Hang tight through a sports analogy, I won't do them often.

I knew McLaren should back Lando.

This was late in the 2025 F1 season. My guy, Oscar Piastri, and Lando's teammate, was still mathematically in it, but barely. The rational move for the team was obvious: consolidate behind Norris, maximize driver's championship points, and secure the championship. Any detached observer could see it.

I didn't want to see it. I wanted Oscar to have his shot. I knew this was not thinking. It was feeling.

This is a small thing. Sports allegiances are fun. This is an arena among many arenas where I invite you to feel. But the same mechanism: wanting something to be true, then finding reasons it should be, operates at much higher stakes. And I suspect it's operating more now than it has in a long time.

We've spent the last century in what might be called an Age of Thinking.

Not that everyone was rational. But the dominant cultural assumption was that progress came from rigor: from science, from expertise, from institutions designed to separate signal from noise. The technocrats would figure it out. The systems would work. Trust the process.

And for a while, this delivered. The post-war economic expansion was real. Life expectancy climbed. Infant mortality collapsed. The middle class grew. If you were born in 1940 in America, you had a 90% chance of out-earning your parents by the time you turned 30. The system was working for most people, and the people who doubted it were a minority.

That's no longer true. By the 1980 birth cohort, according to research led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, only half of Americans were doing better than their parents at the same age. The American Dream became a coin flip.

The perception is what matters here. The dividends of the Age of Thinking narrowed, or at least appeared to. And when the benefits of a system shrink, so does trust in the system.

Gallup has tracked confidence in American institutions since the 1970s. In 1979, average confidence across major institutions stood at 48%. By 2024, it had fallen to 28%, with most institutions at or near historic lows. Trust in government, measured by Pew since 1958, tells a similar story: from 73% trusting the federal government "most of the time" in 1958 to roughly 16% today.

This isn't partisan. Democrats' confidence in institutions recently hit its lowest point in Gallup's trend dating back to 1979. Republicans experienced similar collapses during different administrations.

What collapsed wasn't just trust in specific institutions. It was trust in the epistemological infrastructure: the shared understanding of how we know what's true. Peer review, credentialed expertise, institutional consensus: these were the mechanisms that told people what to believe. Some of the failures were real: the 2008 financial crisis, the Iraq WMD assessments, the opioid epidemic enabled by captured regulators, the whiplash of COVID policy. Some were merely perceived. Either way, the result is the same: the machinery of thinking lost its authority.

Into that vacuum, feeling rushed in.

Something easier to miss, something subtle.

When shared standards for truth collapse, what remains is resonance. Does this feel right? Does it match my experience, my identity, my tribe's consensus? The question shifts from "Is this true?" to "Does this feel true to someone like me?"

Both poles are now operating this way, while each believes the other is the irrational one.

Take "trust the science" during COVID. This phrase was a demand for deference dressed as an invitation to examine evidence. Insisting on faith in institutional authority dressed as empiricism. Very Maoist. The message was: don't think, comply. Inquiry was rebranded as denial.

The pendulum has now swung hard. Vaccine skepticism has metastasized from legitimate questions about specific policies into wholesale rejection of immunization itself. We are watching measles return. Children will get sick and some will die. Not because of a lack of information or knowledge, but because of an abundance of feeling. Distrust became identity. Identity became epistemology.

Or take tariffs. The business-friendly right has embraced them with enthusiasm, despite tariffs being, at their core, a tax on American consumers and businesses. They stifle the economic freedom conservatives claim to champion. They chase away trading partners and shrink the cooperative global order that made American prosperity and preeminence possible.

But tariffs feel like doing something. They feel like fighting back, like protecting "us" from "them." The feeling is real. The economics are not. And when confronted with the economics, the response is deflection: elites, globalists, out-of-touch experts.

Both examples share the same structure. A legitimate grievance or uncertainty gets filtered through tribal identity and emotional resonance until it becomes unfalsifiable. What remains isn't a position. It's a posture.

Why now?

Two forces converged.

First, the trust collapse. Institutions failed: sometimes through incompetence, sometimes through capture, sometimes through bad luck. Each failure made the next one easier to believe. When experts get it wrong enough times, "do your own research" starts to sound reasonable. The problem is that the research people do tends to confirm what they already feel, not challenge it. Confirmation bias is perhaps the strongest force in human nature.

Second, the information environment. Algorithmic feeds select for engagement, and engagement correlates with emotional intensity. What spreads is what feels true, what triggers recognition, what confirms identity. The replication crisis in social science made "trust the science" genuinely shakier: many celebrated findings couldn't be reproduced. But instead of producing more careful epistemology, it produced less epistemology altogether. Feeling filled the gap. In science!

science became Science.

We've lost shared standards for what counts as good thinking, or the standards are fragmented and dispersed. Without those standards, emotional resonance becomes the default criterion. And emotional resonance is not evenly distributed. It clusters around identity, tribe, and grievance.

No one is above this; we all do it.

I watched myself rationalize my F1 preferences. Calculating what needed to occur for Oscar to win the drivers' championship and praying for it to be.

I've caught myself discounting information that didn't fit narratives I'd already adopted. We all do this. The research on motivated reasoning is robust: we are exquisitely skilled at believing what we want to believe and finding evidence to support it after the fact.

The question isn't whether we're susceptible. We are. The question is whether we notice.

If you can see the pull: the tug toward feeling, the comfort of resonance, the satisfaction of positions that confirm who you already believe yourself to be. You can start to shape it. You can ask: Is this what I think, or what I feel? You can hold conclusions loosely. You can seek out the strongest version of arguments you disagree with. You can remember that your opponent is probably operating with the same motivated reasoning you are, which means dismissing them as stupid is almost certainly wrong.

None of this is prescription. I don't think I can change hearts and minds by telling people what to believe. But I think awareness itself might be enough to start. If more people could see the mechanism and could feel the pull of feeling and name it for what it is, we might at least be having different conversations.

I invite you to put your brain and beliefs in debug mode. Step through the lines of code one by one and examine the output and conclusions you believe to be true about our world.

This is not a manifesto against feeling. In the absence of data, trust your gut. When the data makes no sense, gut check. Love, laugh, cry. I want all of it for you. But I also want the structures that make flourishing possible to be strong enough to withstand the parts of our emotions that deceive us.

This is the first post of a new publication. The subject is civics: the structures, values, and habits that make a free society possible. What does it take to sustain a democracy where outcomes aren't equal (they never will be) but opportunity genuinely is?

These are old questions. They feel urgent again.

I have no answers, only a conviction that they won't come from either pole, and they won't come from feeling. They'll come from people willing to think carefully about hard problems, even when conclusions are uncomfortable, even when the tribe disapproves.

We'll spend time with history, with books, with thinkers past and present.

If that sounds like you, welcome to The Prometheus Dispatch.