Why You Will Never Really Know Which Car (Or Candidate) Is Better

"How well supported your position is by objective reason" is not a scalar measure. How real is it? Such can be asked of a great many ideas by people who need to know, but the answer is tricky. And if there are positions whose supporters know they have less basis in evidence, their promoters and supporters are probably quite thankful such a scalar measure does not exist.

However, supporting an argument with evidence is certainly a process on which objective discovery and logical reason depend for their validity. It brings methods of science to applications in ordinary life. Arguments of suitability for given purposes establish ways to be practical and efficient in our choices. Correctness in analysis of these arguments should be very helpful, and thus we can note with interest where, when, and why such analysis fails to help more.

In what ways do virtue and suitability actually exist and lend themselves to objective measure?

Why is it so hard to determine "objectively better" even (or perhaps especially) when it is important that we, individually or collectively, do so? Putting it plainly, the marketplace of ideas is still a marketplace. And the marketplace of anything is competitive, even clamorous, since a good market for your product is something to be desired greatly: a source of potential profit, power, and prestige. Winning friends and influencing people is always more attractive than simply demonstrating qualities - and exposing deficiencies - accurately.

Being able to determine that one brand of automobile stands demonstrably head-and-shoulders above all others, while another brand is worse in all measurable ways, this would be a wonderful ability to have and to use and disseminate to all who wish to acquire in the marketplace, but it would be much less wonderful for the makers of the worse cars. Imagine if those worse cars had, nonetheless, still somehow become very popular. The sellers in the marketplace can be quite clever creatures, after all. There would be a large amount of business and a large number of jobs to be lost if the objective truth could be demonstrated by reasoned argument and gathered evidence: if you could simply convince everyone of those demonstrable facts.

Now think of political parties and movements, and the principles and platforms on which they are based, particularly their potential for governing well or poorly. Certainly, there are points of view that make this a trickier set of qualitative measurements than an automobile's virtues and vices. And perhaps in cars and politics and life itself, the marketplace idea means that there are many virtues of a particular brand of product, or a particular party, by which it can redeem itself even as it falls flat in other ways. Progress, after all, can be seen as destructive of the old even as it is constructive of something new. Likewise, conservation of something can preserve its desired worth but also can ignore the constructive potential for change, for knowing if something is more constructive or worthwhile.

But in politics, as well as advertising, does this lead to confusion rather than clarity? Is the practice of everybody giving the best sales pitch they know how - popularization and effective marketing - actually disguising the fact that sometimes, somehow, products - including political parties and movements - can actually rise to such a high level of quality that one could say with correctness they are better than the others, or fall so low that they are objectively, demonstrably worse?

When you're a buyer in the marketplace, you cannot reasonably hope not to have your viewpoint manipulated by someone motivated to sell you a product, above and beyond a dispassionate display of evidence of the actual merit of the product. In fact, if someone standing in that marketplace was correcting everyone's sales pitches with actual facts and evidence, acting as a sort of a "Consumer Reports" whistleblower daring, unlike that reputable publication, to intervene actively in the sales process, they would be an undesired troublemaker the likes of which even the most seedy dive bars have never seen.

This is why I have never had an aptitude - or appetite - for sales.

This is also why "status quo" so often has translated to "the mess we're in."