“Epistemic Feudalism” is Upon Us
Democracy Offers a Path Through the Coming Fog
The big picture: We are witnessing a breakdown of our shared reality and common foundation of truth in ways that are building toward a sort of epistemic feudalism, in which fragmented fiefdoms construct rival regimes of truth.
Why it matters: This epistemic fragmentation seems to pose a challenge to democracy, which many believe relies on some baseline agreement about facts and legitimate knowledge to function properly.
What's happening: Several forces are conspiring to pull apart the Enlightenment-era consensus around reason, science, and empirics as the basis for shaping collective beliefs and policy.
Tribal identities are hardening and being reinforced by ideological media ecosystems that create contradictory narratives.
Social media algorithms incentivize user engagement through outrage and confirmation bias over truth. Generating AI is set to turbocharge that.
“Experts” everywhere—from university leadership to public health officials—are feeling the heat and losing the trust of the public.
Deeply-held worldviews and what policy process scholars would called “core beliefs" are highly resistant to change or falsification.
The threat: We may be on the verge of regressing into a state of what we could call epistemic feudalism— a loose constellation of insular, independent spheres with their own incompatible belief systems warring over what's real.
Philosophers like Jacques Barzun identified this "Disenlightenment" decades ago, arguing Western democracies were decaying into “moralizing didacticism” rather than open rationality.
The counterpoint: This might make defenders of democracy queasy; after all, democracy emerged from the Enlightenment, an effort at shared reality by way of rational thought and empirical methods. Democracy seems to depend on shared facts.
But representative democracy may prove more capable of withstanding epistemic feudalism than expected.
Late 20th century political scientist Robert Dahl saw democracy as a system for managing inherently conflicting interests through pluralism, a commitment to creating space for others’ beliefs.
Before that, Joseph Schumpeter was cynical about the power of elites, but still convinced democracy could hang together as those elites jostled for power—as long as there was regular transfer of power after elections.
And long before him, the American founders separated church and state in part to create a state that could hold the ring between religious factions that had spent centuries bordering each other in Europe.
The bottom line: In different ways, these thinkers understood democracy to be a way of handling conflict and preventing the tyrannical accumulation of power. To them and others, democracy doesn’t require agreement on anything more than the basic, power-sharing rules of the game.
Reality has always been contested. Democracy can channel that disagreement away from the bullet and toward the ballot box.
