The Day After Substack
Apparently Substack now controls the fate of civilization. Let’s investigate.
This is the fourth experiment (see the first, second and third) in a series where I’ll be using my ontological framework to stress-test thinkers from every corner of the political galaxy, even the ones I personally swear by.
The goal is to spot the exact moment a perfectly confident argument takes a wrong turn at the metaphysical off-ramp and ends up in a charming little subdivision called “Not Actually Reality.” We’re looking for those paradoxical glitches where the claims sound profound and logically airtight, yet the whole thing quietly detaches from the structure of existence, which is, of course, a minor detail.
This framework isn’t something I cooked up at 2am next to a cold slice of pizza. It’s a re-mapping of very old insights about how reality is organized—the kind Aristotle was already cataloging before indoor plumbing was cool, with philosophical guest appearances from Hannah Arendt and Plato, who both spent a great deal of time pointing out that we humans are extremely talented at mistaking our own projections for the universe—prompting Pluto to file a restraining order.
In short, we’re not here to dunk on people. Only to watch how ideas gently drift from ontology into interpretive fan fiction and maybe learn how to keep our own thoughts from doing the same.
So without further ado, it’s time to introduce the next participant in our completely safe, thoroughly respectful, and definitely not a hit piece experiment: Adam Serwer of The Atlantic: “Gullible, Cynical America.”
I do not know Adam, so take this characterization with a grain of salt: I get the sense that he probably has very strong feelings about people who use hints in a crossword. Hints are what barbarians use and he, naturally, would never behave like this. He seems like the sort of person who would turn a clue over in his mind the way a jeweler studies a diamond, waiting for the language to reveal itself with proper dignity. Every now and then, and purely as a matter of intellectual efficiency, he might take a peak. A small calibration of the mind working exactly as it should. The barbarians, of course, would never understand the difference.
✈️ PART 1: “Altitude Sickness”
“Many Americans believe that vaccines are unsafe, but will jab themselves full of performance enhancers. They think seed oils cause chronic disease, but beef tallow is healthy. They’ll say you can’t trust federally insured banks, but you can trust the millionaires who want you to invest in their volatile vaporware crypto tokens. They think food additives are toxic but support an administration removing all restrictions on pumping pollutants into the air and water. They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.
The coronavirus wasn’t the only epidemic to hit the United States in the past decade. Americans are also facing a bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism—gullicism, if you need a portmanteau—that is drawing people into a world of conspiracism and falsehoods, one where facts are drowned out by a cacophony of extremely loud and wrong voices.”
Adam opens with a remarkable intellectual maneuver in which certain schools of thought differ from his view of medicine, nutrition, finance, toxicology, environmental policy, and epistemology—gathered here in holy matrimony to celebrate their gullibility mixed with cynicism. This is accomplished with impressive efficiency, largely by leaping from ontology straight to moral judgment without the intermediate step of showing the work. It’s a bold move. When you’re collapsing that many domains into one explanation, subtlety can really slow you down.
The effect is a bit like the coastal habit of referring to the Midwest as “flyover country.” From 30,000 feet, the landscape does look wonderfully simple and devoid of detail. It’s only when you land that you discover all the inconvenient complexity people have been living in the whole time.
Once achieving this altitude, alternative explanations disappear from view. Things like humanity’s long-standing reluctance to trust authorities who arrive at their conclusions using the rigorous philosophical method known as “because I told you so.” Thereby unleashing a generation of hormonal teenagers who feel uniquely qualified to explain how everything works. This possibility is treated the way New Yorkers treat Nebraska. Interesting in theory, but unnecessary to stop and investigate.
🕯️ PART 2: “The Day After Substack”
“Americans are facing an epidemic of gullibility.”
A few niche subcultures quickly escalates to The Day After Tomorrow, and the republic is apparently sliding toward an epistemic apocalypse. The curious part is that we’re never quite told who these people are, how many of them exist, or whether they amount to more than a handful of internet eccentrics. We’re simply assured that someone is thinking these unsettling thoughts and that is evidence enough to warrant sounding the national siren.
A fashionable bit of logic these days is that if a person distrusts one expert, they must therefore believe the nearest fool. The theory appears to be that skepticism of authority is caused by only one thing: idiocy. Distrust, in this telling, simply materializes out of thin air. What never gets addressed is why the vacuum was formed in the first place. Something cleared the room. Something broke the trust. But that part of the story remains mysteriously unexamined. It seems Adam prefers to begin his investigation several steps after the interesting thing happened, moving from how people evaluate knowledge to why they are morally defective.
🧪 PART 3: “The Mundungus Fletcher Theory”
“Gullicism creates not just a void but also an opportunity. It creates an ideal business opportunity for snake-oil salesmen to peddle products whose whole appeal is that they’re not scientifically validated. What is ultimately being sold is the feeling that consumers can prove they’re smarter than those snooty experts who think they know everything—and who probably are in on the conspiracy to deprive you of the truth.”
Adam is quite fond of criticizing people for believing things without evidence, which is a perfectly admirable hobby. The curious thing is that he often makes his case using scientific words like gullicism, snake oil, bonkers, and lunacy—which are less empirical than they are colorful ways of declaring someone ridiculous. As a connoisseur of moral satire myself, I can hardly object to the genre. It’s just helpful to know when we’ve switched from evidence to biting theater.
At one point the author introduces the fearsome “snake-oil salesman,” and the entire modern world holding together civilizational order becomes unstable like rickety lemonade stands waiting to be tipped over because Mundungus Fletcher showed up with a crate of suspicious elixirs and a persuasive sales pitch. Meanwhile cathedrals of institutional power start collapsing like dominoes while he pockets the receipts. The only drawback is that it requires believing that the vast infrastructure of modern knowledge, finance, politics, media, and culture can be toppled by a man whose professional specialty is selling slightly dented chamber pots behind a pub.
If that’s the case, we don’t deserve nice things.
🥤 PART 4: “Reality According To the Cool Table”
“As the writer Will Wilkinson wrote in 2022, ‘Building a relatively accurate mental model of the world doesn’t have all that much to do with your individual reasoning capacity. It’s mostly about trusting and distrusting the right people.’ Anyone successfully isolated by an algorithm can get got—a few wrong decisions, and you’re listening to someone who thinks sunscreen causes cancer.”
Giving credit where credit is due, Adam may have actually described the core problem. Modern discourse has drifted from a shared belief system into something closer to a game of telephone, where the meaning of a claim mutates depending on which clique heard it first. At that point the question is no longer whether something is true, but whether it sounds like something their table would say. It’s less a search for truth than a social sorting mechanism—roughly the intellectual equivalent of the cafeteria scene in Mean Girls.
💝 PART 5: “On Wednesdays We Enforce Ideologies”
“The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that ‘a mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements.’ She argued that ‘the whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naïve fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism.’ All are ruled by “the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.’”
Adam eventually brings in Hannah Arendt, which is usually the signal that the conversation has reached the “Very Serious Part.” Arendt, of course, was describing totalitarian systems like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union—places with the sort of features one normally associates with totalitarianism. A single-party rule, monopolized propaganda, secret police, suppressed opposition, and mass ideological enforcement. In Mean Girls terms, this would be the scenario where The Plastics have successfully eliminated every other clique, seized control of the school paper, installed themselves in the superintendent’s office, and instituted a mandatory “everyone wears pink on Wednesdays or you don’t graduate” policy. The article then takes this framework and applies it to things like spreading rumors about the girl who likes the same guy as you (social media misinformation), thereby turning her into a social outcast (populist rhetoric). It’s certainly a bold interpretive move. Not quite the same category, though the comparison does add a certain dramatic flair.
🚪 PART 6: “The Door Marked ‘Interesting’”
“That said, blaming Rufo and other right-wing activists alone would understate the severity of the problem. We have a data economy that thrives on selling products we don’t need for problems we don’t have, and a public that falls for these ploys—even as we think ourselves much too clever to be fooled.”
Near the end the article briefly opens the door to something genuinely structural—the observation that we now live in a data economy designed to sell people things to feed the algorithm monster and keep the engagement meter twitching—craving outrage, novelty, and nonsense into the same hopper because those things keep it alive. For a moment you can almost see the machinery. Like discovering Oz’s illusion behind the curtain. The pipes, the gears, the industrial plumbing of the entire arrangement. But the author seems to have wandered into this room by accident while looking for the bathroom. He glances around, notices the engineering might explain quite a lot, realizes there is no toilet in sight, and promptly backs out again. Nature is calling, and there are still people in the hallway who need to be scolded.
None of this, it should be said, is intended as a hit piece. Adam Serwer is doing what the rest of us are doing and wandering around in a very confusing landscape with a flashlight that occasionally works, trying to describe whatever he happens to bump into. Sometimes it’s a tree. Sometimes it’s a shrub. Occasionally it’s an exposed root that, in the dark, looks extremely tree-like. It happens to everyone who spends time in the woods.
And yet beneath all the confusion, there’s still a patch of solid ground everyone happens to be standing on. Which, these days, qualifies as a minor miracle.