I am not sure I remember too much from my high school philosophy class, other than the lesson that I probably would not be actively pursuing a career in philosophy. But I remember one discussion about displaying one’s rebellious nature by doing the exact opposite of whatever an unfavored person said. The teacher made the point that if you always did the exact opposite of what person X says, then you are just as much ruled by X as any of X’s most cultish followers. In such a case you have completely abdicated your agency to X.
I took the lesson from that, which I still try to follow to this day, that you have to process people’s actions and ideas one by one. Certainly this is not to say that there is no room for trust and reputation. If I have found myself agreeing with someone historically and they have been proved right on certain topics time and again, I am going to give their next statement a lot of credence — but I am still going to mentally challenge it to some extent. And for individuals, this sort of reputational trust can vary by topic. If my wife gives me a read on a person, I am going to assume she is correct; if she opines on navigation issues when we are walking around an unfamiliar city, I am going to treat that with a lot more skepticism.
Most will have guessed where I am going with this — the opposition to Trump has reached this point of zero agency. Smart people I know will mock everything Trump says, even if it is something they would normally agree with or at least entertain. People who are extraordinarily skeptical of all medication suddenly think that concerns about Tylenol during pregnancy are totally absurd. The whole Tylenol story is actually pretty interesting — a Harvard dean’s imprimatur seems to tick the credentialism box that was so prominent in COVID, but a look at the quality of the research and the money involved tends to make one very skeptical. And of course a lot of what RFK says makes me skeptical. The whole story is a really interesting, including appeals-to-authority issues we had during COVID, only with the parties reversed. But no one really looks because if Trump said it, it must be mocked.
Coyote, “On Having Zero Agency”, Coyote Blog, 2025-10-02.
January 18, 2026
QotD: Having zero agency
Comments Off on QotD: Having zero agency
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
