Thread by @waitbutwhy

Let's talk about social authoritarianism. We can break low-rung thinkers (those who identify with their ideas, care more about being right than truth, never change their mind, etc.) down into three categories:

1. Non-authoritarians
2. Social bullies
3. Idea supremacists

1/10

Non-authoritarians don't enforce their way of thinking on anyone else.

The social bully gets angry or offended with friends who disagree with them, which keeps the people around them walking on eggshells.

The idea supremacist goes a step further...

The idea supremacist believes that ideas they disagree with are so vile and dangerous that they must be silenced. They don't just impose their preferred echo chamber on the people who choose to spend time with them—they try to impose their echo chamber on everyone.

We can illustrate this by comparing how people react to an upcoming talk by a speaker they disagree with. High-rung thinkers find a lot of value in having their beliefs challenged. Low-rung thinkers, not so much. But only the idea supremacist tries to cancel the event.

Low-rung thinkers may not be great at learning, but as long as they don't prevent others from learning, it's fine. Even the social bully is fine—they only hurt people who choose to be their friend.

But idea supremacy is a direct affront to the workings of a liberal society.

Trying to cancel a talk is one obvious form of idea supremacy. But it also applies to trying to get people fired, reprimanded, mass shamed, etc. for saying the wrong thing—any behavior that uses coercion or fear to hinder discussion or the spread of ideas is idea supremacy.

This concept helps illuminate the difference between criticism and cancel culture. Criticism attacks ideas, which enhances discussion. Cancel culture attacks the *people* who speak the ideas, which makes it scary to speak and chills discussion. Cancel culture is idea supremacy.

If you consider yourself a (lower-case-L) liberal, you should push back against idea supremacy in all its forms. It doesn't matter whether you happen to agree or disagree with the idea supremacist's ideas—they're impeding the marketplace of ideas and should be vocally criticized.

A common retort to this brings up an extreme example (e.g. "oh so we should just let Nazis say they want to kill Jews?"). In these extreme cases, 99% of society roundly rejects the idea and person—the canceling is imposed by everyone, everywhere. That's not idea supremacy.

Idea supremacy is when only a small group finds a certain idea so vile and dangerous as to warrant coercive silencing, but that group has outsized power to impose their rules upon everyone else. It's bullying on a mass scale and it makes the whole society dumber.

This is a major concept in my book What's Our Problem? I examine a bunch of examples of idea supremacy up close and discuss why and how it has bubbled up in western societies in the past decade.

waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem