Some Thoughts on The Performative Contradictions of Anti-Intellectualism in Modern Life

views expressed dated: 2025-06

I somewhat hate engaging with serious philosophical ideas and what feel like are obviously false/unappealing ones at the same time. (Full disclosure: In this note that means engaging with the nature of social norms and normativity at the same time as engaging with post-truth anti-intellectualism.)

I found this note difficult to finish and polish up for that reason and will likely not continue making ones like it.

For me, the ideas of anti-intellectualism (as defined here) and/or the philosophy that lead to its adoption have never been even remotely convincing stances. Therefore the parts of this note focusing on them, feel like beating a dead horse to me rather than getting real traction on an interesting philosophical issue.

Since the note wanders back and forth between each, I chose to keep it, though somewhat begrudgingly.

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

— Charles Sanders Peirce

1

This note will focus on how anti-intellectualism, in our modern world, "Bites the hand that feeds", resulting in a performative contradiction, which I will argue is at least a critical ignorance which should be addressed and at worst an indictment of moral character. It will also explore how pseudo-intellectual figures, given prominence by epistemically problematic means, create a feedback loop that creates an increasingly more anti-intellectual and post-truth landscape. I will make this argument by pointing out a performative contradiction that is made by the anti-intellectual, and showing how their behavior and the pseudo-intellectual's behavior exist in a mutualistic positive feedback loop.

2

With respect to the pursuits of creating, sharing, and testing knowledge, the term "pseudo-intellectual" attempts to describe one who makes defective moves in that game. The term invites criticism for its pretense, the fear being that anything not meeting some arbitrary standard is labelled as unfit for the game. This criticism is warranted, we cannot simply call the thinkers we don't like pseudo-intellectuals. In the game of giving and asking for reasons, though, there are in fact defective moves. No one of sound mind ought to deny that. If I claim that $P \rightarrow Q$ and claim $P$ but not $Q$, that a straightforward and undeniable case of rational defectiveness. Defective moves in the game of reasons are rarely so blatant (often unintentional), and diagnosing them requires a messy and detailed botanization of what one claims, what one is committed to, what one thinks follows from what, and what the facts are. No tour through the varieties of defective ways epistemic moves one can make is necessary for what will be my argument here.

An important clarification is in order. Moves may be defective, but the case is less clear for persons. Merely making some defective moves does not render a person, qua reasoner, defective. However, one who habitually and without reflection or remorse makes defective moves (under the guise of being epistemically responsible) is, I argue, correctly labelled as a pseudo-intellectual (not qua person, but as a characterization of their tendencies). It is my goal in this note to examine the relationship between the actions of such individuals and Anti-intellectualism generally.

I will argue that the pseudo-intellectual's habits make fertile ground for the roots of Anti-intellectualism and post-truth by exploiting the norms of rational discourse to satisfy people's feelings, insecurities, and prejudices. This, in turn, leads to a cognitive dissonance where the believer of the pseudo-intellectual strongly desires to reach a conclusion that is not warranted. This will force them to run counter to legitimate institutions and practices of knowledge to hold on to their unwarranted beliefs. Anti-intellectualism and post-truth then emerge as overcorrections. The feedback loop continues as Anti-intellectualism and post-truth clear the way for more demand for pseudo-intellectuals (the only ones who can be found trying to uphold such conclusions). The increasing result is that good epistemic institutions and practices that we implicitly trust are rejected in a performative contradiction, as rational discourse itself is selectively undermined to further unwarranted feelings, insecurities, and prejudices.

3: Definitions

Since the above has likely left the reader with some questions as to my terms, I want to offer definitions, as the rational conclusions differ wildly with how one draws the boundaries.

• Good epistemic institutions and practices: rational norms of reasoning and inquiry. These practices and institutions range from simple epistemic notions like apportioning one's belief to the evidence, updating beliefs based on the evidence, applying general principles consistently that systemically underwrite entire social institutions like universities, laboratories, trades, journalistic organizations, businesses, and all of the various human pursuits connected to truth.
• Pseudo-intellectual: one who habitually and without reflection makes defective epistemic moves under the guise of someone who does not.
  • I have argued for a common genus of pseudo-intellectual already in The Vibe Salesman, and I will not repeat those arguments here. I believe there is such a thing as defective epistemic practices, without which a notion of good epistemic practices would be made unintelligible, along with rational discourse itself. Rejecting the validity of good epistemic norms is not a move anyone can coherently make.
• Anti-intellectualism: a rejection of and strong resistance to (or arbitrary selectivity in) the validity of epistemic norms and institutions.
• Credentialism: a view that almost no one actually holds, the idea that the epistemic worth of one's reasons is to be equated with their credentials.
• Nonessentialist-credentialism: the correct understanding of how credentials relate to the epistemic worth of one's reasons, I will argue. The view that credentials are not the core of genuine intellectual action, though they are highly correlated with and attaining certain credentials tends to cause one to be an epistemic authority of some kind.
• Anti-credentialism: the idea that credentials are completely meaningless or even bad indicators for the epistemic worth of one's reasons in a given domain. "THEY want you to believe X".
• Post-truth: the denigration of institutions and practices of justification and good reasoning. (Not to be confused with some "being past-ness" of truth itself, which is not intelligible.)

4

Why think that performative contradictions are of much importance? Surely all of us are, often unwittingly, engaged in many performative contradictions simply by not being perfect rational beings. We must distinguish, however, between such contradictions I "ought not to make" and excusable ones. The performative contradictions of moral significance are the ones that cause harm to others or society, and the ones for which I am blameworthy are the ones I ought to know better about. Either of these varieties of performative contradictions are rational flaws in that if one is pointed out, there is a rational duty on behalf of the performer of such a contradiction to justify or correct it.

For a morally innocuous example, imagine I hold that the refrigerator is >300lb and also that I cannot lift more than 200lb. I am engaged in a performative contradiction if I attempt to lift it into the moving truck. On the other hand, if I hold that disabled people should receive no state assistance in the ideal world, and also that it is wrong to hurt helpless individuals, I am engaged in a morally pernicious performative contradiction when I promote the destruction of safety nets for these people. Note that I am engaged in this contradiction of practical reasoning, whether or not I know it. I am blameworthy to the extent that I ought to know better and be able to put the pieces together between my commitments and actions.

So, in quick summary, performative contradictions are:

• always irrational
• morally wrong when they cause harm to others or society
• blameworthy when the person ought to know better and could reasonably connect their commitments to their actions
• present whether or not the person is aware of them
• create a rational duty to justify or correct them once challenged
• distinguishable between blameworthy or not, due to our not being all-seeing rational beings

5

Notice something about hypocrisy. A hypocrite (say, about donating to charity) does not, by being a hypocrite, render their claim that we ought to donate to charity false or dubious. It does, however, function as a rational (and perhaps moral) self-indictment. Why exactly? Borrowing from my arguments in [[The Vibe Salesman - Examining Bad Faith Reasoning through Kantian Responsibility]], I claim it is irrational, not just because of the contradictory element, but also because it shows that what is "really" driving their behavior is not rational either. If it was driven by the practical reasoning:

"Anyone ought to donate to charity if they are able."
"I am able to donate to charity comfortably."

then we should see them follow through with the action of donating. They do not, which is fundamentally irrational. If they continue to make such claims but never follow through with the act, artfully dodging challenges to the contradictory nature of their behavior, then we see that they are not being driven by the ends that they claim to be. It is an epistemic shortcoming in action to say:

"Anyone ought to donate to charity if they are able."

but really, as slowly revealed through time, only act as if one is responsible to:

"I shall spread the idea that donating to charity is good."

6

Simply making incompatible claims does not render any of the claims themselves false (it just renders the speaker's action in doing so irrational). Likewise, acting/not-acting in a way incompatible with one's claims renders the doer irrational in doing so, but does not make the claims-to-act any worse off. Commitments to act or to claims may be implicit or explicit. For example, I have never in my life uttered or thought the sentence "To be walking means to be activating the leg muscles in some pattern," but I am committed to this conclusion through some basic anatomy knowledge and by knowing what "walking" is.

So, we have two types of performative contradiction. One having to do with making explicit claims that are incompatible with one's implicit/explicit commitments, like:

"Language is meaningless!"

(In this case, the commitment is implicit in my very use of language.) And a second, having to do with taking actions (endorsing some practical reasoning) which implicitly commits me to something incompatible with a prior implicit or explicit commitment, as in our hypocritical charity advocate:

<Does not donate to charity>
But implicitly or explicitly endorses: "Anyone ought to donate to charity if they are able."

Performative contradictions can take place in either the act of advancing some theoretical reasoning, acting on some practical reasoning, or endorsing some practical reasoning.

7

I will turn to explicating a few of my initial definitions in greater detail, but first, a few thoughts on the concept of testimony or trust in an epistemic context. There is a common thread to many hyper-individualist philosophies and anti-intellectualism that is a rejection of epistemic trust tout court. On these extreme views, the inference from hearing the credentialed doctor say (in standard conditions):

"Your X-ray indicates that you have a hairline fracture in your femur." 

to

"I shall believe him and rest my leg."

is not a good inference unless it is accompanied by a huge helping of knowledge that I have gathered "first hand" (what "first hand" could mean is indeed something one could have a bone to pick with, but I will get to that). One cannot help but wonder how life in an actual society is supposed to function under these absurdly demanding epistemic standards. I will argue that this notion of the ultimate court of appeals being only in one's head is exactly backwards.

8

Views in this hyper-individualist anti-intellectual vein tend to make two deep mistakes, in addition to leaving us with a crippled view of social epistemology. The first mistake is running together the concept of "appeal to authority" and deference of justification. It is a native feature of discourse itself—it simply would not qualify as such without it—that we can inherit and defer the justification of claims. If $S$ makes a claim $P$, asserts that something is true, I can say "according to $S$, $P$" and I thereby pass the buck to $S$.

There is nothing to be wary of in saying "Fermat's Last Theorem is true," even if we cannot pull out a pencil and paper and prove it ourselves. We trust mathematicians that it has been proven. What would have to be true for it to come out that they were mistaken all along?

9

When we claim it to be true (that we rightly know) that the Earth revolves around the sun, is that the same thing as claiming one can give a demonstration?

10

Perhaps the individualist can claim that the ideas themselves evolve, like Dawkins' memes, and it has nothing to do with epistemic trust. Under this view, the best ideas survive, and so our trust in them is placed in the evolutionary process and not at all in the socially-recognitive dimension of trust. For this to be more than mere fantasy, however, we would have to show that ideas can evolve to such a level of complexity entirely without some kind of rational discourse (no doubt itself a product of an evolutionary process). For rational discourse implies the possibility—and extremely high probability—that claims will be inherited and justification deferred. I am not sure what "ideas" (that are any kind of knowledge) can mean outside the possibility of rational discourse.

11

The second deep mistake that these hyper-individualist anti-intellectual views make is that they are a performative contradiction (one where one's explicit commitment is contradicted by commitments implicit in one's ongoing actions). On the one hand, they claim to endorse:

"I shall trust no one's reasons but my own and the products of my senses."

when in reality this is merely an act one puts on for oneself. For the same person will attempt to convince you of their meaning by endorsing something like:

"You should believe me because my arguments for absolute X are convincing by these lights..."

If they are right, why should we be persuaded? The performative contradiction is in claiming to stand alone in being able to justify, while all the while one is deferring justification by relying on the reasoning-machinery and language that allows one to make the argument in the first place. The very meanings of my words are deferrals of justification to something beyond merely myself. Even Descartes, alone in a room attempting to doubt everything, did not truly stand alone in this sense.

12

It might be objected that this second flaw is a straw man, and the more sophisticated individualist might object that this conflates domains where epistemic trust is warranted with those where it is not. As long as the demarcation between "to be trusted" and "not to be trusted" is made for the right reasons, I have no issue with this objection.

Perhaps we live in a world where there is massive selection pressure for biologists to become liars, then it might be rational to place less trust in a biologist than in some other expert.

There is going to be a deeper problem with this objection if we drill down, though. This kind of evaluation must be done in a thorough and epistemically responsible way. I cannot simply hear one podcast episode about a bumbling biologist and therefore rationally lose all trust in biologists. But the deeper difficulty is this: unless I use my own eyes and ears 'first-hand' plus whatever fields are 'trusted' to demonstrate that 'nearly all biologists are liars', I cannot reach my conclusion without performative contradiction—rejecting epistemic trust while simultaneously relying on it. This seems a tall order.

13

Another objection the individualist might take to avoid countenancing epistemic trust is reliance on market forces.

The market-based alternative faces the same problem of teetering in a position that threatens to collapse into the performative contradiction of relying on the very trust to is invoked to reject. Evaluating market feedback itself requires epistemic trust, except in perhaps the simplest toy examples.

14

There simply is no such thing as deferring all justification yet still somehow justifying. Charles Taylor, in his essay "Atomism" likens this kind of view, an attempt to preserve one's rights over oneself at the cost of all social-normative benefits, to the paradoxical offer for me to

[...] defend you against those who menace your freedom by hiding you in a deep freeze.

His point is that I am engaged in a performative contradiction where a deeper claim—implicit within my overt claim—is contradicted by practical commitments implicit in my actions.

"I shall defend you against those who menace your freedom." 
    (commits me to "I shall save you from all infractions on your wellbeing.")
<deep freezes you>
    (commits me to having damaged your well-being)

Here, it is the wrong concept of freedom that is at work. The concept of freedom that the deep-freezer claims to hold is not consistent with the consequences of the deep-freezer's actions. Likewise, the notion of jettisoning all social-normative value is not consistent with the consequences of speaking, reasoning, and acting qua community member.

15

To speak and to reason, we must act qua community member. When I say 'The cat is on the mat,' I'm not just making noise—I'm invoking mutually shared concepts, grammatical rules, and standards of truth that only exist through social practices. Even in the simplest claim-making, language-using, or human interactions, we rely on inherited social practices of reasoning.

This sociality need not be instantaneously active—someone alone on a desert island can reason, but their reasoning remains parasitic on internalized social practices. However, I want to argue that actual reasoning requires more than just this parasitic relationship. It requires the ongoing possibility of being corrected, challenged, and held accountable to shared standards.

Consider an eternal desert-islander who never existed in society but nevertheless seems to reason. If he holds that claim $A$ supports claim $B$, how does he know he's correct? If he changes his mind tomorrow, how will he determine which view was right? Without social practices of correction and confirmation, there's no meaningful distinction between "seems right to me" and "is right." The normative dimension that makes reasoning reasoning (rather than mere information processing) collapses.

We rely on social practices not just for the content of our concepts, but for the very standards that make rational evaluation possible. The individual reasoner cannot bootstrap these standards from pure solitary reflection—they emerge from and are sustained by communities of reasoning.

My deeper claim has been that reason requires actual sociality. This inherent sociality of reason claim requires a vast and entirely separate argument that I leave for another time. I mention it now in the interest of putting my cards on the table. Suffice it to say for now, none of us are actual eternal desert-islanders; our reasoning faculties are a direct descendant of sociality.

16

Even if this deeper argument is too big a pill to swallow for this note, the hyper-individualist view must still contend with a more mundane fact. That is that we in practice constantly and consistently—through the use of words, concepts, evidence, etc—rely on deferrals of justification among many other inherently social epistemic moves. Just practically speaking, with all deeper arguments aside, epistemic trust is so deep a part of the engine of rationality as it actually happens that if we want to understand and remove it, we will have the break the entire thing down and rebuild it.

I think it is indicative of a big philosophical mistake when we find ourselves having to forcefully contort everyday actions like trusting the doctor to fit the model.

17

One might object that perhaps that sociality is a ladder we could climb and then kick away, using the reasoning-machinery and knowledge of society to see one's true place and then discard it all. Indeed, one may do so, perhaps by not speaking, not arguing for the view, and living alone in international waters. However, when such an individual might so much as check a Wikipedia article, they become embroiled in the same performative contradiction again.

18

Imagine someone who has just learned that the hyper-individualist view is correct. They say in fear:

"I cannot drive down the mountain. I am not aware of exactly how the brakes on my vehicle work."

19

Let me now make something clear. I am not advocating, nor is anyone, for always trusting the reasons of others with credentials or expertise. There are obviously exceptions, and it would be a mistake to just trust across the board. Who to trust and when is a messy retail business of boots-on-the-ground reasoning. Equally mistaken, though, is the view that we ought to place trust in no one or place trust selectively without consistency.

20

Turning now to anti-intellectualism, then to varieties of credentialism. I have defined anti-intellectualism as a rejection of the validity of epistemic trust in epistemic norms and institutions, but we need to unpack that a bit. I believe this rejection of trust is best understood as a cluster of epistemic ailments. I call them ailments or defects, not merely because they are things I do not like, but because they are fundamentally not rational, and in the modern world, result in performative contradictions of the above kind.

The first element comprising anti-intellectualism is a bad-faith rejection of epistemic authority. This is a selective rejection of an otherwise trustworthy reason, usually on post-hoc skeptical grounds. It is selective and in bad faith because if one were to apply the same criteria universally, one would not trust the majority of sources one already implicitly does in action, thus a performative contradiction.

The second element is the aforementioned anti-credentialism, the idea that credentials are completely meaningless or even bad indicators for the epistemic worth of one's reasons in a given domain. Once the mistake has been made in rejecting the epistemic authority of another selectively, one must justify this step. Usually, this is done in a reactionary way by conflating deferring justification with appeals to authority. Appeal to authority is a commonly known fallacy, but it is rarely actually invoked.

"Jane is right about that rash. She is a doctor." 

is not a vicious instance of an appeal to authority fallacy, nor is

"Listen to the experts on vaccines."

These are practically unavoidable deferrals of justification. Should the Doctor come up empty-handed with actual good reasons to take the vaccine, then we won't believe them. We do not believe them merely because they are doctors or wear white smocks. We believe them because, under standard conditions, their credentials matter in evaluating the reasons they give in the very same way that being a good basketball player means one is likely to make an easy layup.

The third element of anti-intellectualism, drawing on the previous two, is a kind of Epistemic populism. Once any legitimate epistemic trust is mistaken for "appeal to authority," and once the criteria for what to trust become cherry-picked, anyone's "research" or opinions appear as good as the next person's. The tough pill to swallow is that they are not. Someone off the street is wildly unlikely to make a breakthrough in nano-technology, predict the future of emerging science, declare vast swaths of good medical research a lie, and so on.

Anti-intellectualism, as defined in this note, is a defective status (most of the time) because it is a rejection of trust in epistemic norms and institutions that deserve our trust. Anti-intellectualism takes root in cherry-picked selections of epistemic authority, anti-credentialism as a reactionary response catalyzed by the confusing of deferral of justification with appeals to authority (often resulting from hyper-individualist philosophies), and eventually the false idea of Epistemic populism. "My ignorance is as good or better than your knowledge."

21

An anti-intellectualist might counter that often the "institutions" are wrong, and a unanimous opinion can turn out to be false. I would not deny either of these. I would merely point out that these are bad reasons to distrust our best knowledge now. Human institutions of knowledge are indeed wrong sometimes, and in the long run, almost all of them invariably are, but that is a foolish reason not to trust them now.

"The best research could be wrong and likely will be flawed in the long run therefore I shall do a 5 minute Google search and trust that instead." 

This is a bad move. Again, it must be stressed that I am not saying to uncritically trust institutions, but rather that trusting them is the rule, not the exception.

22

The anti-intellectualist is also, at heart, another Vibe Salesman. The performative contradictions that the anti-intellectualist winds themselves up in are a product of the fact that consistency was never their goal. They seek to foster a false sense of "epistemic equality," which is really a confused gerrymandering of whose claims should or should not be trusted.

23

Now to the varieties of credentialism. Just as the "appeal to authority" fallacy is rarely actually invoked, mere-credentialism is also rarely invoked. Instead, it is a lazy or blind accusation from those who cannot distinguish deferral of justification from appeals to authority and who generally do not trust institutions (again, often because of hyper-individualist views).

No one of stable mind wants to actually be committed to something like:

"Jane is right MERELY because they have a PHD (and considering none of the likely sequences of events that led them there, character traits, or past events etc ...) "

24

Having at least partially diagnosed the underlying philosophy of anti-intellectualism, I will turn to the relation between Anti-intellectualism and Pseudo-intellectuals. The former relates to the latter in a mutualism, like pollinator and flower. As we saw with the Vibe Salesman, for the Pseudo-intellectual, feelings are in the driver's seat. They exploit the norms of rational discourse while being guided by unstated feelings/absurdities rather than truth or consistency. It is these norm violations that make them deserving to be called Pseudo-intellectuals, not any kind of credential or lack thereof. Anti-intellectualism—often fostered by hyper-individualist philosophies—clears the path for Pseudo-intellectuals, and demand for those Pseudo-intellectuals drives more feigned or selective skepticism towards good epistemic norms, resulting in a feedback loop.

25

Just as the singular individual who practically rejects good modes of justification is engaged in a performative contradiction, so the entire societal forces of ant-intellectualism and post-truth are engaged in performative contradictions. A society that denigrates good epistemic norms, likely fueled by the attention economy, is doomed to contradict itself by trying to simultaneously acknowledge:

1. Society's capability to "go post-truth" is predicated on societal progress, the absence of disaster, famine, and disease, etc. All these are only possible due to good epistemic norms. (implicit commitment)
2. "We reject good epistemic norms!" (Incomptabile because it has the consequence of shattering stability, which is unwanted)

This contradiction is the purported rejection of the very institutions and practices that MAKE IT POSSIBLE to be in a position to disavow them at all. One could argue that "good epistemic norms" are inessential for our present state of success and comfort, but this line of reasoning is hardly worth countenancing.

26

Imagine a damaged steam ship navigating treacherous icy waters. Every crew member is only alive because of the skill of the captain, the crew, and the engineer. Far below deck, there are a handful of accidental passengers (themselves without experience piloting such a craft) who exchange skepticism for the choices of the crew and captain. "Perhaps they should have gone west?" "Does the captain really know what he's doing?" "Get me up there, I'll have us home in 2 days!" The grumblings of these members are dependent on their safety as provided by the skilled actions of the crew.

Post-truth and anti-intellectual (not well-founded skeptical) sentiments towards medicine, science, and expertise generally stand in this same relation. We live the comfortable lives we do—not ridden with infant mortality, war, disaster, plague, and famine—because of the institutions of good epistemic practice that we implicitly benefit from in our modern world.

Why does the crew have epistemic authority? A systemic question involving its history, universities, science, etc, all with good epistemic norms running through each element as a common thread.

27

In summary, there are two kinds of performative contradictions at play in post-truth and anti-intellectualism. The first is causally rooted, as in the case of the ship and crew or our health today, given the progress of medicine. This kind of performative contradiction results from our rejecting the norms that have up to now done well by us and afforded us a comfortable position from which to complain about them. The second kind of performative contradiction is of a deeper conceptually rooted philosophical kind. It is the contradiction between good epistemic norms that conceptually constitute the very possibility of meaning and progress in knowledge and the selective/inconsistent rejection of those norms. Willingness to participate in these contradictions is irrational and is morally wrong when it involves denigrating institutions that help people.

28

The attention economy promotes outrage and fans the flames of anti-intellectualism. We are bashed over the head with pseudo-intellectuals, not because what they say is of epistemic value, but because it plays to the suppressed feelings of many and outrages the rest with its paper-thin rhetoric.

29

Imagine every day being prompted over and over again to revisit modernized versions of Descartes' argument for God-given "clear and distinct ideas" pedaled by "Doesn't this idea make you mad?"-intellectuals (Perhaps in a world where there is a suppressed anger for the difficulty of defeating skepticism with foundationalism). Despite being unconvinced, you find yourself every day having to swat away talk of the argument like pestilent flies clouding your vision. No matter how many times you rehearse the reasons you don't buy the argument and throw it out the front door, it sneaks in through the window for you to be forced to confront it again. So it is with pseudo-intellectuals in the post-truth anti-intellectualist world. The attention economy loves pseudo-intellectuals because they drive engagement far more than substantive, complex ideas.

30

The pseudo-intellectuals we have, I have argued, are a product of deeper philosophical tendencies combined with a spiral of mistrust and bad faith. I think this cycle can be broken by making what really drives our reasoning and action explicit through education. When we take ourselves to be doing what we are in fact not doing, we can neither be honest with ourselves nor others. We cannot take ourselves to be doing what we are in fact doing if we are unaware of the performative contradictions we are engaged in.

I will not pretend to know what a comprehensive solution to this problem looks like, but I suspect that it involves education, face-to-face human involvement in communal matters, all in the aim of better understanding ourselves. Technology, norms, or institutions have run too far counter to the human interests they spawned from when we find their selection pressures driving how we behave more than the other way around.

This is, then, in conclusion, an argument that fundamental good epistemic norms and institutions are an essential component of a moral and healthy life and a moral and healthy society. When we deny them, we deny what we tacitly accept in practice, and we become a mystery to ourselves, and the path to good lives becomes needlessly complex.