The JFK files tell us what people already know: the government can sometimes be deceitful or evil. This was not true in 1963. Surveys in the late 1950s show that over 70% of Americans trusted the government to do what is right "most of the time" or "just about always."
Nov. 22, 1963, was the beginning of a long fall in the public's confidence in institutions. Since then, it’s gotten worse. Can it recover from the belated realization that the government and media mislead the world repeatedly over the COVID-19 pandemic? Recall that “no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the [Wuhan Institute of Virology].” But an op-ed in the New York Times ruefully admits that:
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.
How should one rationally behave in a society where there is a significant probability of authority lying to you? If there is a significant chance that institutions are lying, the rational thing to do is to verify whenever and wherever you can. Regard nothing as completely true unless backed by verifiable evidence. Do not rely on decency to prevent deceit; if they can lie to you about a deadly epidemic like COVID, they can lie to you about anything. Nor are authorities the sole purveyors of falsehoods. Enemy nations have their own disinformation campaigns; political parties coordinate talking points. Plain ignorance or stupidity contributes to the noise. Fortunately, it is still possible to extract a signal from it all.
This means cross-checking what you’re told against primary sources — data, documents, or firsthand accounts — rather than taking narratives — even those you are sympathetic to – at face value. This used to be prohibitively expensive if not impossible. But email, telephony, live streams, AI, and open-source databases have made it practical, though only just. The decision-making process in a noisy world would rely heavily on probability and verification. If authorities push a policy or claim, you’d assess its plausibility based on logic and observable outcomes, not promises. For example, if they claim they’ve reduced the crime rate, you’d look at crime indicators or talk to people rather than trust the press release. If they claimed that climate change would end civilization in 20 years, you’d look at the high water markers down at the harbor.
How much effort you put into independently assessing the truth will depend on how much you care about the subject in question. A 10% chance of getting something vital wrong might justify more effort than a 20% chance some small amount might be lost. You can know some of the truth some of the time. There is the special problem of evaluating novel events for which there is no baseline and no recognized subject experts. Imagine for example that a future unknown epidemic breaks out all over the world. There is no alternative but to trust – at least initially – in the expertise of authority in fields most closely related to the new subject and then to modify the starting assessment depending on how accurate they turn out to be.
But there’s a political downside. You’d have to factor in the social cost of skepticism. Never fully buying in puts one at odds with the human tendency to take sides. Many people need the reassurance of certitude and the comfort of authority especially when they are afraid. They take sides. That’s what politics is all about. Using independent, probabilistic analysis in place of reliance on authority is emotionally difficult. It makes you a “denier” and probably why ideologues are hostile to the method. Provisional "truth" is simply not inspiring enough to elicit commitment.
The idea of a secular dogma guarded by fact-checkers is relatively new. Apart from the great religions, which dealt with the eternal questions, it was surprisingly difficult to establish dogma in the empirical world until recently. Before printing, it was impractical to clone authoritative texts, without which knowledge transmission was always mutable. Progress in standardized facts remained slow until the Renaissance began to revive classical learning and encourage new scientific exploration – one preserving and the other modifying.
Propaganda and the media made it temporarily possible to create a culture of stable, widely accepted facts. But the era of the canon was overthrown by the speed of discovery and the democratization of inquiry. The so-called technological singularity made information uncontrollably abundant. With AI capable of processing and disseminating vast datasets, knowledge could become universally accessible, undermining authorities that rely on controlling narratives. As Grok says:
Imagine a world where AI exposes corruption or generates real-time, transparent analyses of institutional decisions. This could empower people to question and resist authority, much like how social media today amplifies dissent, but on an exponentially larger scale. We are back in the pre-canonical age. The rule of the educated has been destabilized by the explosion of the knowledge frontiers.
The factuality of COVID-19 is a prime example of the new Bayesian nature of understanding. No one who hadn't changed his mind at least half a dozen times about the origin of the virus, its transmissibility, and its cure can be said to have been really thinking about the problem. The world did not revert to its former comforting certitude after the coronavirus pandemic faded. Rather doubt, like a second pandemic, spread to institutional epistemology. Was there really gold in Fort Knox, was Biden truly competent? Our heads started to spin. Dallas dug the grave. Wuhan filled it in. For better or worse, complete certainty is dead in the political domain. What we have now are expectations, probability distributions, and a posteriori Monday morning quarterbacking. We are back in the world before the canon. The good news is that we've been here before.
What died on the day JFK was shot in Dallas was the idea that the public could always rely on authority to tell them the truth. It’s a lonely feeling to stand by its graveside and realize that to a greater or lesser extent, we will have to figure it out ourselves.
