Truth Belongs to No Institution

“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary person could be such a fool.”

“One must belong to the intelligentsia to believe such things: no ordinary person could be that foolish.”

George Orwell, the British author and essayist who keenly examined the connection between language, power, and the loss of political reality, wrote this sentence in 1945 in his essay “Notes on Nationalism.” Europe had just emerged from a war in which ideologies, states, and intellectuals repeatedly demanded that facts conform to their loyalties. Orwell did not attack education. He attacked the moment when education ceases to serve as a tool for examining reality and becomes an instrument for defending a preexisting commitment. The educated person is not immune to folly. At times, he is even more dangerous, because he is capable of endowing it with structure, style, technical jargon, references, and a sense of moral superiority (Orwell, 1945).

Precisely the institution that promised to elevate humanity above ignorance, superstition, myths, and crude interests has often succeeded in bringing those very forces back into the world, clothed in the language of philosophy, theology, science, law, progress, security, liberation, or justice. Popular prejudice appears as prejudice. Institutional prejudice sometimes appears as a conclusion.

When an individual holds a prejudice, it can remain confined to their own world. When a prestigious institution adopts it, teaches it, publicizes it, trains professionals using it, includes it in textbooks, or translates it into policy, it takes on a different status. It ceases to be merely an opinion. It becomes authoritative knowledge.

An institution of knowledge is not just a university. It can be an academy, a church, a court, a research institute, a professional association, a museum, an educational system, a journal, a committee of experts, a news organization, or a government agency that decides what data will be collected, how it will be classified, who is authorized to interpret it, and which conclusions will be considered valid. Such institutions do not merely examine claims about reality. They determine who is allowed to speak, what counts as evidence, what language is considered professional, who will be recognized as an expert, who will be heard as a credible witness, which questions will be considered legitimate, and which will be labeled in advance as unscientific, unenlightened, immoral, or irrelevant to the discourse.

The danger does not begin only when an institution consciously lies. A simple lie is just one possibility—and sometimes not even the most interesting one. The deeper danger arises when power takes the form of truth: when hierarchy is presented as nature, self-interest as science, domination as order, prejudice as diagnosis, propaganda as context, policy as a matter of necessity, and political stance as an objective conclusion.

The institution does not have to invent hatred; sometimes it is enough for it to purge it of its foul odor by giving it a Latin name, entering it into a statistical table, or attaching a meticulous footnote that frames it as a legal provision, a conference topic, or an expert committee declaring the issue complex. Thus, prejudice becomes more respectable precisely at the moment it becomes more dangerous.

Institutions are not the problem in and of themselves. A society without institutions is not a free society; it is a society in which brute force is freed from the obligation to account for itself. Science, law, academia, religion, and expertise are among the most important tools that humans have developed to combat ignorance, arbitrariness, and unchecked power. Precisely for this reason, it is worth asking what happens when these institutions themselves lose their capacity to be scrutinized.

Knowledge as a method—that is, as a system of inquiry open to scrutiny and correction—requires skepticism, evidence, transparency, and the ability to admit error. Knowledge as a class of people relies on prestige, hierarchy, mastery of professional jargon, and social immunity. When an institution functions as a method, it is capable of exposing injustice. When it functions as a class of people, it is capable of whitewashing it.