Joe Rogan has been trying to escape consequences for irresponsibly broadcasting ignorant nonsense by using a dodge that weak-minded media hacks have employed for decades.
He claims that he’s just trying to have “interesting conversations” on air with controversial people because he wants to hear their thoughts. It’s a variation on the stupid interpretation of “free speech” that defines it as being able to say anything you want anywhere at any time without having to suffer any blowback.
It’s called “the marketplace of ideas.” The idea is that the public square should be a place where anybody can air any ideas at all, as if they were goods sold in the marketplace. These ideas would then be subject to market forces. The idea-customers would decide by their purchases which “idea-goods” they prefer. Those would be the “best” ideas.
This analogy with a perfectly frictionless capitalist marketplace is stupid on so many levels that its impossible to even list them all in a brief blog post. But noting just a few will be enough to show that it is an untenable analogy.
In the first place, this notion of how the market works is simplistic to the point of being moronic. In reality, the market does not do what the advocates of the analogy imagine it does.
1. The marketplace does not decide what products are best. It decides what the average-wealth consumer will pay for a product—which is always lower in quality than the best version of that product, which average-wealth consumers cannot afford.
2. The marketplace is not perfectly frictionless. Unscrupulous sellers gum up the works with deceptive advertising and monopolistic practices, which inflate the value of goods. (This is why every marketplace requires government regulation to stop deception and monopoly.)
3. The marketplace does not contain any goods that cannot be imitated and made less well. Creating cheaper, lower-quality goods is necessary if the average-wealth consumer is to engage with the market.
In the second place, applying this foolish notion of the capitalist marketplace to ideas is monumentally stupid for many reasons:
1. The “marketplace of ideas” contains a bewildering plethora of ideas, many of which are illogical, ignorant, or crazy. It can never yield up the “best” idea. People are not determined to get the best idea they can find, and most of them have no way of judging ideas other than their personal preferences. So they can’t even tell which “idea-goods” they are looking for. They are therefore not even judging the same things. In such a mess, it is impossible that any “good” idea will come to the top. Indeed, even an “average” idea can’t emerge.
2. The “marketplace of ideas” is much more risky than the capitalist marketplace. Where the buyer of goods has to watch out for unscrupulousness and fraud, the “buyer” of ideas walks around in a “market” completely saturated with ignorance. On the side of the “sellers,” there are certainly fraudsters, people who push BS ideas that they know are worthless; but there are also many more who push BS ideas that they wrongly believe to be the genuine article. On the side of the “buyers” there is complete lack of discrimination about the worth of ideas, since most people gravitate toward ideas that feel good to them rather than to those that have actual value. (And there is nothing like government regulation that prevents intentionally deceptive “sellers” from pushing BS ideas.)
3. The “marketplace of ideas,” unlike the capitalist marketplace, contains some “goods” that cannot be imitated and made less well, priceless ideas that are distinct from all other ideas because they are true. Any attempt to cheapen such ideas or lower their quality destroys their value instead of just diminishing it. These ideas are of infinite value in and of themselves. Their value cannot be determined by the opinions of consumers because their truth puts them intrinsically beyond price.
There are many more problems with this analogy, but these are enough to see how utterly stupid it is. So why is it so popular?
Joe Rogan has honed in on one important reason it is so popular: it helps people avoid responsibility for the things they say.
If you use the “marketplace of ideas” analogy as an excuse, you can say things like, “I’m just trying to have interesting conversations” as though that were an innocuous thing. After all, aren’t ideas just like goods in the marketplace—different and with different values but subject to the judgment of consumers? What could be wrong about setting them all out in front of people and letting them choose?
Plenty is wrong with that. Because very few “buyers” or “sellers” are capable of discerning the differences among ideas, setting them all out indiscriminately is irresponsible. Because of the boundless ignorance suffusing the whole “marketplace of ideas” and the tendency of “buyers” to gravitate toward ideas for their emotional charge rather than their actual value, laying them out without evaluation is dangerous. And because some ideas are priceless, it is fatuous to pretend that all ideas are equal.
Having “interesting conversations” is not a neutral activity. It is at best a cocktail party entertainment—which is to say, worthless—and that is only if the chatter is harmless. On the contrary, it is both irresponsible and harmful to broadcast “interesting conversations” that make little or no attempt to discover the few priceless, true ideas among the infinitude of flawed or false ideas.
But it is precisely this responsibility that Joe Rogan and the whole adolescent-mutiny-mongering social media want to avoid. Everyone involved in this value-free zone of “opinion” thinks they should be able to say and do anything they want without suffering any consequences for being irresponsible about the things they say and do.
Perhaps Rogan is too naive and foolish to understand how irresponsible he is. Perhaps he really believes the stupid and dangerous BS about the “marketplace of ideas” that underpins the defense of his show.
But there are others who use the BS analogy to avoid consequences for trafficking in deceit, manipulation, and outright lies—like Fox News, for instance, whose "We Report, You Decide" is a breathtaking bit of nasty cynicism masquerading as a harmless free-market truism.
And don’t even bother with the teenager’s defense of free-speech: “Well, nothing is true anyway, so don’t tell me what to believe.” That is utterly vapid and almost self-refuting. Because if you’re telling me that nothing is true, you’re either telling me something you think is true, and thus contradicting yourself, or you're saying that your statement is relative—that it is sometimes true and sometimes not true—and thus contradicting yourself.
So Rogan and the opinion-mongers are just refusing to put in the hours it takes to figure out what is true, which requires research, study, examination of evidence, and application of logic—all very difficult to do. Too much like work.
But this is the work that the old media used to do. There is a good reason why Walter Cronkite was trusted by so many Americans: he worked hard to figure out what was true and separate it from what was false. He actually went to Vietnam to see for himself what was going on, and he found out that it was at odds with what the government was saying.
But that kind of work is too hard for much of today’s adolescent media. It’s so much easier to have “interesting conversations” that don’t hold anyone to task for their opinions.
And it’s even easier if you have the BS “marketplace of ideas” analogy to hold up as a shield when someone actually wants to hold you responsible for the things you say and the things you let other people say unchallenged.
Well written. I just bought your Asshole America book new from Amazon, which led me here.
Well written. I just bought your Asshole American book new from Amazon.