Jason Arday. Polyamory. Mounting machine guns along the Mediterranean. Gene-editing embryos. Ukraine vs. Russia. Abortion in the third trimester.
There is no shortage of things people disagree on. The job of a public intellectual is to opine on them. To be successful, generally you must do this in a contrarian or uniquely surprising way. This, of course, creates an incentive misalignment: For attention, people are willing to say contrary things they don’t believe and which they know to be in opposition to the interests of society. You can likely think of many such people.
But it’s actually very easy to say contrary, true things: You just need to have values and not compromise those values.
Here’s a question: What does your ideal tax policy have to do with whether you think it’s okay to abort a child in the third trimester? The answer, of course, is nothing. They share no moral or principled undergirding. And yet if you know an American’s opinion about one of those, you can guess with high confidence their opinion about the other. This is because most people do not form opinions based on values; they form beliefs based on the opinion of their tribes.
When people have values and adhere to them, they will necessarily form beliefs that crisscross the political spectrum; this is because political tribes’ beliefs are not defined by any particular principled undergirding. Therefore: Given most people from most political tribes do not have consistent principles, if you do have principles, and you adhere to them, you will believe surprising, contrary things.
People often ask me what I think about particular issues. Let me instead tell you what I think about all issues: Here are my principles.
