Listening to the Monsters

A scream into the void about Professor Arday, and flawed institutions in a bad faith ecosystem.

Note: I’m writing this here on Substack because I need to get it off my chest, it doesn’t really fit on my website, and is too long to turn into a Bluesky thread.

I may never have anything to say again or I may be back soon with more non-trade thoughts.

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I do not know what an institution is supposed to do when the bad faith monsters who dig relentlessly for gotchas claim to have found something real.

Except, that’s not true.

I know what they should do. I’m just infuriated by how snookered those of us not on the grifter-right are by situations like this.

• If we treat every allegation as credible we create incentives for terrible people to bury us in them, paralysing us with investigations the results of which will be weaponized regardless of outcome as either ‘gotchas’ or ‘conspiracies’.

• If we give a right wing outrage oxygen, the fire behind it grows, often vastly out of proportion to any alleged wrongdoing - and with consequences far beyond the formal.

• Yet if we ignore the hints of smoke and do not ever search for fire, we sacrifice doing what’s right for the sake of the broader culture war and give up our own integrity and that of our institutions.

• I suppose the answer could be that we must exist as Caesar’s wife, above reproach, but the world is vast and full of potential targets, full of humans, and full of sins.

The right has a massive, well-funded, internally incentivized ecosystem to fuel its argument by anecdote. It’s an established, monetized pipeline running from fringe TikTok creators, to major ones, to blogs and columns, to Fox News et al, to clips on Facebook and then back to Tiktok.

When that jaundiced Eye of Sauron focuses on an institution, I understand why it is natural to circle the wagons - especially around the vulnerable people whose lives that scrutiny is sure to ruin.

It is immediately obvious that even if there is an underlying truth to a given set of allegations, they are not being made in good faith, but as yet another sortie in a relentless campaign of attrition against institutions and all social progress. I just don’t know what to do about that.

I can also understand why, when dealing with people who argue almost exclusively via anecdote, it can seem justifiable to instinctively resist conceding the anecdote.

If you know that a massive, organized and well-funded machine is going to argue that a problematic black professional in a position of authority proves that no black professionals should be in positions of authority, I understand why you’d want to avoid conceding that black professional was problematic. It’s not like the subsequent moves in this chess game are hard to predict.

There are numerous examples of this. It sometimes felt like we had to defend horrifically implemented, poorly conceived, cynically mandated diversity and inclusivity schemes in large corporations - not because we thought they were perfect, but because we knew the other side was waiting for the slightest admission of imperfection to declare the entire project inherently flawed and return to all white c-suites and calling coworkers “sugartits”.

Progressives, liberals, institutionalists, and just decent people are constantly put in a position where we are expected to simultaneously play the culture war game like savvy operators and operate as if we are above or unaware of it.

Obviously, obviously, the overwhelming majority of Telegraph columnists writing about Prof. Arday or the millions of right wing chuds tweeting about him, don’t actually care about plagiarism in sociology PhDs, any more than they care about what the (precisely zero) trans players in the WNBA are doing to women’s basketball or whether the mayor of New York City has pronouns in his bio.

We are somehow expected to operate as if that’s not important, soberly considering each allegation on its merits and then doing the right thing, and then scolded as naive children getting outplayed by savvy operators when our doing what’s right isn’t reciprocated and is indeed weaponized against us as a gotcha.

We are treated as if we have independent and isolated agency whereas the people we are fighting with for the soul of our society get to be treated as purely reactionary forces.

Conservatives are given endless column inches to explain how they found the left so annoying they had no choice but to give up on all their stated principles and embrace some of the worst actors in political life. Well, Nathan Cofnas seems really annoying, but no one will permit us to say he was so irritating Cambridge had no choice.

Moreover, conservatives are permitted to explain away their actions by reference to the “problem” they were trying to solve, whereas any progressive solution is pilloried for the slightest externality or simply for failing to immediately and comprehensively solve the massive issue it was targeted at.

Conservatives are given endless leeway to pivot conversations about the comical, farcical, brutal, dystopian, inhuman failures of their immigration enforcement measures to the friendlier ground of the “problem” they’re trying to solve. Well, racism and unconscious bias is a pretty big problem, is anyone going to let us pivot every conversation about not fact-checking Arday’s claims hard enough to that?

What’s most maddening about all this is that it’s not like lowering the bar for us is the answer. We shouldn’t get a pass on judgement and responsibility just because we’re fighting terrible people. We shouldn’t just be able to yell “I’m doing this for a good cause” to waive away all questions about the efficacy, ethics and impact of our policies and actions. I know that.

I’m slowly being driven insane by watching many of the very institutions we’re trying to defend create a playing field we can’t win on, and then tut-tutt us for being insufficiently savvy not to concede goals on it.

I don’t know what to do about this except to call it out, again and again.

To say that a public discourse which denounces one side of politics as flawed for failing to live up to its stated principles, and rewards the other for tactical brilliance when they fail to live up to theirs is not sustainable.

To say that we are creating the wrong incentives and allowing ourselves to be manipulated by the bad faith actions of the worst people in public life.

To say that we have to do better, or risk becoming a lot worse.

Rest in peace, Professor.