When Knowledge Lost Its Power

From Evidence to Authority: What Happens When Power Decides What’s True

We used to believe that if we just had the facts, we could win the argument. That if the data were clear, the public would listen. That evidence could still shape decisions. But what if that was never entirely true, and what if now, it no longer matters?

Knowledge hasn’t disappeared. It’s been sidelined, fragmented, and repurposed. We live in a time when expertise is met with suspicion, when policy is shaped by perception, and when spectacle wins more airtime than substance. The rupture wasn’t sudden, but it was real—and we’re now governed less by understanding than by performance.

It didn’t happen all at once. There was no single moment when knowledge was pushed aside, no declaration that reason would be replaced by spectacle or that data would yield to slogans. But across decades, through political shifts, institutional drift, and economic restructuring, knowledge became separated from the places where decisions are made.

That separation wasn’t accidental. Universities, once imagined as public institutions serving civic life, became increasingly professionalized and insulated. The rewards went to those who specialized narrowly, published within their disciplines, and secured funding from corporate or governmental sources. The more expert someone became, the less accessible they were to the public, and often, the less influential they were in shaping policy. Knowing more didn’t mean being heard. In some cases, it meant being safely ignored.

At the same time, power was migrating. Economic policy, once debated in legislatures, moved into back rooms and global institutions. Trade deals were crafted by technocrats and signed off by heads of state with little public input. The language of accountability gave way to the language of efficiency. In political life, the rise of consultants, public relations firms, and data-driven messaging meant that persuasion overtook substance. Candidates didn’t need the best ideas—they needed the most effective narrative. The ability to manage perception began to matter more than the ability to govern well.

There were moments, not ideal but instructive, when knowledge shaped public decisions. The New Deal drew on social research to guide labor and relief programs. Postwar public health campaigns relied on epidemiological data and education to address disease and sanitation. Even the early years of environmental regulation were grounded in research and hard-won consensus. These weren’t flawless systems, but they remind us that public policy and public knowledge once shared a working relationship.

That relationship began to unravel in the late 1960s and early 70s, when a cultural rupture emerged that challenged the authority of expert knowledge. The Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rise of the counterculture sparked a broader questioning of institutions that had long claimed scientific neutrality. Out of this ferment grew postmodernist critiques that viewed knowledge not as objective truth, but as a function of power—always situated, often exclusionary, and sometimes complicit in injustice.

This questioning was necessary. It opened space for silenced voices and for critiques of colonial, racial, and gendered hierarchies embedded in “universal” claims. But as those critiques filtered beyond the academy, they were distorted and repurposed. What began as a demand for epistemic humility became, in the hands of populist and corporate actors, a justification for discarding expertise altogether. “Truth” became a matter of opinion, and expertise became just another elite identity to be resented or dismissed.

As the neoliberal model took hold, this shift accelerated. Under its logic, knowledge was either monetized or sidelined. Research agendas increasingly followed funding streams set by philanthropic foundations, corporate sponsors, or state agencies guided by market priorities. What couldn’t be measured in terms of deliverables or brand value was often abandoned. Truth wasn’t debated; it was managed. Think tanks filled the vacuum left by public institutions, many of them advancing agendas not subject to peer review but to donor alignment.

Media fragmentation widened the gap. In a fractured information environment, attention became the scarce resource. Outrage and speed displaced depth. Complexity didn’t sell. Political communication was recast as branding, where facts were just another raw material. Even journalists trying to do serious work faced shrinking newsrooms, hostile ownership, and an audience pulled in a hundred directions at once. In that space, truth competes poorly with spectacle.

This wasn’t simply the result of cultural decline. It was structural. Anti-intellectualism didn’t just drift in on the tide—it was cultivated. Discrediting public institutions and academic expertise cleared the way for policies that favored private control, deregulation, and the systematic defunding of civic infrastructure. A well-informed public might ask hard questions. Easier to cast knowledge itself as suspect.

Anthropologists have long understood that systems of power organize meaning. What counts as knowledge, who gets to speak, and whose experiences are validated are not neutral decisions. The colonial project depended not only on conquest but on classifications. The neoliberal project depends just as much on abstraction, quantification, and the selective amplification of voices. Knowledge hasn’t disappeared. It’s been filtered, repackaged, and absorbed by institutions with other goals.

The deeper problem is that public policy on housing, health, migration, and climate is being made by people who either reject or ignore the best available evidence. At the same time, those producing that knowledge are often left speaking to each other—behind paywalls, at conferences, or in publications no policymaker will read. Expertise without influence becomes performance. Power without understanding becomes propaganda.

Reconnecting knowledge and power will take more than outreach. It requires structural change. That means rebuilding institutions that serve public purpose, not private interest. It means restoring civic space where ideas and evidence matter. And it means confronting the systems that benefit from keeping knowledge locked out of the room where decisions are made.

This erosion of knowledge hasn’t just weakened policy—it has cleared the way for something more dangerous. When power no longer needs evidence, it becomes free to invent its own truths. Today we face a postmodern authoritarianism, not anchored in tanks or decrees, but in the willful construction of falsehoods, repeated until they crowd out reality. A president who treats truth as a loyalty test, who wages war on science, history, and expertise, isn’t just an eccentric—it’s a sign of how far we’ve drifted from governance grounded in understanding. When lies are repeated from the podium, echoed across media ecosystems, and enacted through policy, they don’t merely distort—they rule. What’s at stake isn’t just the credibility of experts or the funding of universities. It’s whether public life can be shaped by anything other than force, belief, and spectacle. If we don’t rebuild the link between knowledge and power, we risk living under a government that no longer recognizes the difference between them.

Suggested Readings

Berman, Elizabeth Popp. Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.

Collins, Harry M., and Robert Evans. Rethinking Expertise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

McGoey, Linsey. The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World. London: Zed Books, 2019.

Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso, 2013.

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.