Opinions Are Bullshit

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

We all have them. We all love to express them. We all wish that everyone else would stop giving them to us because we didn’t ask for them. Some are held strongly, others weakly, and still others weekly, in the form of a column.

I’m referring of course to the dreaded “opinion,” the center of our social universe and the nadir of human epistemology. For all the opinions we have and hold, we spend very little time wondering what, exactly, they are.

What are they?

One thing is certain: they’re not facts. Everyone knows the difference between an opinion and a fact. “Paris is the capital of France”—that’s a fact. “The Barbie movie is feminist propaganda”—that’s an opinion. The former is true, and the latter is… well, it’s a matter of opinion. We hate it when people try to pass off their opinions as facts. It’s part of what makes opinions so dreadful.

So maybe they’re preferences? No, that can’t be it. We already know how to express our preferences: we say we “like” this or that, or we “don’t care for” this or that. We don’t say, “It is my strongly held opinion that I like cilantro.” That sounds weird. We’d just say, “I like cilantro.”

So maybe they’re perspectives—our way of seeing things? No, that doesn’t make sense either. How you see things is just another kind of preference, isn’t it? You prefer to see the glass half full; I prefer to see it half empty. You prefer to see the bigger picture; I prefer to focus on the details. It’s no different than the preference for cilantro. We don’t say “It is my strongly held opinion that I like to focus on the details.” That also sounds weird. We’d just say, “I like to focus on the details.”

So maybe opinions are beliefs—what we take to be the facts? No, facts are facts. If we believe the facts, then we’re correct. If not, then we’re mistaken. Insofar as we see the facts differently, it is because we have different perspectives.

So there’s something puzzling about opinions. They’re not facts. They’re not preferences. And they’re not perspectives, which are just other kinds of preferences. But they’re not beliefs either, because beliefs are either true (which makes them facts), false (which makes them mistakes), or perspectives (which makes them preferences).

So what are opinions? What strange entities are we dealing with here? We need a theory of opinions.

My Theory of Opinions

We’re a judgy species. We’re constantly judging each other for every little thing we do. And we deny that we’re doing this, because one of the things we get judged for, ironically, is being judgy.

And we deny that we’re trying to impress our judgy peers, because trying to impress them makes us look insecure and performative.

So we judge each other for being judgy, and we desperately try to make each other think that we don’t care what they think. It’s all very confusing.

This raises the question: how do we judge people? What do we judge them on? The answer is: preferences. We mostly judge people on what they like and dislike.

For example, I like McDonalds, and people judge me for having that preference. They might think I’m a normie, or relatively uneducated, or maybe a bit dumb, or a bit dull, etc. That’s a lot of judgments.

In a perfect world, everyone would judge me positively for my preferences. People would discover that I like McDonalds or Radiohead or calling out people’s bullshit and think, “Wow, that guy is really cool.”

But sadly, we don’t live in a perfect world, and some people are going to learn about my preferences and think, “Wow, that guy really sucks.” What can I do about this?

One option is to abandon my preferences and copy other people. Instead of listening to Radiohead, I’ll listen to Taylor Swift. Instead of calling out people’s bullshit, I’ll echo it. If my preferences are the same as yours, then you can’t judge me. How wonderful. This strategy is called “conformity.”

Unfortunately, conformity is itself a preference, and people will judge me for having that one too. People don’t like conformists—they’re boring and dumb and empty inside. So conformity, if it’s too obvious, won’t work. Unless, of course, I find a way to conform without making it look like I’m conforming—for instance, by “rebelling” against conformity in the exact same way as everyone else. That’s an option, but it’s hard to pull off.

Another option is to have different preferences than other people—that is, to be a “hipster.” Instead of listening to Taylor Swift, I’ll listen to some band you’ve never heard of. Instead of echoing everyone’s bullshit, I’ll echo a weird French guy’s bullshit from the 16th century. If my preferences are different than everyone else’s, then you can’t judge me for being a braindead conformist, and you might even think I’m smart and cool and authentic.

Unfortunately, being a hipster is also a preference, and people will judge me for having that one too! People don’t like hipsters—they’re smug and annoying. The only way to pull off the hipster strategy is to, again, pursue it covertly. I must consume niche products to look cool without making it look like I’m consuming niche products to look cool (otherwise, I won’t look cool). So being a hipster is another option, but, again, it’s hard to pull off.

In the end, there is only one way to ensure that my preferences won’t cause people to look down on me, and that is by 1) turning my preferences into “opinions,” and 2) winning “the opinion game.”

What are “opinions?” They’re preferences, combined with a set of positive judgments about the type of people who hold those preferences (e.g., they’re smart and cool) and/or a set of negative judgments about the people who lack those preferences (e.g., they’re dumb and cringe). What is “the opinion game?” It’s an attempt to make the people who share our preferences look superior to the people who don’t, while concealing the fact that we’re trying to do that.

Let’s take an example. I like McDonalds—that’s a preference. But insofar as it is an opinion, it comes with a set of judgments. For instance, I think the people who like McDonalds are honest about what tastes good in their mouth. They aren’t trying to impress people and show how health-conscious and anti-capitalist they are. No, they’re sincere, blunt, genuine people. McDonalds has objectively delicious food, and anyone who cannot recognize that is either in denial or has a medical problem with their taste buds. So the inference you should draw about me for liking McDonalds is that I’m honest, that I’m anti-bullshit, that I don’t care about virtue signaling, and that I have properly functioning taste buds.

Here’s the point: all that bullshit I wrote just now counts as my “opinion” of McDonalds. If I can convince all my peers of that bullshit, then liking McDonalds will become a social norm among my peers.

Jeez, now I’m talking about “norms.” What are “norms”? They’re what happens when a bunch of people share the same opinions and therefore make the same judgments about each other.¹ For example, if I win the opinion game, then my peers will start to think McDonalds eaters are cool, honest, authentic people—and that McDonalds haters are vain, vapid virtue signalers. Once that happens, everyone in my peer group will be socially incentivized to say they like McDonalds, even if they secretly don’t. Saying “McDonalds is great,” and perhaps even eating there, becomes a norm.

Or let’s take another example: recycling. We tend to negatively judge people who don’t recycle. Those people are assholes who don’t care about the environment. Such negative judgments create a social incentive for people to recycle. When everybody tries to avoid others’ negative judgments, by performing a particular behavior, we call it a norm.

There’s an interesting implication here. The attempt to change the judgments that people make about our preferences—i.e., to play the opinion game—is an attempt to shift social norms in our favor. When we express our opinions, we are waging a secret war over social norms.

Secret. What do I mean by “secret”? I mean we cannot say any of this out loud. Remember: we all want status, but we can’t admit it. But wanting to win the opinion game is identical to wanting status—it’s an attempt to get other people to think we’re better than them (i.e., we have superior preferences). But they cannot know we’re trying to be better than them, or else they’ll think we’re smug and douchey and worse than them. It’s a social paradox.

That’s where the dreadfulness comes from. We all know, deep down, that when people give us their opinion, they’re trying to be better than us. We can feel it. But we cannot call them out on this, because then they’ll get offended, and we’ll look mean—like we’re trying to look better than them. So we’re stuck nodding our heads and pretending not to be annoyed.

How do we do it? How do we win the opinion game and transform our preferences into social norms? Well, one way is just by having lots of status. People sycophantically agree with whatever high-status people say, so our social norms—our shared opinions—will bend toward the interests of high-status people.

Another way is to have cultural power—to have a big platform where people listen to you. If you get to shout your opinions on a megaphone to a massive audience, then you’re going to have a big advantage in the opinion game. So norms bend toward the interests of the culturally powerful.

Another way to win the opinion game is, to be a bit more optimistic, by having genuinely good arguments about why your preferences are better than other people’s preferences. Those arguments will involve externalizing your preferences—that is, framing them as reactions to objective features of the world. The reason you like the stuff you do is because it is objectively good for you, or good for everyone. The reason you see things from your perspective is because it is objectively accurate or insightful. These are the sorts of arguments we make when we play the opinion game.

Of course, these arguments are mostly bullshit, because we mostly don’t care about useful truth or what’s good for the world. We just pretend to care about these things to win the opinion game. “I like the things I do because they’re good for everyone. I see the world the way I do because it’s useful and true.” Uh huh.

Let’s take the theory for a test drive. If I say, “I like Radiohead,” that’s a preference. But if I say, “Radiohead is the best rock band of all time,” that’s an opinion. The difference is that the opinion is externalized—it’s a feature of Radiohead, not me—implying that if you don’t agree with me, you’re missing something. You’re not smart or deep or sophisticated enough. If everyone comes to share my opinion, then pretending Radiohead is “one of the greats” will become a social norm, in the same way that pretending Shakespeare is “one of the greats” has become a social norm, even though most people secretly don’t give a shit about Shakespeare. Opinions have covert insults built into them: if you don’t share my preference, there must be something wrong with you. 

But of course, the covert disses built into our opinions are bullshit. It’s entirely possible—indeed, plausible—that there’s nothing wrong with you at all. There might be something wrong with me: I might be a douchey Radiohead bro who’s too much of a hipster to appreciate conventional pop music, or too much of a normie to appreciate the genius of avant-garde jazz that sounds like feral children strangling a flock of geese. Or maybe neither of us is right, and neither of us is wrong. There might be no such thing as “objectively good” music.

When we play the opinion game, we ignore these possibilities. We downplay the arbitrariness of our preferences. We exaggerate their connection to external reality. We try to make our opinions seem more objective than they really are, so that we can declare them as “right” (i.e, only smart, sane people have them) and others as “wrong” (i.e, only dumb, crazy people have them). And, of course, we neglect the possibility that nothing is objectively “right” or “wrong”—that it’s all arbitrary.

That’s not a pleasant thought is it? We don’t like to think that “it’s all arbitrary.” What a bummer. We need things to be objectively right or wrong, so that we can have superior preferences, and so that our political coalition can have superior ideologies (which you can think of as a set of bullshit perspectives). That’s what we’re secretly going for—the goal evolution programmed us to pursue—superiority. Without objective moral or aesthetic truths, we can’t be superior to our rivals, and our ingroup can’t be superior to our outgroup. That sucks.

But the funny thing is, we cannot admit why this sucks, because if we did, we’d reveal the what we’re trying to conceal—that we’re competing for superiority—and we’d lose the opinion game. So when we talk about why it sucks that our preferences are arbitrary, with no objective basis in reality, we make up some bullshit about how we’re afraid of “nihilism”, or how it robs us of “meaning” or whatever. But we don’t actually care about nihilism or meaning. What we care about is being better than other people, and better than other groups, which we cannot admit, because if we did, we would look worse than other people, and worse than other groups.

So when we express our opinions, we are disregarding three possibilities: 1) our opinions are wrong, 2) nobody’s opinions are right or wrong, 3) our opinions are a covert strategy for shifting social norms in our favor, or our group’s favor, regardless of whether they’re right or wrong.

Given what we know about human nature and the nature of reality, these three possibilities are very strong possibilities. The fact that we ignore these possibilities when expressing our opinions suggests a profound disregard for the truth. 

In other words, opinions are bullshit. 

1. My definition of “norm” is different from a “rule” or a “law,” in that it does not necessarily need to be explicitly formulated or come with explicit penalties for violating it. Of course, norms often transform into rules or laws, as when a norm against prostitution becomes a law against prostitution. When politicians compete to propose new laws that their constituents will like, laws that reflect the social norms of their constituents will tend to win out. But not all laws are norms. There can be laws that nobody judges us for violating. Jaywalking, for example, is against the law, but there’s not a norm against it. My definition of a “norm” is also different from a “convention,” in that the benefits of following norms (in my sense) are reputational, rather than practical. Driving on the left side of the road is a convention—not a norm—because the benefits of doing so are practical, not reputational.