Only your reputation within the priesthood matters. Someone can have tens of thousands of fans for doing popular writing in a field, and the extra status it gives them within the field is within a rounding error of zero. This boundary — this contempt for two-way traffic with the public — might seem harsh. But it is an adaptive artifact. The outside world is so much bigger, so much richer, so full of delicious status waiting to be consumed, that any weaker border would soon be overrun.
Simple Picture
ELI5: imagine a monastery whose monks have spent centuries developing the best bread recipe in the world. The recipe works because the monks only listen to each other, not to the villagers who want more sugar. But one day a virus enters the monastery. Because all the monks breathe the same air and talk only to each other, every monk catches it simultaneously. The same isolation that protected the recipe from the villagers’ bad taste now prevents the monks from noticing they are all sick.
The Three Boundaries
Priesthoods maintain three essential barriers:
The boundary against the public. The priesthood’s whole identity comes from separation. Ideas that seem too similar to the public’s get actively penalized — the same way Democrats would resist a plan Donald Trump proposed first, even if it fit their ideals. Dr. Oz was a professor of surgery at Columbia, by all accounts quite good. Then he went on TV and started catering to the public. Imagine a bishop declaring that The Da Vinci Code is 100% real. The priesthood excommunicated him not for being wrong but for being public.
The boundary against capitalism. A doctor who seems too mercenary loses status. By the time you finish medical school and residency, all your non-doctor friends have abandoned you, and all the old sources of status have been excised and replaced with the all-seeing eye of the medical priesthood. If you sell out and start a supplement line, you might get a Ferrari, but everyone whose opinion you respect will hold you in contempt. This is Bourdieu at the institutional level: the priesthood launders knowledge into status, and mercenary behavior threatens the laundering operation.
Ritually pure communication. Ex cathedra communication must follow ritual forms — papers in journals, not Twitter threads. The most crucial conversations appear in the best journals that everyone reads. Less important ones in smaller journals read by specialists. Everyone in the priesthood reads the same few journals and ends up on the same page. This solves a coordination problem that Hirschman would recognize: it creates a shared voice channel that prevents the fragmentation of attention.
The Monoculture Problem
The priesthoods draw from a certain type: usually upper-class, well-educated, successful but not too successful, prone to abstract thought. Then they isolate many examples of this type in a community with dense internal connections and thin-to-nonexistent external ones.
The Expert Beginner creates the micro-priesthood version: a small team where the leader’s standards are the only standards, outside perspectives are contamination, and the monoculture that results is perfectly engineered for stagnation. This ends the same way as any other monoculture. Aurochs in the wilderness probably got diseases rarely. But cram ten thousand genetically near-identical cows in a tiny warehouse, and your beef ends up 95% antibiotics by weight. The priesthoods are a perfect environment for memetic plagues.
knowing-the-name captures the student-level version: a classroom where nobody understands anything but everyone fakes it, and the social cost of admitting confusion is high enough that the spell never breaks. This is paradigm-lock-in at the institutional level. The same mechanism that protects the priesthood from public ignorance — consensus-seeking, dense internal discussion, contempt for outsiders — also makes it immune to correction. When the entire priesthood gets one-shotted by some bias especially appealing to smart people and especially repugnant to the public they’re differentiating themselves from, they lock it in as consensus, then stand firm against the rest of the world.
Their intelligence made them easy prey for bad ideas that flattered them as intellectuals. The will to think names the individual version: the credentialed elite are often intellectually hollow because the system rewarded them for accepting black-box explanations. The priesthood version is the same hollowness institutionalized.
Wokeness as Perfect Memetic Parasite
The need to stay separate from the public, mixed with the desire to stay in touch, creates a productive tension. Wokeness was a beautiful resolution of this tension: the public (as represented by the average straight white male) is itself out of touch. By learning the special language — pronouns, terminology, frameworks — you learn secret knowledge feared and loathed by the masses, which makes you cool and in touch with the youth.
Now in-touchness is no longer about pleasing “barbaric yawps” and their middlebrow tastes. It is about pleasing identity groups who each require a special language that only smart people can learn. You can call Latinos “Latinx,” which they are known to hate, and be even more in touch than the Latinos themselves.
This is orthodoxy as virtue seen from inside the priesthood: the shallow, complicated, and frequently changing rules make it the perfect substitute for actual virtue. And the cultural immune system cannot fight it because the parasite is using the immune system’s own antibodies — separation from public, contempt for the unsophisticated — as its delivery mechanism.
The Elegant Deceits
Because priests are focused on reputation, even their mistruths follow ritual purity laws. The typical non-priest repeats un-fact-checked anecdotes. But the deceits of priests are subtle and elegant — a study that observes the forms almost perfectly, then buries something in the footnotes which reveals it is irrelevant to any real-world situation people would expect it to apply to.
The PR team operates with institutional backing. The priest does not need to lie crudely because the entire apparatus of ritually pure communication allows for sophisticated misdirection. The spin has elegance — and elegance is harder to detect than crude fabrication.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “experts are corrupt — trust no one with credentials.”
The midwit take is “the priesthoods are fine — trust the experts and ignore the conspiracy theorists.”
The better take is that the priesthoods are indispensable and unreliable at the same time. There is only one medical priesthood, and the reputational incentives within it still work — priests fear provoking other priests more than they desire worldly goods from lying. A New York Times article is 99% likely to be factually true, probably spun, probably selected to support an agenda, but true — in a way random YouTubers are not. But the priesthoods are no longer trustworthy on anything adjacent to politics, because the memetic plague has compromised their immune systems in precisely the domains where the public needs them most.
You can resign from a priesthood. You can even be excommunicated. But you will always be a defrocked priest. You can never go back to being a normie.
Main Payoff
The antifragility lesson: priesthoods are fragile to the degree they are monocultures, and they become monocultures precisely because the isolation that makes them useful also makes them vulnerable. The fix is not to abolish priesthoods (we need them) or to open them to the public (that kills their function) but to increase the internal diversity of the priesthood without breaking the external boundary — which is, historically, the one thing priesthoods are worst at doing.
References:
- Scott Alexander, On Priesthoods, Astral Codex Ten