to loud, divisive, and identity-conferring opinion. The “dox” prefix here comes from the Greek word for opinion, “doxa,” and is therefore a different derivation than “doxing,” the public internet shaming or vilification of individuals you dislike.

The two “dox” roots conjoin in practice by way of aggressive public campaigns of hatred, targeting, intimidation, de-platforming, and cancelling. Virulent opinion becomes the basis for a targeted cancelling campaign. Not all doxing carries this attendant energy of condemnation and shaming, and sometimes there are legitimate reasons for publicly identifying a bad actor, especially online. But the basic drive to expose is an unstable property: one person’s self-righteous exposure is another person’s public shaming. Doxing of any kind is relatively rare; doxaholism is, by contrast, more basic, widespread, and dangerous.

Medical practitioners will tell you that addiction is the wrong framework to employ when it comes to belief, trust, and authority. Its metaphorical usefulness is impaired when applied too widely, they argue. Unless a condition or behaviour involves substance use disorder, potential withdrawal, and harmful dependence, a condition of perpetual craving should not be called addiction. And of course, it is true that you won’t find doxaholism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

But other discourses, including social psychology, will argue that addictive behaviour is a valid wider category—and a necessary one. Not all harmful obsessions involve chemical substances, even if they all play out in dopamine cascades and the chaotic firing of neurons. Social media, fashion, gossip, and adventure all count as occasions for addictive behaviour. So, too, does the feeling of being right.

Whom do you trust as we stumble to the end of the twenty-first century’s first quarter? Your friends? Your family? God? Science? No one? We are often advised, in elite humanities departments and on wackadoodle conspiracist podcasts alike, to question, question, question authority. But is obeying that command possible? Even if we do push back on power, we know that overactive distrust leads to a dangerous endgame of broken institutions: politics, media, religion, science, expertise itself are all more suspect than ever. Should we complain about that? Fear it? Fix it? Or is the real problem within us?

The result of applying critical thinking to your own thinking is not a “herd of independent minds,” the much-mocked fashionable conformity, nor is it lock-step suspicion of everything going. It is, instead, a willing, and potentially just, civil society of disputatious freethinkers. Let us dwell together in doubt, guided by its companion cognitive virtue, humility. Because this is the only solution to a crisis of authority. And this requires reflection on our own stories, how we come to be the political actors we are.

Adapted and excerpted from Question Authority: A Polemic about Trust in Five Meditations by Mark Kingwell, with permission from Biblioasis. Copyright © Mark Kingwell 2024. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.