The Principle of Inverse Authority

One of the correlates of personifying the Powers that Be is the disreputability of the cultural mainstream. It is almost always the case that the Powers that Be operate from within traditional structures of authority, rather than autonomously, or against them. There is therefore a very strong tendency to favour culturally marginalized sources of information. They generally prefer their information to come from those “unschooled, but highly educated”, as Cliff High put it, to avoid The “taint of academic leanings”(Here, at 4:34-4:40).

I’d like to propose a hypothetical principle, generalizing this position. I think it characterizes a lot of woo:

The Principle of Inverse Authority [PoIA]: The more Authority (as defined by the cultural mainstream) a source of information has, the less likely it is to be true.

This could be restated, from the view outside woo, as “Those on the fringes tend to get fringier”. Once your confidence in one or a handful of very widely accepted sources of authority, for some people it becomes much easier to disbelieve other sources of authority. If you believe the U.S. government lies all the time, for some people the notion that NASA lies all the time thereby becomes easier to swallow. Since the very widespread tendency is to locate the Powers that Be within traditional authority structures, truth therefore has to come from the margins. Fringe  fringe politics, fringe science, and fringe spiritual traditions are brought into dialog with each other to make up the spectrum of woo.

The PoIA functions to insulate the woo-woo community from having to engage in arguments with experts in the fields that they claim to have improved. Those who believe there will be a pole-shift, for instance, can summarily dismiss debunkers – they are tainted with academic learning, and therefore cannot be trusted. Witness, for instance, Patrick Geryl:

He is of the opinion that in 2012, the crust of the earth will shift as much as 30degrees over the course of a few hours, due to a massive sunstorm. He’s not a professional scientist, but he is unwaveringly confident in his narrative nonetheless.

When asked in the interview why he is so confident, he recalls another one of his predictions from when he was a young man. When it was fashionable to believe that the expansion of the universe was decelerating, he was boldly claiming the contrary. He believed that (due to an error in Special Relativity that he claims to have identified) the univere is in fact accelerating in its expansion. Recently, and anomalously, a number of observations have been made that suggest that this is true. Geryl’s reasons why this acceleration is happening are not widely accepted, but he was several decades ahead of the game on the observable facts.

So when asked about the reliability of his apocalyptic 2012 crust shift scenario, he points to his previous success with the acceleration of the universe (see 31:55 of the video above). Everyone thought I was crazy, he protests, but I was right. Everyone thinks I’m crazy again. I must be right. This is the PoIA, elegantly self-applied by Geryl. The fact that no one believes him becomes clear evidence of the truth of his claims.