DocWatts

Navigating Bad-Faith Perspectives

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I thought I might share a snippet (the first half or so) of an in-depth article I authored on Malicious Perspectives, which is the culmination of a series of articles on the epistemology of perspectives. The series is part of a philosophy book I'm writing, 7 Provisional Truths, which aims to make in-depth epistemology accessible for non-specialists. 

The write-up is essentially a field guide on how to skillfully navigate bad-faith viewpoints, which explores why we're vulnerable to these manipulation tactics, how to spot them, and what to do about them. We also explore on of history's most most consequential examples of these calculated deceptions: the 'Stabbed In The Back' myth that became the founding mythology of Nazi ideology.

The full article can be found here:
https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/malicious-perspectives

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Calculated Distortions And Their Consequences

What happens when viewpoints aren’t just misguided, but deliberately poisonous? The answer begins with acknowledging a basic truth about perspectives - their partiality. ‘Partial’ means localized, limited, and incomplete. This partiality isn’t a flaw, but a fundamental feature of how we engage with reality through these vantage points. While we might aspire to ‘a view from nowhere’, what we actually occupy is a ‘view from within’. For our sensemaking is always situated within a particular body, culture, and historical moment that shapes what we see. And while we can certainly step back from these lived orientations, we can’t step outside of them entirely. Which means that perspectives necessarily reveal and distort - capturing some aspects of a situation while obscuring others.

High-quality perspectives acknowledge these constraints and work within them. Misguided ones ignore or deny them. And malicious ones weaponize them. A malicious perspective is a calculated distortion of reality - one that’s deployed in service of goals its architects dare not state openly. The harm they cause isn’t an unintended byproduct, but a deliberate strategy for achieving ends that honest methods can’t reach. If you have a rotten agenda that would be rejected if stated plainly - and lack the means to impose it through brute force - then manipulation is what’s left. From run-of-the-mill con artists to aspiring dictators, where there’s an incentive and a means, bad actors will use any opening they can find to push their schemes. Hitler, after all, had far more success overthrowing democracy from within than by storming it from without through a putsch. The scale varies, but the pattern doesn’t. So what do these malignant operations look like on the ground?

Whether the aim is to deflect accountability, obstruct solutions, or consolidate power, the overall arc of this calculated deception remains the same: exploit problems where they exist, manufacture them where they don’t. And above all, ensure that nothing gets solved, because the goal isn’t to fix anything - it’s to consolidate power, deflect blame, or line pockets. And nothing opens doors to these ambitions like a good crisis. An exploitative employer doesn’t want you to feel secure at your job - they want workers whose positions are too precarious to make demands. A demagogue doesn’t want kitchen-table issues addressed - they want a citizenry desperate enough to grant them emergency powers.

If this playbook sounds familiar, there’s a reason - it bears more than a passing resemblance to an abusive relationship. Like an abusive partner, pushers of malicious perspectives will: 1) Reel you in with flattery, validation, and belonging. 2) Gradually distort your perception of reality. 3) Exploit your emotional vulnerabilities for control. 4) Attempt to isolate you from outside perspectives that might break the spell.

That’s the playbook. But what makes these manipulative tactics viable in the first place? After all, nobody sets out to join a cult, become a mouthpiece for propaganda, or get swindled by a demagogue. Yet people fall for this stuff all the time, so what gives?

Social Animals In A Messy World

The answer is that we’re navigating inherently murky terrain as social animals who are permeable to influence, with skin in the game for the conclusions we reach. Human intelligence is innately social - the same factors that allow for culture and cooperation also enable manipulation. But how does this play out in practice?

Benefit of the doubt gives these malicious framings an initial foothold, and the permeability of our situated perspectives gives them traction. Our viewpoints don’t emerge from some pristine inner sanctum, but from our messy entanglement with the world. We do our meaning-making as social animals - inheriting cultural templates and adapting or inverting them to fit our circumstances. And critically, this process is thoroughly entangled with our emotions, identity, and social belonging.

Given these stakes, the bulk of our attitudes and beliefs aren’t the product of careful reasoning - they’re organic outgrowths of the lives we’ve lived. We can’t deliberate over everything, so this autopilot is an essential feature of how we navigate the world. Our intellect is mostly content to step in when this pre-reflective flow hits a snag. Reasoning does play a role in this process - just not the leading one. The star of this show is intuition, with intellect acting more like a public relations firm for these emotionally grounded judgments. Reason’s primary job is to rationalize our existing beliefs - reconsidering them is secondary. There’s considerable inertia to revising convictions that we’ve already staked out - which is why it’s usually much easier to dig in than to change course.

Changing our minds is of course possible - it’s just that the path of least resistance runs in the opposite direction. Self-examination is hard, while self-justification runs on autopilot. Which is why we don’t tend to do it until the world knocks us on our ass in a way that our typical defenses can’t cover. But before we get too hard on ourselves, it’s worth understanding why we’re swimming upstream in the first place.

If these shortcuts seem pointless, that’s because we forget that they’re actually adaptations. However much we assume that our minds are built for rationality, evolution had different priorities - namely, keeping us alive. And because there’s no designer driving this process, the solutions it arrives at can be inelegant. In short: evolution doesn’t optimize - it satisfices - settling on adaptations that are ‘good enough’ for survival and reproduction. We see fingerprints of this process in our psychology, which is wired for speed and efficiency over accuracy and precision. The proof is in what we don’t notice. Consider the countless tasks you’ve executed flawlessly today - from getting dressed to eating breakfast to scrolling and tapping while on the toilet - without a moment’s thought.

We conduct most routine activities on autopilot, and there’s a good reason for this - we’d grind to a halt if we were forced to deliberate over the thousands of micro-decisions we make on a daily basis. Careful deliberation is cognitively and emotionally taxing because stopping to deliberate carries real opportunity costs. So it pays to be strategic about what we question - and this selectivity is intertwined with our deeply social nature.

While there’s a modern myth that our ancestors were rugged individualists who survived on grit and self-reliance, the reality was exactly the opposite - for most of human history, being cast out from the group meant certain death. The equation was brutally simple: ‘together we are safe, alone we die’.

That ‘together’, however, was radically smaller than today’s sprawling anonymity. Living in a ‘society’ of millions would have been an unthinkable contradiction for our distant ancestors, who survived within a hostile world by trusting and depending upon a small, tight-knit group. Dozens of individuals at most, whose survival was inseparable from your own. When your entire social universe is small enough to fit around a fire, reputation and belonging aren’t vanity but essential for survival.

This ancestral legacy has carved deep grooves into our psychology that continue to color our intuitions to this day. We are, fundamentally, groupish creatures. That means we’re calibrated for in-group loyalty over impartial judgement, and sensitivity to our social status over merit-based assessment. And these instincts run deep - operating at an intuitive level that’s scaffolded by reason and reinforced by emotion.

The practical takeaway is that we’re wired to trust what feels familiar, fear what feels foreign, conform to the group, and accept simple explanations over complex ones. This creates predictable vulnerabilities that skilled manipulators know how to exploit. And the most effective means for doing so often isn’t through lies. Lies are a liability - they take effort to maintain, leave trails investigators can follow, can collapse under their own contradictions. What’s better by far is to manufacture an unreality where truth itself is beside the point. Which brings us to the realm of bullshit.

Flooding The Zone

Bullshit is speech that’s manufactured without any regard for truth or falsehood, where the real aim isn’t to persuade, but to overwhelm and distract in pursuit of an undisclosed agenda. Bad actors are drawn to it like flies to shit because it’s a remarkably effective scaffolding for propping up a rotten edifice. This is how malicious perspectives gain their deepest foothold - not through convincing arguments, but by flooding the zone with shit until people give up trying to separate fact from fiction. It’s a deliberate scorched earth campaign against the epistemic commons, corroding trust in the type of shared reality that allows for productive disagreements.

And when bullshit is deployed at a societal scale, it becomes something even more dangerous - what scholars of authoritarianism call The Big Lie. Not an isolated falsehood - like denying an affair or fabricating evidence for weapons of mass destruction - but a narrative so audacious and repetitive that it wears down the mind’s ability to resist.

History's Most Consequential Lie

What happens when these audacious unrealities gain purchase? They draw blood. They build gas chambers. They turn neighbors against one another until societies fracture along lines of manufactured hatred. In short, they don’t just distort our understanding - they pave the way for real-world violence.

We don’t have to speculate about this dynamic - the historical record offers no shortage of case studies. From The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion that fueled pogroms across Europe to the Lost Cause narrative that paved the way for Jim Crow, the examples are as familiar as they are horrifying. Yet there’s one that towers above the rest as perhaps the definitive example of the Big Lie. The story begins in the final months of World War 1, in a war-ravaged Germany facing imminent defeat and collapse.

After four years of brutal conflict that had sent two million Germans to their graves and a naval blockade that left millions more on the brink of starvation, the military dictatorship that had emerged over the course of the war could no longer deny the reality that was staring them in the face. With its armies on the brink of collapse and civilian unrest escalating towards revolution, Germany faced a stark choice - surrender immediately or face imminent invasion and inevitable occupation by the Allied Powers. The Schlieffen Plan - Germany’s blueprint to avoid a two-front war by delivering a swift knockout blow to France - had failed catastrophically in the opening months of the war, condemning Germany to the grinding war of attrition the plan was designed to prevent.

With Allied armies pressing in on all sides, the generals who had promised swift victory now confronted total defeat after four years of industrial-scale carnage that had bled the nation white. This wasn’t just a bitter pill to swallow - it was a social apocalypse for the military aristocracy that had driven their nation to ruin. The toll on Germany’s civilian population, which had endured years of deprivation while their husbands, sons, and brothers died in trenches was similarly catastrophic - creating a traumatized nation that was desperate for answers, but would settle for scapegoats.

It was within this volatile environment that the architects of this defeat concocted a scheme to evade accountability for the catastrophe they’d engineered. The solution was to shift the blame to the newly formed civilian government, which had been hastily assembled as a prerequisite for a negotiated peace with the Allies. Rather than signing their names to the humiliating peace they’d made inevitable, Germany’s military elite instead engineered a transfer of power that left civilians holding the bag for a military disaster whose true scale had been systematically concealed from the public. Unless you were an exceptionally imaginative or unusually well-informed civilian, the sudden declaration of defeat would have arrived as an incomprehensible shock. While soldiers in the trenches had no illusions about Germany’s dire situation, those on the homefront were kept in the dark through strict censorship and wartime propaganda that assured them that victory was around the corner. Adding to this veneer of plausibility was the fact that Allied troops had yet to set foot on German soil, its armies still occupied foreign territory, and no climactic battle had sealed Germany’s fate.

It was into this perfect storm of shock, grief, and manufactured ignorance that Germany’s military elite orchestrated their coup de grâce - a Big Lie that would become the founding mythology of Nazi ideology, reshape German politics into a cauldron of conspiratorial grievance and betrayal, and open a path for decades of dehumanization that would ultimately lead to the Holocaust. The Dolchstoßlegende, or the Stabbed-In-The-Back myth, held that Germany wasn’t defeated from without; it was betrayed from within by Jews, socialists, and democratic politicians. While all three groups were vilified, antisemitism was the beating heart of this Big Lie. One where Jews were cast as the enemy from within - never mind that thousands of German Jews had died in trenches trying to prove their loyalty to a nation that would turn on them.

While the Stabbed-In-The-Back myth stands as history’s most consequential Big Lie, the technique didn’t die with the Third Reich. Its malevolent logic has been a tried-and-tested tactic of authoritarians ever since: bury the truth beneath a mountain of audacious bullshit until reality itself is contorted into something unrecognizable. Variations of the Big Lie have motivated state sponsored violence from Jim Crow era lynchings to the Rwandan Genocide to the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. The tactics differ, but the thrust remains the same - to give malicious actors carte blanche to consolidate power, persecute enemies, and destroy lives.

Brutal stuff - but history, real history - doesn’t pull any punches. Likewise, epistemology is never just academic - it has consequences that can be measured in body counts. When done well and honestly, both should make us uncomfortable.

 

 

Edited by DocWatts

I have a Substack, where I write about epistemology, metarationality, and the Meaning Crisis. 

Check it out at : https://7provtruths.substack.com/

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31 minutes ago, Rafael Thundercat said:

Waiting for your whole book to be published. 

Thanks! I'll be wrapping up the last section of the book over the next few months, and am looking to release it in the latter half of 2026.


I have a Substack, where I write about epistemology, metarationality, and the Meaning Crisis. 

Check it out at : https://7provtruths.substack.com/

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