Outlawing the Truth

Since elections are about desire rather than truth, experts should not be given special voting rights. But for precisely the same reason, elected governments should respect the independence of science, the courts and the media. Government represents the will of the majority of the people, but the truth should not be subordinated to the will of the people, because people very often will the truth to be something other than it is.

For example, Christian fundamentalists very much desire the Scriptures to be true and the theory of evolution to be false. However, even if 90 percent of voters are Christian fundamentalists, they should not have the power to dictate scientific truth or to prevent scientists from exploring and publishing inconvenient truths. Unlike Congress, the department of biology should not reflect the will of the people. Congress can certainly pass a law declaring that the theory of evolution is wrong, but such a law does not change reality.

Similarly, when a charismatic leader is accused of corruption, his loyal supporters usually wish these accusations to be false. But even if most voters support the leader, their desires should not prevent journalists and judges from investigating the accusations and getting to the truth. Even if a parliament passes a law declaring that all accusations against the leader are false, such a law does not change the facts.

Of course, scientists, journalists and judges have their own problems, and cannot always be trusted to discover and tell the truth. Academic institutions, the media and the courts may be compromised by corruption, bias or error. But subordinating them to a governmental Ministry of Truth is likely to make things worse. The government is already the most powerful institution in society, and it often has the greatest interest in distorting or hiding inconvenient truths. Allowing the government to supervise the search for truth is like appointing the fox to guard the chicken coop.

To protect the truth, it is better to rely on two other methods.

First, academic institutions, the media and the judicial system have their own internal mechanisms for fighting corruption, correcting bias and exposing error. In academia, peer-review publication is a far better check on error than supervision by government officials, and academic promotion often depends on successfully uncovering past mistakes and discovering unknown facts. In the media, free competition means that if one newspaper avoids publishing a scandal, its competitor is likely to jump at the scoop. In the judicial system, a judge that takes bribes may be tried and punished just like any other citizen.

Second, the existence of several independent institutions that seek the truth in different ways allows these institutions to check and correct one another.

For example, if powerful corporations manage to break down the peer-review mechanism by bribing a large enough number of scientists, investigative journalists and courts can expose and punish the perpetrators. If the media or the courts are afflicted by systematic racist biases, it is often the job of sociologists, historians and philosophers to expose these biases. None of these safety mechanisms are completely fail-proof, but no human institution is. Government certainly isn’t.