The Business of Being Against

When forbidden truths become commodities: The paradox of professional contrarianism.

I was 15 when I figured out how to order books from England. The first book I ordered was The God Delusion, and I got three copies because I knew I'd want to gift it. The content was incidental—I was already sold. These books were tokens of my allegiance to the growing community of "New Atheism," the leading strand of contrarianism of the 2010s.

I was primed for this world by the convergence between the stormy revelations of puberty and my parents' dubious religious affiliation. As far as I can tell, my dad was agnostic, not out of the ordinary for someone steeped in Soviet-era religious ambiguity, very much a STEM type, and who was burned by the chaotic spirit of the age. After communism, he adopted a bourgeois position towards religion. He went to church but endured it. It was yet another price to pay to be an upstanding member of the community.

My mother had an intuitive grasp of Pascal's wager. She took it to staggering new heights, covering every religion she was even vaguely aware of with a bit of precautionary belief. Our home was covered in exotic symbols, amulets, crystals, and icons from every denomination. The tension between my father's instrumental view of religion and my mother's precautionary pantheon made it clear that this was rich soil for digging. By the time confirmation rolled around, I was already firmly checked out.

There's always been something tantalizing about the idea that the world is not how it is presented to you. A frontier opens up. You, the explorer, bravely unshackled from the pressures and expectations of those around you, at great cost (or at least that's what you tell yourself), get to define a new idea space. This revelation creates a special thrill: you've seen behind the curtain while others remain blind. Whatever the circumstances of your life, knowing the truth is a form of deliverance. Even if you think you're the only one, this hidden status is a flame that warms your wise soul. Others may have other forms of status, but their success is in the shadows because they are not lit up by the truth.

Early as I might have been, I was not the only one. Contrarianism is big in the Internet economy. The recipe for success online is simple: be interesting. Few things capture attention more effectively than dismantling conventional wisdom. There are much more sophisticated avenues for contrarianism than "5 Surprising Foods That Can Melt Belly Fat," but the psychology of why it fascinates is the same. Secret knowledge awaits, and with it, the possibility that it may give you an edge.

As someone who has run a podcast called Subversive for a few years, I've made it my job to unearth the counter-intuitive. However, there are some systematic issues with the contrarian economy.

The reality of professional contrarianism is that the demand for hidden knowledge outstrips the supply. Similar to the diversity and inclusion industry, where the job depends on a steady supply of bigotry to justify its existence, the contrarian needs a constant inflow of counterintuitive revelations. The set of potential hidden truths is naturally limited, though. Inevitably, a lot of things really are the way they seem.

If you're naturally drawn to the arcane, and especially if you've built an audience of novelty seekers on that basis, the incentive is to continue down the path. If the foundation of our shared beliefs is so fractured and the old heuristics of what is true are so broken, the heuristics themselves start to flip. New truth is prioritized, and the esoteric seems, by default, true. The pattern-matching mind begins to see hidden agendas everywhere.

The unstable nature of contrarianism creates several potential paths: