On Contrarianism

Two Cheers for Thinking Differently

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

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I’ve been thinking about writing this essay for some time, but recent events spurred me to move it up in my queue.

Anyone who knows me – or who has read certain stories of mine – knows I’m a contrarian. Those who know me well know that I’ve been one my entire life. There’s a good side and a bad side to contrarianism. The upside is that you can think for yourself a little more easily and that you have an easier time saying no to drugs. The downside is that you can fall into any number of intellectual fallacies, refuse to admit that you’re wrong, or reject common sense and become a conspiracist out of a belief that the majority is always wrong. Perhaps the worst temptation is to reflexive contrarianism, which eliminates the entire point of “thinking differently,” because if you uncritically oppose majority opinion every time, you’ll still be defined by majority thinking.

Growing Up:

Recently, the hosts of a podcast I follow had a conversation about natural contrarianism vs. natural conformity. Their take was that people tend to be naturally one or the other, and that true critical thinking lies somewhere in the middle. I largely agreed and posted a comment to the effect that maturation requires people to question their own natural tendency. My dispositional inclination is to distrust group consensus, which means that, as I’ve grown older, I’ve had to work to avoid always disagreeing with popular opinions. There’s nothing wrong with having the opposite predisposition – to conformity – that just means you’ll have to work a little harder to question collective decision-making.

Basically, critical thinking requires exacting the highest scrutiny on your own assumptions, because “you’re the easiest person to fool” (as Feynman reminded us). Flaunting your contrarianism can come off as immature. But, on the flip side, for the natural conformists, maturing requires learning to make your own decisions and growing comfortable with a little disagreement. Contrarians will find it easier to ignore peer pressure, but harder to accept that conventional wisdom is sometimes right. Conformists will find it easier to avoid self-certainty or drawing undue attention to themselves, but they’ll find it harder to ignore social pressure to do something they do not want to do (including things that are wrong).

I’d argue that true free-thinking requires coming to your own conclusions before you check with what everyone else is saying, but also recognizing that you might be wrong and the majority might be right. At the same time, you need to avoid the temptation to believe that all knowledge starts from the self. There’s very little truly original thought, which is okay. Rather than rejecting all who passed before you, free-thinking requires reading and learning and engaging with as many people as possible – especially those you’re naturally inclined to disagree with.

Endless Self-Creation:

I’m an individualist, but I reject contemporary notions of endless creation of the self. Everyone needs to do a little self-definition (i.e., choosing a profession, figuring out your values), but too much self-definition either becomes navel gazing (i.e., introspecting to the point of losing touch with reality or becoming self-obsessed) or becomes absurd (i.e., deciding that you’re not going to wear pants anymore because you’re different from everybody else).

In 2022, there’s too much celebration of contrarianism, with too little actual contrarianism. Too much celebration of “being different,” without any Socratic humility. Too much “original thought” that’s really just warmed-over, watered-down, unexamined versions of thoughts other people have already had.[1]

It’s become trite to laugh at the saying “you’re unique, just like everyone else.” In some ways, that statement is obviously true. In other ways, it exposes the contradictions in the way we talk about individualism. Individuality is over-celebrated and misunderstood. Individuality properly understood is less celebrated and therefore rarer.

Actually, everyone is unique. Just not in the way we sometimes think. Everyone is unique in that everyone is a person. Each person is a different person. You cannot remove one person and replace him with a different one, not really. If someone dies, she’s gone and you might find another person who has the same voice, job, personality, tastes, preferences, etc. but this other woman isn’t the same person. It’s not that every person has a unique potential for greatness. It’s that no two people are ever exactly alike.

I needed to say this bit about the cult of self to move on, because I realize that celebrating free-thinking too often strays into “I do my own research,” or “I come to my own conclusions,” or “I don’t need to have heroes,” or “I don’t get my opinions from a book,” which really comes down to a myopic epistemology in which there’s never a need to crack a book or attend a lecture or learn from the experts. Experts are often wrong. But they’re also often right. Knowledge begins with knowing that you don’t know everything.

Reflexive Contrarianism:

It’s amazing what passes for “contrarianism” sometimes. Does that word lose it’s meaning if there is a herd of contrarians?

Reflexive contrarianism isn’t free-thinking, because if you define yourself in opposition to someone else, you’re still defining yourself based on what someone else said/thought/wrote. Often, “contrarianism” boils down to uncritically rejecting whatever someone else says (and changing your opinion when they change theirs).

Worse, there’s the automatic rejection of “the mainstream media,” “the establishment,” “elite consensus,” “the experts,” “scientific consensus,” “mainstream institutions,” “corporations,” “the globalists,” “the rich,” etc.

Now, I’d be the first to tell you that any fool can see that the mainstream media, by and large, has a political bias. As I wrote in my defense of Substack, they’ve gotten stuff wrong before. I’ll also point out that arguments that resort to “scientific consensus,” miss the fact that science works based on skepticism and dissent, not consensus. As far as expertise is concerned, I’d argue that distrust of expertise is partly due to widespread failures on the part of experts – for which the onus is on “experts” to fix. In general, people in positions of power within institutions must always take responsibility for the reputation of their institutions, perhaps especially when they perceive they are being unfairly misperceived. Leadership requires stopping the buck.

But

With all of that aside, any time you’re putting a group in quotation marks, you’re probably oversimplifying it to the point of absurdity. None of these groups is a monolith, and many can be self-correcting. Within science, for instance, you’ll typically find one or two voices willing to buck the herd (As I type this, I’m reading Lost in Math, by a German physicist who’s asking some very hard questions about how her profession has been doing science – or failing to – for the last forty years). With the proliferation of online media, it’s become easier than ever to find publications that challenge mainstream consensus, such that there’s much less consensus within media than there has been at any time in the last century.

Generally speaking, even though the experts, or “the elite” (whoever that is), or the mainstream media, get things wrong, sometimes they get stuff right. Which means unthinking rejection of say, “the prevailing narrative,” is still a form of not thinking.

We see this in the idea that because some public health authorities beclowned themselves during the George Floyd protests/riots (pick your preferred term), then the public health establishment must be covering up hideous vaccine side effects. Or the idea that because some national security analysts were wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, “the U.S. defense industrial complex” must be secretly engineering the war in Ukraine.

But reflexive contrarianism doesn’t have to stoop to conspiracy theories. Sometimes it just manifests as a festering “X is always wrong/at fault,” where X stands for “the media,” or “the public health establishment,” or “the political establishment,” or “corporations,” or “white supremacy,” or “authoritarianism,” or “the patriarchy,” or “imperialism,” or “Big Pharma,” or “Big Tech,” etc. You can always count on certain voices to never deviate from their criticism of the same demons, no matter how much they have to work to fit their preferred demon in as the culprit of any new social ill.

How Unthinking Rejection Becomes Uncritical Acceptance:

It’s interesting to note that many contrarians can become part of a contrarian herd. Meaning that self-proclaimed “heterodox thinkers” not only always reject “the mainstream narrative,” they also automatically accept the “counter-mainstream narrative.” In this way, “vaccines are bad” becomes “ivermectin is the cure.” And “the Ukraine situation is complicated” becomes “it’s NATO’s fault.” Many so-called “contrarians” are really just followers of some counter-mainstream voice (ex., people who’ve discovered a newfound hatred for Anthony Fauci become devotees of Bret Weinstein).

Which brings me to a question: Why does all “heterodoxy” sound the same? Since when did “thinking differently” come to mean thinking a certain way? Why is it the case that if I told you someone “does his own research” about COVID, you will automatically know his position on everything from masks to death counts to ivermectin to hydroxychloroquine to vaccines?

At the point that contrarianism starts to all sound the same, it becomes passe.

Contrarianism vs. Anti-Contrarianism:

On the other hand, I’ve noticed a troubling rise in a different sort of unthinking rejection. A sort of backlash to the backlash. This comes from people who – were the term not already taken – might be called contrarians. These are people who seem to define themselves in opposition to “contrarianism” and “heterodoxy” (which as I just explained is beginning to be anything but heterodox). They, too, have a natural inclination to disagree with widely-held opinions. But – to set themselves apart – they lament the “rise of contrarianism.” I’ll call this line of thinking “anti-contrarianism.” And it’s just as much of an intellectual fallacy as reflexively disagreeing with “the prevailing narrative.”

Let me unpack this. You have one group of people who define themselves in opposition to a widely-believed narrative. This group (“The Contrarians”) creates what we might term a counternarrative. Then you get another group of individuals (who also are, at root, natural contrarians), who define themselves in opposition to the counternarrative. But once again, it usually comes down to uncritical rejection of one set of people based on the position they hold in society, and unthinking acceptance of another set of opinions based on the fact that the people “The Anti-Contrarians” don’t like have come out against them.

Confused? Let me re-explain. A narrative develops and becomes widespread. “The Contrarians” immediately raise objections to it. “The Anti-Contrarians” raise objections to their objections. And it continues in a kind of reactive perpetual motion machine. It’s like thinking about thinking about thinking, and then thinking about the fact that you’re thinking about thinking about thinking. You get the idea.

At this point, you may have grasped that true free-thinking requires intellectual humility (recognizing that you might be wrong) and a willingness to avoid reflexively rejecting or accepting anything based on the person who said it.

In other words, don’t be a “Contrarian” or an “Anti-Contrarian.” And don’t be a conformist, either. All three fall into intellectual fallacies. Taken to the extreme, all three groups are still filled with people who define themselves by other people’s opinions (because if you define yourself in opposition, you’re defined by the thing you oppose).

Some People Have a Need to Be Different:

One problem with natural contrarianism is that you start to have a need to “be different” (the exact opposite happens with natural conformists). Hence, you reflexively disagree with everyone. I’ve struggled with this at times. As I’ve grown older, I’ve been able to recognize it a little better than I once did.  

To be honest, there’s very little that’s redeeming about needing to disagree with people for the sake of being different. Sometimes, it’s okay to go along with the crowd. The more you recognize yourself disagreeing to be disagreeable, the better you’ll understand when you have legitimate differences and when you’re just being a jerk.

Because in criticizing conformity and reflexive disagreement, I’m not praising conformity. Again, critical thinking lies somewhere in between. Furthermore, if you’re disagreeing not out of a desire to be different but out of a sincerely-held belief, that is a good thing. We need people who think differently (who actually think differently, not just who think in opposition). It’s important to reflexively disagree with someone when you think they’re legitimately wrong – not wrong because of who they are or what position they have but wrong on principle.

For instance, I have never thought violations of freedom of expression were acceptable, no matter who proposed them. I was against such violations when they were proposed or implemented by John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the Moral Majority, Tipper Gore, woke college kids, public schools, the right, the left, J.D. Vance, AOC, Donald Trump, “law and order” Republicans, the FCC, “cancel culture” Democrats, and everybody in between.[2] I’ve stated that one of the reasons I’m on Substack is their “laissez faire approach to free speech.”

For this reason, I will reflexively disagree with anyone who wants to limit or restrict expression, whether or not they’re on “my side” and regardless of my own feelings on the speech in question (including if it’s personally offensive to me). I don’t say this to talk myself up, but simply to explain that reflexive disagreement isn’t “needing to be different” when it comes from a place of deeply-held belief.

All of which brings me to the upside of contrarianism.

Genuine Diversity of Thought:

It turns out that in a free society there’s an upside to having contrarians and anti-contrarians, experts and nonexperts, elite media and reactionary media, authorities and people whose natural reaction to authority is the middle finger, people who bend contrarian and people who bend conformist, as well as hopefully some critical thinkers.

A free society requires diversity of thought, because without that come the beginnings of tyranny. Although I have my disagreements with John Stuart Mill,[3] I tend to think he gives one of the best explanations for why free society requires extreme freedom of expression in On Liberty. According to Mill, we should welcome disagreement for a number of reasons, including: if you’re wrong about something, you can be corrected; if you’re right about something, you can correct the other person; and either way you learn and understand your own position and the issue better.  

Society needs contrarians because the great mass of people might be wrong about something.[4] Imagine if the herd of lemmings hadn’t whacked the guy that said, “hey, maybe this year we shouldn’t all go jump off that cliff. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” In fact, for any institution, or set of institutions, or society, self-correction requires dissent and argument. I think he uses the wrong example, but Jonathan Rauch makes a good case in this article that the media is self-correcting because it is forever fighting. The need for dissent in order to produce self-correction applies to societies, but it also applies to philosophy, science, and the pursuit of knowledge.

One of the fundamental premises of science is the rigorous attempt to prove your own hypothesis wrong. Science only works if it is filled with dissenters. Theories grow stronger only when we try to disprove them. Which is why consensus destroys science, because it discourages the pursuit of truth.[5]

One might go so far as to say that the study of science (with a lowercase s) is antifragile, in exactly the way that Taleb meant that word. The subtitle of his book, Antifragile, is “Things That Gain from Disorder.” Anyone familiar with the idea of antifragility will understand that things that are antifragile are made stronger by disorder and stress, and in fact wither and die without disorder and stress. Science is quite obviously made stronger by dissent, by rigorous attempts to break theories and cause them to fail (which is known as “testing a hypothesis”), and by chaos in the marketplace of ideas.

In fact, one might go so far as to say that all of what I have written in this section is about how antifragility applies to institutions and free societies. To take Mill to his logical conclusion, society gains from intellectual disorder. To have genuine diversity of thought, you need chaos in the marketplace of ideas. Without that chaos, science, free societies, intellectual institutions, and the pursuit of knowledge wither and die.

Which is why you need contrarians. You need someone to call bull. To tell the emperor that he has no clothes. In any group of people, you need someone to say, “why are we even doing this?” or “what if we just mix everything up and see what happens?” or “I know everybody wants this launch to go off tomorrow, but I just wanted to bring up this one tiny thing about icing on the O-Ring,” or that sort of thing.

At the very least, such people are entertaining.

Two Cheers for Thinking Differently:

I tend to naturally bend towards distrust of groupthink, consensus, collective decision-making, or anything that was “decided by committee.” But, sometimes, the group is right. Drunk driving is a bad idea (raising the drinking age might not be, but that’s a different subject). Vaccines really don’t cause autism. Neil Armstrong really did land on the Moon.

But, sometimes, the group is wrong. The Earth wasn’t flat (and still isn’t). Presidential primaries really weren’t a healthy addition to our democracy. And maybe more work on string theory isn’t going to go anywhere and we need to start barking up a different tree if we’re going to make any advancements in physics.

So, we need contrarians and conformists in society, but what we really need is more intellectual humility.[6] A little less reflex and a little more gut-checking. “Going your own way,” and “thinking for yourself,” are in vogue, even as they’re rare. Recognizing your own priors (i.e., do you tend to go along with other people or disagree out of habit) is the first step towards truly thinking critically. And a free society, above all, needs citizens who can think clearly.

And we also need a few cranks to occasionally tell the rest of us that we’re full of it.

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[1] Not that there’s anything wrong with repeating what someone else has said in a simpler form, so long as you know that’s what you’re doing. We need popularizers.

[2] Figuratively speaking. Obviously, I wasn’t alive during the Adams administration.

[3] I was pretty unpersuaded by Utilitarianism.

[4] There are other important reasons. For one thing, free speech and free press act as a check on power, meaning that extreme freedom of expression diffuses power concentrations. Perhaps it can even destroy power, but a further treatment of this topic is beyond the scope of this essay.

[5] That’s not an argument about climate change. It’s an argument that the proponents of the theory did themselves an extreme disservice by justifying themselves with arguments about “scientific consensus.”

[6] I could certainly use more myself.