How to Think Clearly When Institutions Are Lying to You
Three questions for clear thinking in an age of confusion.
Here’s a little experiment you can try if you want to add a bit of drama to your day. Walk into your next diversity training session and declare that men cannot be women. You’ll be sitting across from HR by lunchtime and given a pamphlet about unconscious bias. Persist in your line of thinking, and you’ll be shown the door.
Now try running the experiment the other way. If you’re a man, show up in a floral sundress and announce you identify as a woman (whatever that is) and mention you’ve always felt like “one of the girls”. You’ll be asked your pronouns, told how brave you are, and someone will cry. You’ll get a promotion by Friday.
Something has gone badly wrong with our culture’s understanding of what is true. We all know it. Modern institutions insist on claims about reality that are obviously false – and they’ll happily destroy your career for noticing. Saying nothing increasingly feels safer than pointing out what everyone can see.
None of this is new. Power has always sought to shape perceptions to maintain control. The Catholic Church managed it for centuries, until the printing press made scripture accessible to anyone who could read. The Soviets did it with Pravda – a paper whose name literally meant “truth” – while printing little more than obvious lies.
Where simple propaganda fails, authoritarian regimes can enforce narrative control through censorship, surveillance, and punishment. Today North Korea is the extreme case while China relies on the same tools but without enforced religious devotion to an obese alcoholic at the centre of it.
Democracies cannot operate this way. They are, by definition, built on the idea of consent – although theory and practice diverge on that point to different degrees from one democracy to the next.
But Western democracies are increasingly focused on managing dissent rather than winning consent. This means dialling up confusion about what is true and what is false – the confused are easier to manage, after all. It’s why obvious but unwelcome claims about reality have been turned into moral transgressions. Concerned about mass uncontrolled immigration? It’ll be reframed as bigotry. Men in women’s spaces? Don’t be so transphobic.
What’s new in all this is not the desire to control perception, but the methods – adapted for the digital age. Yuri Bezmenov, the Soviet defector, called it ideological subversion. The goal isn't enthusiastic belief but moral exhaustion.
As Bezmenov put it:
“What it basically means is to change the perception of reality to such an extent that despite an abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their family, their community and their country.”
In such an environment, clear thinking has become a form of resistance. Not the romantic kind that wears a beret or produces samizdat. I mean the basic intellectual hygiene we all need to maintain a free and open society when institutions benefit from muddled thinking.
Public confusion about moral issues has real consequences. Too often, we discover the most shocking examples when the damage has already been done: the medical clinics winging it with experimental procedures on children; grooming gangs raping girls on an industrial scale for years while officials looked away, too frightened of being called racist to protect the most vulnerable people in our society.
We know how it works by now. Flood the information space with euphemisms and make obvious observations radioactive. Punish clarity by throwing around words like “bigot” and “far-right” but reward those who pretend not to see what’s going on, who say “complex safeguarding issues” when they mean rape. Who talk about “gender-affirming care” when they’re describing experimental interventions. Who refer to “community tensions” when trying to avoid saying what everyone can see. Each phrase works like a semantic anaesthetic designed to numb the public to reality while pretending to engage with it.
It’s not working any more – at least not to the same extent – yet still the institutions persist, backed by a sprawling cohort of believers and enforcers who stalk the public square in the name of progress. Chief among them are the celebrity activists and useful idiots who read from an unchanging script that got old a long time ago. And beneath them legions of online activists exhausting good-faith debate by pretending not to understand what’s going on.
It’s a cliché that schools teach students what to think rather than how to think, but it’s also largely true. If you’re in any doubt, ask the next teenager you meet how many genders there are. Whether they answer earnestly or laugh with embarrassment, it’ll be obvious they know what you’re referring to. Two decades ago, the same child would have looked at you in puzzled silence.
The upside is that clear thinking doesn’t require an institution’s permission.
Three questions for clear thinking
I’ve mentioned these questions before, but I keep coming back to them. They’re the quickest way I know of checking whether I’m thinking clearly about what’s going on or just repeating off-the-shelf opinions. Like everyone else, I get things wrong all the time. I once assumed universities were bastions of free inquiry rather than ideological conformity factories, for example. We live and learn.
I’ll use the example of the trans debate and the recent (and very welcome) shift in thinking on this issue – led by J.K. Rowling among others.
Let’s start with Karl Popper’s simple test. Can this claim be falsified? Can it be proven wrong? If it can’t, then it’s not making a factual claim at all. Take the statement: “Trans women are women”. On its surface, we know it to be nonsense. But scratch a little deeper, and we really do know it to be nonsense, because there’s no imaginable evidence that could falsify it. It rests on redefinition of the word women rather than empirical assertion. Contrast that with the statement, “puberty blockers reduce suicidality in gender-distressed adolescents”. This is plainly falsifiable – as was shown when researchers tested it, finding the evidence to be weak or absent. Popper’s falsifiability test is a quick and reliable heuristic: when a statement must be affirmed but cannot be examined, you’re dealing with belief, not science.
Next is the reversal test. Would you accept this argument from your opponents? Good reasoning survives being flipped on its head. Bad arguments don’t. (Almost every opinion piece in the Guardian fails this test because the writers can’t imagine accepting the same argument from the Telegraph. The reverse is often true). Sticking with the trans issue, if an ultra-conservative clinician argued that denying conversion therapy would cause gay teenagers to kill themselves, progressives would rightly demand evidence and reject emotional blackmail. Yet the same logic, used in the opposite direction, was treated as beyond question in the recent case of Fox Varian. And that’s just the one we know about. The reversal test is a reliable way to discover when ideological convictions substitute for principled rational objections.
Finally, consider the most uncomfortable question of all – and the one I find myself asking most often. What would change your mind? Serious disagreement requires knowing what would prove you wrong. A skeptic of paediatric gender medicine might say: “If long-term evidence shows conclusively that affirmation-only care produces better outcomes, then I would immediately reassess my position”. Now ask trans activists the same question and the answer is usually evasive. Why? Because the conclusion was reached first and everything else arranged around it. An inability to specify what would change your mind is the clearest signal that dogma has replaced genuine inquiry.
The Socratic method
The three questions above aren’t new. They’re just variations on what Socrates was doing 2,500 years ago: using simple logic to puncture fashionable delusions.
Socrates wandered Athens asking questions that exposed how little people actually knew beneath their confidently asserted opinions. His method was simple: keep asking “why?” and “how do you know?” until the gap between what someone claims to believe and what they can defend became impossible to ignore.
He was called “the gadfly of Athens” because he was an irritant to power that refused to buzz off. The name stuck, mostly because it’s more memorable than “insufferable busybody who won’t stop asking questions and mocking our unearned moral certainties”. That’s how this publication gets its name, by the way – in honour of those who won’t let fashionable delusions pass unchallenged.
The habit eventually earned Socrates a death sentence for “impiety” and “corrupting the youth” – a polite way of saying he embarrassed and humiliated the elites with his relentless probing.
Simple, reasonable questions can feel like aggression to people invested in not asking them, especially those today who are fluent in progressive newspeak but unable to construct a falsifiable argument. The result is a hypersensitive professional class that mistakes well-meaning delusions for insight and performative morality for principle.
As Bezmenov explained, the goal is to change perception of reality so thoroughly that people lose the ability to come to sensible conclusions. You don’t need gulags when you can convince people that noticing reality is a moral failing while parroting slogans wins you status.
Questions that insist on clear thinking don’t protect you from errors – we all make them – but they do force you to examine whether you’re reasoning or rationalising, observing reality or accruing the social rewards of pretending not to see it.
More tools for clearer thinking
I’ve put together a collection of mental tools I’ve found useful over the years – razors for cutting through nonsense in philosophical debates and online arguments. It’s available now to paid subscribers as a small thank-you for supporting The Gadfly. Click the download button below.
I’ll add more resources over time, and may switch on Substack’s chat feature if there’s interest in discussing the sort of topics I cover, sharing links to other articles and so on.
A quick note on paywalls. New essays will usually remain free on publication, with some moving behind the paywall after a couple of days to help support this work.
Thanks for reading.
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It’s striking how the “gadfly” remains so pertinent even a few thousand years later. This raises questions about whether humanity is truly evolving or simply repeating its past mistakes.
I agree with every word. And the same principles must apply to MAGA and the cult of Trump. He could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose support. Or try to overturn an election. This is at least as important as the nonsense from the woke leftists, no?