One important insight I associate with Foucault is that power is much more multifarious than we often like to think. Basically no one is truly powerless and no one is all-powerful. There are always complex webs and conflicts of power. The phrase of “speaking truth to power” often, as you note, pretends that the speakers are relatively low power - though speaking truth does constitute one kind of power, and there are often others.
But I think this undermines even the case that in historical societies, power was mostly illegitimate and extractive. That may have been true of formal society-level power, but even in traditional societies, the power of parents over children, and the different forms of power of children over parents, and various other forms of power in all other social relationships, likely weren’t as illegitimate and extractive.
One of the issues is, I think, that a lot of the truths people want to tell to power are not really epistemic truths but more moral truths. Crucially this difference gets elided and then leads to the appearance of motivated reasoning which then discredits the analysis. It tells us that such moral truths have become embedded as priors within various progressive domains of discourse. Not necessarily wrong but often unexamined. Then we're talking at cross purposes.
Dan, great stuff. I've been running a series at Sacred Cow BBQ that converges on a lot of this from a different door, and, so here's two pushbacks I'd offer as friendly extensions/amendments rather than disagreements.
The motivated-reasoning section is exactly where my next piece is going. The empirical literature you're gesturing at (Taber & Lodge, Kahan on identity-protective cognition, Mercier & Sperber) is the cognitive layer of what's also a structural story, and an angle I've hit hard in some of my own academic research. Smart/sophisticated people are more motivated and more capable of building identity defenses and strategies.
The posture of speaking truth to power is self-flattering, yes, but the deeper reason it survives is that the disciplines that adopted it lack what Gad Saad (of all people) recently called an "autocorrective mechanism of reality." The harder sciences, e.g., Engineering, and even the "harder" social sciences like business get reality-corrected all the time: build a bad bridge, predict a market wrong, you hear about it. Humanities and parts of social science don't. Approval-optimization without reality-correction will always select for skillful rationalization over accuracy. Also, that's the disciplinary version of the RLHF problem in AI alignment.
The other push: I'd be (only slightly) gentler on the original constructivist turn, even granting the horrible places where it ended up. The Frankfurt school and standpoint folks weren't wrong that institutions distort knowledge production. They were wrong about the target (positivism wasn't the problem; approval-optimization was), and they built a meta-theoretical apparatus that ended up immunizing their own descendants against exactly the critique you're making here. That's the irony I'd add to your self-exemption section: the same critique-of-power tradition that should have made academia self-aware about its own ideological power produced the tools that now prevent it from being applied inward (which is the argument Part 2 of my series ran in detail: https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/the-fifty-year-war-or-reality-bats).
"Isolated demands for rigor as bravery." Amen. Strong piece.
Great stuff. This explains a frustration I have with much of the current left, which is that instead of analyzing new technologies and sources of power with a fresh (though still leftist) perspective, they want to shoehorn everything into familiar abuses of power we've seen in the past. This is most obvious with AI. Capabilities deniers want to say it's just like crypto or the housing bubble. People who claim datacenters use a ton of water want datacenters to have exactly the same problems as oil and gas drilling.
To your second point, there's also a huge motivated reasoning component to this. A core belief of leftists is that workers have the real power over the economy, if only they could organize. The possibility that AI will replace workers is so threatening to this core belief that many would rather say AI is useless and being foisted on workers than develop new claims for a new era.
I wish that there was a better term, or a more elaborate explanation of "speaking truth to power". Because it seems to me depending on the framing it can be good or bad. The way you have framed it the ethos causes one to prejudge who/what has power and it relies on a simple heuristic that power and truth systematically collide.
But, I don't see it that way - I think an ethos of attempting to push back on hegemonic ideas is good *in the long run*. OFC there are intellectually lazy and misguided folks who assume they know where power is before actually investigating the system, but the problem isn't the ethos described - it's the method they use.
Let's use AI as an example. I am 100% with you - AI is huge, and the people/organizations who wield AI will have immense power over society. So if someone says "it's all a bubble/scam to get more money" they aren't speaking truth to power. They are speaking misunderstandings that allow the powerful to accumulate more power. So if you wanted to say "The ethos of assuming you know the truth and who has power without actual empirical investigation of those facts is bad" I am 100% with you. But what about *actually* speaking *truth* to real power.
I will attempt to explain why I think it is a good ethos to have with a few key examples
#1) Marx - It is clear upon reading Marx's work in the 21st century that he made quite a few empirical mistakes. But let's place him in a historical context. He (and Engels) were observing the birth of the industrial revolution, especially as it related to Dickensian Britain. The immiseration of the working class in the 19th century with declining life expectancy and quality of life (despite rapidly increasing GDP/productivity) is the historical reality. Marx was reacting to what he saw as a gross injustice, formulating an entirely new frame of looking at power structures. Without his reaction to the ascendant power of a capitalist oligarchy we may never have seen the labor movement in the early 20th century take off.
#2) Scientific progress - We often see ideas that are entrenched become more and more sclerotic as they do not explain the phenomena we see in reality. I am not saying that 100% of people should doubt the scientific paradigms of the day. However a world where a committed 10-20% of people are working to disprove the core ideas of the day is more likely to get us out of a local minima and push us into a more accurate paradigm. On a population level we want some people to be innovators/disruptors, even if that group is only a fraction of the whole.
#3) Wars of position - I hope you've read Gramsci because I think his idea of a war of position is actually incredibly useful to analyze large scale societal changes. If you live in a society (like antebellum southern US) then the dominant structure is white supremacy, enslavement and a rich slave owning class dominating the economic/political world. If you have only so much time/effort in your life to produce work it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable/beneficial to fighting ruthlessly against that regime. If I am going to try and convince my fellow citizens that slavery is wrong I am going to make my argument as persuasive as possible. If someone comes in and says, "Well as much as you hate slavery, what about the incredible amounts of cotton we are producing? Think about how much that cotton is used in textiles to help clothe the cold worldwide. If we start producing less cotton that may cause harm to some others." If I spend my time analyzing the world-wide utilitarian calculation of abolishing slavery it will not only reduce the amoutn of time/effort I have left for advocating for abolition, it will weaken the argument. And if you have CORRECTLY identified Hegemonic regime that is in power making the world a worse place, it is often strategically sound to fight that hegemonic power on all fronts, rather than concede small empirically true points on their side. Why would I be willing (as an intellectual) to see myself as a soldier in a war of position againts an evil regime, instead of as a noble truth teller. Because, according to you "almost everything you believe [in] is based on information you acquired from others—from the claims, gossip, reports, books, remarks, opinion pieces, teaching, images, video clips, and so on that other people communicated to you." So I want to make sure the information I pass onto others can direct them away from evil.
-------
Finally, you live in Britain rather than USA so I wanted to just take issue with one statement of yours: "Western intellectual elites live in liberal democracies characterised by universal rights, formal equality, the rule of law, pluralism, constitutional limits on state power"
I live in the USA. We do not have universal rights (women in southern states no longer have bodily autonomy, non-whites can be racially profiled and targeted by law enforcement, observers in my city have been shot, killed and the government refuses to investigate the ICE officers who killed them). We do not have formal equality (Black citizens in the south are losing all representation in federal government). The rule of law is decaying fast. Our Supreme court has literally interpreted the constitution to say that any act of the president can not be illegal so long as it is deemed "official", an arbitrary determination. So while I do not believe we yet live in a totalitarian regime, the sanguine assumption that powerful regimes have been permanently defeated by a liberal regime does not reflect what I see in my country.
Once you have accurately determined what is truth and where the power lies, encouraging intellectuals and citizens to push back will *over time* lead to a more copacetic equilibrium.
Great article. A classic example of how this is bad epistemology is modern antisemitism. The populist right wing and left wing claim against Jews of course lay on them making a theoretically plausible claim of Jewish power.
On a different note, I don't see how you get around this issue within a society without agreeing on some shared knowledge base, some core curriculum.
Speaking Truth to Passion is the real challenge. Institutionalized power in democracies endlessly badgers citizens for input and feedback. Moralistic crusaders convinced that ‘such truths have been established before inquiry has even begun’ are a much tougher audience.
On the Al stuff, I wonder if the lack of math in left leadership was hurting. I've been tracking AI papers for over a decade and it was very obvious when things accelerated in various areas. All of the business conservations I participate in are taking AI adoption very seriously.
You are quite right about the "Speaking Truth to Power" pose....something that has always sounded to me (in so far as I have given it any thought) as just one of that huge grab bag of off-the-shelf, clever-sounding journalistic phrases. On the wider discussion of your essay, I offer here some edited excerpts from an essay of my own.......on a (broadly) related theme: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/everyone-has-lost-control-of-the
"There is a currently fashionable right-wing political narrative where everything gets blamed on a so-called ‘woke elite’. A kind of Wokievellian Illuminati. In this telling, our 21st Century hyper-progressive dystopia has simply been foisted on a great mass of grounded and well-adjusted citizenry. Yes, they have put up with it, but entirely unwillingly. The big flaw in this narrative is that by implication, the US Democratic Party ought, for example, to have attracted around 5 per cent of the popular in November 2024, not the near-50 per cent it actually got. The more dispiriting truth is that if there is such a thing as a ‘Woke elite’, it is one that perhaps comprises a majority of all those Westerners who have been through tertiary education. That’s one hell of a lot of people to label an elite.
Turning specifically to the parts that the narrative typically shies away from........
We in the West have been schooled into an expectation that there is a political solution to everything. There isn’t and the expectation can lead people – especially the most politically engaged kind – down rabbit holes. One of them is an excessive fixation on someone to blame for our discontents. It is a retreat to a moral/philosophical redoubt in which an alien ‘other’ is juxtaposed with a reassuringly ‘great mass’ of sane citizens.
The more challenging propositional 'truth' is that aspects of a hyper-progressive mentality have, over recent decades, been embraced by tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions – albeit in greatly varying dilutions....... that the competitive-victimhood mentality is a highly addictive one … a kind of mass psychosis that ensnares both rich and poor, young and old. "
And perhaps the most salient feature of "power" in our 21st Century digital age is that EVERYONE has lost control of its "truths".
One important insight I associate with Foucault is that power is much more multifarious than we often like to think. Basically no one is truly powerless and no one is all-powerful. There are always complex webs and conflicts of power. The phrase of “speaking truth to power” often, as you note, pretends that the speakers are relatively low power - though speaking truth does constitute one kind of power, and there are often others.
But I think this undermines even the case that in historical societies, power was mostly illegitimate and extractive. That may have been true of formal society-level power, but even in traditional societies, the power of parents over children, and the different forms of power of children over parents, and various other forms of power in all other social relationships, likely weren’t as illegitimate and extractive.
One of the issues is, I think, that a lot of the truths people want to tell to power are not really epistemic truths but more moral truths. Crucially this difference gets elided and then leads to the appearance of motivated reasoning which then discredits the analysis. It tells us that such moral truths have become embedded as priors within various progressive domains of discourse. Not necessarily wrong but often unexamined. Then we're talking at cross purposes.
Dan, great stuff. I've been running a series at Sacred Cow BBQ that converges on a lot of this from a different door, and, so here's two pushbacks I'd offer as friendly extensions/amendments rather than disagreements.
The motivated-reasoning section is exactly where my next piece is going. The empirical literature you're gesturing at (Taber & Lodge, Kahan on identity-protective cognition, Mercier & Sperber) is the cognitive layer of what's also a structural story, and an angle I've hit hard in some of my own academic research. Smart/sophisticated people are more motivated and more capable of building identity defenses and strategies.
The posture of speaking truth to power is self-flattering, yes, but the deeper reason it survives is that the disciplines that adopted it lack what Gad Saad (of all people) recently called an "autocorrective mechanism of reality." The harder sciences, e.g., Engineering, and even the "harder" social sciences like business get reality-corrected all the time: build a bad bridge, predict a market wrong, you hear about it. Humanities and parts of social science don't. Approval-optimization without reality-correction will always select for skillful rationalization over accuracy. Also, that's the disciplinary version of the RLHF problem in AI alignment.
The other push: I'd be (only slightly) gentler on the original constructivist turn, even granting the horrible places where it ended up. The Frankfurt school and standpoint folks weren't wrong that institutions distort knowledge production. They were wrong about the target (positivism wasn't the problem; approval-optimization was), and they built a meta-theoretical apparatus that ended up immunizing their own descendants against exactly the critique you're making here. That's the irony I'd add to your self-exemption section: the same critique-of-power tradition that should have made academia self-aware about its own ideological power produced the tools that now prevent it from being applied inward (which is the argument Part 2 of my series ran in detail: https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/the-fifty-year-war-or-reality-bats).
"Isolated demands for rigor as bravery." Amen. Strong piece.
Great stuff. This explains a frustration I have with much of the current left, which is that instead of analyzing new technologies and sources of power with a fresh (though still leftist) perspective, they want to shoehorn everything into familiar abuses of power we've seen in the past. This is most obvious with AI. Capabilities deniers want to say it's just like crypto or the housing bubble. People who claim datacenters use a ton of water want datacenters to have exactly the same problems as oil and gas drilling.
To your second point, there's also a huge motivated reasoning component to this. A core belief of leftists is that workers have the real power over the economy, if only they could organize. The possibility that AI will replace workers is so threatening to this core belief that many would rather say AI is useless and being foisted on workers than develop new claims for a new era.
I wish that there was a better term, or a more elaborate explanation of "speaking truth to power". Because it seems to me depending on the framing it can be good or bad. The way you have framed it the ethos causes one to prejudge who/what has power and it relies on a simple heuristic that power and truth systematically collide.
But, I don't see it that way - I think an ethos of attempting to push back on hegemonic ideas is good *in the long run*. OFC there are intellectually lazy and misguided folks who assume they know where power is before actually investigating the system, but the problem isn't the ethos described - it's the method they use.
Let's use AI as an example. I am 100% with you - AI is huge, and the people/organizations who wield AI will have immense power over society. So if someone says "it's all a bubble/scam to get more money" they aren't speaking truth to power. They are speaking misunderstandings that allow the powerful to accumulate more power. So if you wanted to say "The ethos of assuming you know the truth and who has power without actual empirical investigation of those facts is bad" I am 100% with you. But what about *actually* speaking *truth* to real power.
I will attempt to explain why I think it is a good ethos to have with a few key examples
#1) Marx - It is clear upon reading Marx's work in the 21st century that he made quite a few empirical mistakes. But let's place him in a historical context. He (and Engels) were observing the birth of the industrial revolution, especially as it related to Dickensian Britain. The immiseration of the working class in the 19th century with declining life expectancy and quality of life (despite rapidly increasing GDP/productivity) is the historical reality. Marx was reacting to what he saw as a gross injustice, formulating an entirely new frame of looking at power structures. Without his reaction to the ascendant power of a capitalist oligarchy we may never have seen the labor movement in the early 20th century take off.
#2) Scientific progress - We often see ideas that are entrenched become more and more sclerotic as they do not explain the phenomena we see in reality. I am not saying that 100% of people should doubt the scientific paradigms of the day. However a world where a committed 10-20% of people are working to disprove the core ideas of the day is more likely to get us out of a local minima and push us into a more accurate paradigm. On a population level we want some people to be innovators/disruptors, even if that group is only a fraction of the whole.
#3) Wars of position - I hope you've read Gramsci because I think his idea of a war of position is actually incredibly useful to analyze large scale societal changes. If you live in a society (like antebellum southern US) then the dominant structure is white supremacy, enslavement and a rich slave owning class dominating the economic/political world. If you have only so much time/effort in your life to produce work it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable/beneficial to fighting ruthlessly against that regime. If I am going to try and convince my fellow citizens that slavery is wrong I am going to make my argument as persuasive as possible. If someone comes in and says, "Well as much as you hate slavery, what about the incredible amounts of cotton we are producing? Think about how much that cotton is used in textiles to help clothe the cold worldwide. If we start producing less cotton that may cause harm to some others." If I spend my time analyzing the world-wide utilitarian calculation of abolishing slavery it will not only reduce the amoutn of time/effort I have left for advocating for abolition, it will weaken the argument. And if you have CORRECTLY identified Hegemonic regime that is in power making the world a worse place, it is often strategically sound to fight that hegemonic power on all fronts, rather than concede small empirically true points on their side. Why would I be willing (as an intellectual) to see myself as a soldier in a war of position againts an evil regime, instead of as a noble truth teller. Because, according to you "almost everything you believe [in] is based on information you acquired from others—from the claims, gossip, reports, books, remarks, opinion pieces, teaching, images, video clips, and so on that other people communicated to you." So I want to make sure the information I pass onto others can direct them away from evil.
-------
Finally, you live in Britain rather than USA so I wanted to just take issue with one statement of yours: "Western intellectual elites live in liberal democracies characterised by universal rights, formal equality, the rule of law, pluralism, constitutional limits on state power"
I live in the USA. We do not have universal rights (women in southern states no longer have bodily autonomy, non-whites can be racially profiled and targeted by law enforcement, observers in my city have been shot, killed and the government refuses to investigate the ICE officers who killed them). We do not have formal equality (Black citizens in the south are losing all representation in federal government). The rule of law is decaying fast. Our Supreme court has literally interpreted the constitution to say that any act of the president can not be illegal so long as it is deemed "official", an arbitrary determination. So while I do not believe we yet live in a totalitarian regime, the sanguine assumption that powerful regimes have been permanently defeated by a liberal regime does not reflect what I see in my country.
Once you have accurately determined what is truth and where the power lies, encouraging intellectuals and citizens to push back will *over time* lead to a more copacetic equilibrium.
Great article. A classic example of how this is bad epistemology is modern antisemitism. The populist right wing and left wing claim against Jews of course lay on them making a theoretically plausible claim of Jewish power.
On a different note, I don't see how you get around this issue within a society without agreeing on some shared knowledge base, some core curriculum.
Has not deconstructionism and new relative therories shown
that truth is all determined by the ruler the observer is holding ?
There is no truth only observations.
Speaking Truth to Passion is the real challenge. Institutionalized power in democracies endlessly badgers citizens for input and feedback. Moralistic crusaders convinced that ‘such truths have been established before inquiry has even begun’ are a much tougher audience.
On the Al stuff, I wonder if the lack of math in left leadership was hurting. I've been tracking AI papers for over a decade and it was very obvious when things accelerated in various areas. All of the business conservations I participate in are taking AI adoption very seriously.
did you really cite Thomas Sowell? I almost spit out my morning coffee
You are quite right about the "Speaking Truth to Power" pose....something that has always sounded to me (in so far as I have given it any thought) as just one of that huge grab bag of off-the-shelf, clever-sounding journalistic phrases. On the wider discussion of your essay, I offer here some edited excerpts from an essay of my own.......on a (broadly) related theme: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/everyone-has-lost-control-of-the
"There is a currently fashionable right-wing political narrative where everything gets blamed on a so-called ‘woke elite’. A kind of Wokievellian Illuminati. In this telling, our 21st Century hyper-progressive dystopia has simply been foisted on a great mass of grounded and well-adjusted citizenry. Yes, they have put up with it, but entirely unwillingly. The big flaw in this narrative is that by implication, the US Democratic Party ought, for example, to have attracted around 5 per cent of the popular in November 2024, not the near-50 per cent it actually got. The more dispiriting truth is that if there is such a thing as a ‘Woke elite’, it is one that perhaps comprises a majority of all those Westerners who have been through tertiary education. That’s one hell of a lot of people to label an elite.
Turning specifically to the parts that the narrative typically shies away from........
We in the West have been schooled into an expectation that there is a political solution to everything. There isn’t and the expectation can lead people – especially the most politically engaged kind – down rabbit holes. One of them is an excessive fixation on someone to blame for our discontents. It is a retreat to a moral/philosophical redoubt in which an alien ‘other’ is juxtaposed with a reassuringly ‘great mass’ of sane citizens.
The more challenging propositional 'truth' is that aspects of a hyper-progressive mentality have, over recent decades, been embraced by tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions – albeit in greatly varying dilutions....... that the competitive-victimhood mentality is a highly addictive one … a kind of mass psychosis that ensnares both rich and poor, young and old. "
And perhaps the most salient feature of "power" in our 21st Century digital age is that EVERYONE has lost control of its "truths".
The traditional speaker of truth to power was the Court Fool