← Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
DOCUMENTARY - When the State Loses Moral Legitimacy
00:23:11
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- [00:04]
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Welcome to Outrage Overload, a science podcast about outrage and lowering the temperature. Chaotic Scenes at this Year's White House Correspondents Dinner as US President Donald Trump was rushed off stage after shots were fired in the hotel where the event was taking place. When the news broke of the recent shooting at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, a strange thing happened. Millions of people didn't react with grief or even political anger. They reacted with suspicion. A National News Guard poll found that 24% of Americans believed the event was fake, while only 45% considered it legitimate, and 32% remain unsure.
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By midday on Sunday, there was over 300,000 posts on X alone using the term staged. Many accounts shared that they thought Trump had fabricated this attack to divert from his poor approval ratings or distract from the war in Iran. Others theorized that Trump was trying to ramp up supply support for his controversial plans to build a new White House ballroom. And indeed, Trump himself referenced that ballroom in the press conference following the incident, where he talks about why it's more important than ever and how significant the construction of this ballroom is.
- [01:36]
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When public suspicion reaches the point where citizens view major crises as state sponsored fabrications, it marks a critical breakdown in governance. History shows that a state can't effectively govern, but by law alone. It requires a baseline of moral legitimacy. When that evaporates, the system faces an entirely different kind of structural instability. To understand why this happens, we have to look past the Internet memes and look at the underlying Mechanics of Trust. Dr. Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies, explains this as a breakdown in how humanity builds a shared world.
- [02:13]
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I would say what is it that accounts for the fact that nobody is able to put forward an authoritative view and therefore things that flatly contradict each other, interpretations that contradict each other, floating around the airwaves and nobody's able to say this is definitive, but there's a good deal of social science about that. And I think that the the place to begin is that you need a kind of agreement about things that are in the domain of values before you can arrive at a factual disposition that everybody will agree with. The simplest piece of this is you delegate to particular institutions the right to have the final say and and then you abide by whatever that group says. You don't get into a conspiracy theory till you start challenging the right of that body to be dispositive.
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In other words, facts don't come first, trust does. We only agree on what happened after we've already agreed on who gets to decide. Once you stop trusting the institution, you stop accepting its conclusions, and the conspiracy theories rush in to fill the void. Here's an important the state is not made of bricks or armies. It is made of trust. And right now, that trust is dissolving. Once you stop believing the state's facts, you stop obeying the state's laws. It doesn't take a massive leap to go from questioning the narrative to completely rejecting the system. This isn't just an abstract debate about media or politics. It's. It has real, tangible consequences for how people choose to live. Twenty years ago, Dan Behrman started questioning the core legitimacy of the system. His response wasn't just to post online. It was far more radical.
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Taxation is a violation of consent. So, you know, you go, you find a job, you make an arrangement with the employer, he's going to pay you some amount, and then the government just comes by and says, hang on a second, you got to give us a piece of it, right? Or whether it's sales tax or, you know, some people see other taxes as slightly more voluntary. You can avoid importing stuff into the country if you want to avoid import taxes. You can stop buying gasoline if you don't want to pay gas tax. But ultimately, the government is not the one providing the gas or importing the stuff for you, right? You're still, you're still paying to do all that stuff yourself. You're, you're creating these contracts with other people, and the government's just stepping in and saying, hey, you got to give us a piece of it. And they justify it in all kinds of different ways, but ultimately it's, you know, if somebody doesn't want to participate with the government, the government's going to stick a gun back in your face and say, you know, what other choice do you have? And so that's, that's my primary objection with, with taxation.
- [05:16]
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Biermann isn't just writing libertarian essays. He took the philosophy out into the physical highway.
- [05:22]
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I haven't had a driver's license in 20 years. I don't register my cars. I don't have. I don't. Still don't have a license. I drive without it. And that, even more specifically, is easier to get wrapped up into trouble. So I tell people very specifically not to do that. But I do try to use this as proof and as a hook to get people interested, but to show them that things actually function, even if you exclude government from the equation.
- [05:50]
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For 20 years. Behrman refused to sign the contract, but his journey raises the central challenge of our story is the Social contract actually a myth of coercion, or is it the only thing keeping us safe? To find out, we have to look at the exact legal and structural machinery that holds us together. How does a society actually encode morality? Dr. Jasanoff argues it isn't through grand philosophical myths, but through mundane, everyday regulations like a local building permit.
- [06:18]
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When you go to law school, boot camp, year one, one thing you get taught is don't ever say that there's a vacuum of anything, because even that is a state that you can describe. So even to say there is no social contract and it is a myth means not that there's no social contract, but this person's idea of the social contract happens not to involve the state. I mean, can you. If the social contract is just a way of saying that I buy into the idea of living in a society and, you know, I agree to live with other people in that society under conditions abcde, you can easily make a world in which ABCDE do not add up to the Constitution of the United States. In fact, all other countries in the world are living, breathing exemplars of people who have decided to live with other people, but not according to the Constitution of the United States. Do they have a social contract? Yes, they have a social contract. It's just different from the one that we have. And I think in this country, libertarians think that it's. Libertarians think that their right to live in a certain way in society should not have to go through the nodes that are called DC or the Beltway or the federal government. Not that, for instance, there should be no doctors, and we should not have ways of deciding, you know, who's a safe doctor and who's not. Or, I mean, it would be interesting to push it. It would be interesting to push libertarians on where it is that they actually do end up delegating authority to something, whether they call it a state or don't call it a state. I think that of course you can and do legislate morality. And there's, you know, probably, you know, at least a dozen different laws that I'm subject to right here now in my living room as I sit and talk to you. For instance, I'm having a basement renovation done. And I can't do that without the city of Cambridge issuing a permit. And I have a permit sitting in my front window, and I can see it. And, you know, that's a morality. I mean, that has to do with. I mean, I own this property. I don't even even have a mortgage on it, so I can dispose of it however I please, but I can't build it however I please. I need, I mean, you know, so, so I think that of course you can legislate morality. Can you make people behave in accordance with legislated morality? Not all the time. Otherwise we wouldn't have murders. But does legislation help cement the morality such that people have a better sense of order? They understand, you know, these are the rules.
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You might expect that a disagreement over building permits and driver's licenses remains an intellectual debate. You might expect that reasonable people can just agree to disagree. But look what actually happens when these two worldviews collide in the real world. The music stops, the borders harden, and the guns come out. In 2014, a dispute involving rancher Cliven Bundy over cattle grazing fees in Nevad escalated into a tense standoff between federal agents and hundreds of armed militia members. Just two years later, that same anti government friction led to a six week armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. In both the Bundy and Malheur standoffs, the abstract theory of non compliance became an armed reality.
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This isn't federal land. It belongs to the people, not the federal government.
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It's public land.
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Protesters who rallied around ranchers have taken over a federal building right outside of Burns, Oregon.
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Dan Behrman analyzed that conflict not as a crime, but as a predictable response to a hypocritical system.
- [10:21]
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That one's kind of a difficult one, right? Because we have this land that was supposedly federal land and these people who were supposedly using it as, you know, their, as basically as the federal government grants free rights to use that land. And at some point the government said, we don't want you on this land even though it was public land the whole time. Right. Had they owned the land, it might have been a little bit different. But what's interesting about this whole thing is when a lot of times we say, oh, this is the government's land. But it's like if I say, this is my house, I bought it. Here's my receipt, right? Here's my deed, here's my title. When it comes to the government, where's your receipt? Right? Because a lot of times it's, you know, and maybe they did buy it from another, another country. They're talking about this right now with how, you know, most of the United States was purchased from, you know, France or Spain, but it's like those countries are in Europe. How did they, how did France or Spain have this land? And it all, has it all Comes back to, you know, conquering foreign land. There were people on this land before any of those countries got here. And then their kings basically sent people over and said, this is ours now. And then they started breaking it up and selling it and trading it and everything else. If the federal government walks into a country and says, this is our territory because we have more guns, as they have done in the past, whenever they, you know, take over something like Puerto Rico or the Philippines or Hawaii or any of these places, that, you know, they just basically go in and say, this is ours now. You know, so if the Bundys have enough guns and they want to do that, then, you know, what's the. What's the federal government complaining about? Not to say that that's right at that point, but it is, you know, for them to say, no, you can't do that is kind of shows a little bit of hypocrisy also. So. So that kind of makes me side with the Bundys, which is, you know, as I see it, siding with the people over this government where, you know, if we. If we want to call it a republic again, you know, which. Which Americans were the ones who said to the federal government, hey, you got to move in there and kick the Bundys out, right? It's like the government was not acting as a republic when they did that. They were acting as an autonomous. I don't know if I wouldn't call it a dictatorship, but an autonomous authoritarian vessel run by, you know, the president or whoever's. Whoever's commanding that order.
- [12:40]
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The conspiracy theories about the White House shooting and the armed standoffs in Nevada are a manifestation of the same disease. They happen because our shared values are in crisis in general.
- [12:50]
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It's been established over a long time, not just through my work, but including my work, that we are more of an adversarial society, that we like the give and take, that the courtroom is our model for how we resolve things in head to head confrontations. Somebody as savvy as Tocqueville saw this in the 1820s and wrote about it and said, americans do politics through law. So, you know, but that just means that the legal way of settling disputes is one of the ones that we have embraced, that to every issue we say there's a side A and a side B and they will duke it out. And ultimately we will trust a jury or a judge or whoever to set or a commission. I mean, you know, we have different solutions to settle these things. But we're living in a world now when we're basically saying there's no jury and there's no judge and there's no inspector general, and there's no, you know, nobody at the end of the day, who is dispassionate enough for us to trust them to get the last word. And, you know, and one can dig more deeply into why that's happened. But you could say it's a pathology of American civic epistemology which relied on adversarial at loggerheads, confrontations, but believed, at the end of the day, that there was somebody who could adjudicate. A pathology of that is losing the adjudicating position. And so I think you can say that what has happened to America over the years is that people have lost faith in that position, whether of expertise or of nonpartisan politics or a president who truly speaks for the people, or even the idea of democracy as being for a united people. I mean, if you no longer have a sense of shared values, then you're not going to believe that any government you're electing is by, for and of the people. I mean, the very notion of the people is dissolving.
- [15:12]
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What she's describing is something distinctly American. We've always settled our fights through confrontation, in courtrooms, in elections, in the press. We were never a society that sought consensus. We were a society that trusted the referee. The crisis isn't that Americans are fighting, it's that nobody believes in the referee anymore. No judge, no expert, no institution feels dispassionate enough to get the final word. And without that, the very idea of a shared American people starts to come apart. Why is the signal fading? Jasanoff argues we are trapped in an invisible revolution. Our lives are completely interdependent on a global scale, but our political institutions are still running on centuries old, localized hardware.
- [15:57]
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I think we're going through a kind of invisible revolutionary process right now. If you don't mind me spouting off a bit on what I believe. I mean, I believe that over the last 100, 150 years, we've created, in all kinds of ways a greater need to live with people that we used to consider safely, other not having much to do with us. And it's no longer possible. It's no longer possible because in this country in particular, we're thickly intertwined with foreigners who've come and inhabited our territory. You and I do not have a genetic lineage that would match up very closely, and yet we probably both carry passports of the same country. So that kind of thing has happened. We have transportation Technologies and economic technologies and so forth that make us more interdependent. We have a planetary climate system that makes us not able to live, as if we don't care what other people elsewhere in the world are doing and how they are living. So it's become kind of necessary to revisit the territory of the other and decide how we're going to live with them. Even here, inside of our own country, we have people who are denying a very foundational aspect of the American social contract, which is you're born here, you're brought up here, you're educated here, you pay your taxes here, you earn your money, you do your social dues by being a productive member of society. You have your family, you're raising your kids, you're part of the educational system. Therefore you're one of us. We no longer seem to be willing to accept that to the extent that we were, say, 40, 50 years ago. So that's a fraying of a certain kind of social contract. And I don't think we figured out how to live in a world where expectations about how you live with people you see as your own kind relate to people that you don't see as your own kind for whatever reason, and yet you're brought face to face with them, and you have to deal with them in some way. So I think we're living through this phase where we're, in effect, having to think about a planetary social contract, and that is very uncomfortable.
- [18:32]
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The social contract was written for a smaller, simpler world, one where your neighbors looked like you, worshipped like you, and rarely had to negotiate what they owed each other. That world is gone. The question of who counts as one of us and what we owe each other across those lines is one our institutions were never designed to answer. We haven't written the new contract yet, and in the meantime, the old one is struggling. When a state cannot project a vision of the common good, it must resort to raw coercion. And coercion alone cannot sustain an empire. As Dan Bearman reminds us, the government isn't checking your license.
- [19:10]
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You, your community is ultimately the reason that we have government. And the reason government is so powerful is because everyone gives. They. They put all their faith into it, Right? Like all the things that I do, I'm not worried about the government coming after me. I'm worried about the government coming after me and all of my neighbors happily giving over their money to fund that government to come after me. And all of my neighbors showing up in the jury pool to say, send this person to prison and all of my neighbors, you know, you know, observing me and snitching on me and telling the government everything that I'm doing, like, that's really where the government's real power comes from. Because if we all just said, hey, we don't like this government, we don't want to deal with it anymore, they would cease to exist. So the problem that I see is everyone's empowering the government. And, like, I do this as a demonstration, but ultimately I want people to understand what our rights are and where the government's limitations should end. Because if we can at least look at the government and if we can all agree, hey, what they're doing over here is wrong, then, you know, it would be a lot easier for us to stop them if we all agreed.
- [20:22]
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The erosion of trust didn't begin with any single administration. The Bundy standoff happened in 2014. The fractures Jasanoff describes were decades in the making. This wasn't a problem that arrived with one election. But there is a difference between a structure slowly weakening and someone taking a sledgehammer to the foundation. When a government doesn't just benefit from public distrust, but actively cultivates it, when the official response to a shooting at the White House correspondence dinner includes a press conference pivoting to a ballroom construction project, something has shifted. What we are watching is not a pattern of mistakes. The falsehoods repeat across speeches, interviews, and official messaging, restated even after being contradicted by evidence inflating what didn't happen, denying what did. At a certain point, the lie stops being a lie and becomes a governing style. The goal isn't to persuade. It's to build an alternative reality durable enough that the original one stops mattering. Jasanoff warned us that the pathology sets in when we lose the adjudicating position, the dispassionate authority that gets the last word. What happens when the institution that is supposed to occupy that position becomes the loudest voice insisting there is no truth to be had? The state was already losing its grip on shared reality. Now it is an active participant in its destruction. Many thanks to Dr. Sheila Jasanoff, Puertheimer professor of Science and Technology Studies at at the Harvard Kennedy School, whose research on how societies build shared knowledge has never felt more urgent. And to Dan Bearman, international speaker and author of Taxation is Theft, That is it for this episode of the Outrage Overload podcast. For links to everything we talked about on this episode, go to outrageoverload.net Outrage Overload is a Connors Institute podcast. The Connors Institute for Non Partisan Research and Civic Engagement at Shippensburg University works to disseminate high quality nonpartisan information to the American public around issues of societal well being, democracy promotion, and news literacy. If you found this episode valuable, please share it or leave a review. It really helps. Thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time.
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This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.