Veteran readers of this blog know I have many complaints about journalists. But I still have basic trust that something in the New York Times’ non-opinion pages is 99% likely to be factually true - probably spun a bit, probably selected from the space of possible news articles because it supports the Times’ agenda, but factually true - in a way I don’t believe for random YouTubers. And I expect the spin to have some level of elegance. They (usually) won’t give a per capita statistic and claim it’s absolute numbers, or mix up stocks and flows, or commit post hoc ergo propter hoc. Relatedly, the journalists I know are obsessed with the opinions of other journalists, which they monitor and gossip about constantly.

In comparison, alternative media is really hit or miss. A few alternative sources are great, usually due to the personal virtue of the people involved. But the average person isn’t smart enough to figure out on their own which ones those are. And the rest are garbage. Also, and it pains me to say this, many of the really good alternative sources are run by former journalists or people with journalistic experience (eg Matt Yglesias - or Jesse Singal, who recently wrote a good piece about exactly this problem). You can resign from a priesthood. You can even be excommunicated. But you’ll always be a defrocked priest; you can never go back to being a normie.

The lies of priests are so limited and subtle, compared to the lies of non-priests, that it might seem like following priests is still an obviously superior option. I think this is true in every way but one: because the priesthoods move as one and fall victim to ideological fads, the lies of priests are correlated. If you follow every priestly pronouncement, eventually you will end up manipulated into going to some specific place you really didn’t want to be. Meanwhile, if you follow the lies of non-priests, you’ll probably end up trying to cure your liver disease with ground-up hippopotamus eyes, but whatever disasters this causes will push in random directions and cause random chaos, rather than slowly turning your society into a totalitarian hellhole. Even though on every specific point you’ll probably do better trusting the priests, you may find that a blanket policy of always trusting the priests is not in your interests. And unless you’re a priest yourself, you probably can’t distinguish good priestly pronouncements from bad ones.