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There is a particular intellectual posture that has become distinctly fashionable at the edges of the liberty movement. It goes roughly like this: a public figure makes a contested empirical claim. Experts in the relevant field find the claim unsupported by the available evidence and say so. The figure, rather than producing better evidence, reframes the disagreement as persecution and blames “the establishment” for it. Sympathetic bystanders, some of them part of the pro-liberty movement, often rally to the outsiders’ defense, not because they sincerely agree with the underlying evidence, but because they see an outsider being criticized “by the establishment”. The liberty tradition, they argue, must side with the outsider, regardless of evidence.
Such reasoning is unpersuasive and it may come at a reputational cost for the pro-liberty movement. We want to make the case here that the open society Karl Popper described, and Hayek defended, is not a proxy for legitimizing falsehoods, or any currently trending contrarian claim. It is something much more demanding than that.
Popper’s main concern was with how open societies handle disagreements. In The Open Society and Its Enemies he claims that the alternative to authoritarian consensus isn’t the rejection of consensus as a whole, but rather the institutionalization of criticism: a system in which claims can be tested through structured procedures rather than through power. Peer review, replication, citations and more importantly the accumulation of evidence are not the enemies of the open society, they’re its working machinery.
Popper was clear that totalitarianism and pseudo-science share a feature: they both treat criticism of their claims as evidence of the critic’s bad faith. A classical liberal epistemology, then, isn’t one that gives to outsiders any more than it gives to insiders. It’s one that asks everyone the exact same questions.
The same misreading has been applied, with even less justification, to Hayek’s pretense of knowledge. The concept has been recently used here to defend the legitimacy of outsiders making overconfident, and undocumented, claims about past civilizations or other hidden truths.
Hayek’s argument was that complex systems generate more information than any single mind can comprehend, and that anyone who claims to have a full understanding of such systems should probably be regarded with suspicion. For instance, the archeologist who says the evidence, gathered by others and himself, does not support a hypothesis of a globe-spanning Ice Age civilization is exercising precisely the epistemic humility Hayek prized. On the other hand, the fantasy novel author and wannabe archeologist who insists that such a civilization existed and was deliberately written out of history, and that almost no one other than him, has access to that knowledge, is probably closer to the figure Hayek’s argument would have targeted.
In fact, what often masquerades as a brave intellectual dissent is, upon closer inspection, merely the execution of a highly predictable playbook.
This is what the playbook roughly looks like:
- Begin with a contested claim: about archeology, about climate, about a pandemic, about elections, about whatever’s trending.
- When the claim is challenged on evidentiary grounds, never try to produce stronger evidence. Instead, reframe the challenge as a manifestation of institutional bias or ideological capture.
- Treat the size and the persistence of the criticism you’re facing as further evidence of the existence of a “hidden truth” and of the importance of what you’re saying.
- If ever asked for evidence, say that you’re just raising questions others are too afraid to ask and that demand for evidence is itself a form of intellectual policing.
- When confronted with cold evidence, say it’s just an attack on free speech and frame yourself as a liberty hero.
- Grow your audience with the buzz, and receive admiration from supporters for standing up alone against “the establishment”.
- Repeat.
You do not have to look very far to see the playbook in action.
It’s the exact method Graham Hancock uses to dismiss archeologists who ask for proof of his advanced Ice Age civilization. It’s the posture Candace Owens adopted when pushing bizarre claims about the wife of the French president, framing herself as a truth-teller asking questions the mainstream media will not. It is the editorial strategy of Tucker Carlson who hosted Darryl Cooper, introduced him as America’s “most honest historian” while he explained that Churchill was “the chief-villain” of WWII and pushed Holocaust revisionism. It’s the business model of Alex Jones, whose “just asking questions” about Sandy Hook got him hit with over a billion dollars in defamation verdicts for the harassment his lies brought down on the victims’ families.
To defend free inquiry isn’t to defend every theory that runs this playbook. True open inquiry requires that weak arguments be defeated by stronger ones. Conflating healthy skepticism with unsophisticated contrarianism strips our movement of any kind of intellectual credibility and ends up rewarding provocateurs rather than actual movers. Doing otherwise would only confirm every lazy stereotype critics already hold about us: that we mistake contrarianism for thought, that we’ll defend any fringe figure who frames himself as being silenced, and that our commitment to free inquiry is really in fact more a commitment to anything that’s currently not in the mainstream.
The freedom to question is real, but it has always come with a companion duty: to engage seriously with the answer, and to update one’s claims when objectively better arguments arrive. The figures who run the playbook claim that freedom while refusing the duty that comes with it. If the liberty movement is to mean anything, it has to be able to tell the difference.
