Lukianoff’s Blind Spot
The establishment clause he's not applying.
Greg Lukianoff has spent his career defending the free exercise clause brilliantly. His new piece on AI and truth-seeking is ambitious, serious, and worth your time. But it has a blind spot that goes to the heart of his project.
Lukianoff is trying to fix the output of a system that is structurally compromised at the input. He wants better disconfirmation of research produced by federally subsidized universities, better protection of speech on federally subsidized campuses, better replication of studies funded by federal grants. But he never asks whether the subsidy itself is the establishment clause violation hiding in plain sight.
The First Amendment’s establishment clause isn’t just about religion. Government funding a particular class of knowledge-producing institutions at massive scale — with all their embedded orthodoxies — is a form of establishment. When Washington subsidizes universities, it doesn’t just fund buildings and salaries. It picks winners in the marketplace of ideas. The institutions that receive that money shape what counts as legitimate knowledge, legitimate inquiry, legitimate discourse. That’s not a free market of competing dogmas checking each other. That’s the government putting its thumb on the scale.
FIRE fights the symptoms while leaving the disease untouched.
I’ve written before that I suspect Lukianoff is a free speech prioritizist — someone who treats free expression as the master value that dissolves all other problems. His new project is the clearest evidence yet. He’s proposing a comprehensive disconfirmation apparatus for everyone else’s knowledge claims while the founding assumption of his own project goes untested: that open adversarial inquiry, properly institutionalized, self-corrects. It doesn’t — not when the institutions themselves are creatures of government subsidy.
Every institution is dogmatic in some way. Churches, universities, FIRE itself — each has blind spots baked into its founding assumptions. The solution isn’t a better arbiter. It’s a structural rule that prevents any single arbiter from winning permanently. That rule already exists:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Lukianoff defends the free exercise clause brilliantly. I’d like to see him apply the establishment clause just as rigorously.
You can’t fix establishment with better speech rules. You have to defund the establishment.
What does that look like in practice? It starts at home and in schools that haven’t been captured by the establishment themselves. Teach children that every institution — the church, the university, the government, even FIRE — has blind spots baked into its founding assumptions. Teach them that the First Amendment’s deepest purpose isn’t to protect your speech. It’s to prevent any single dogma from becoming the official truth. Teach them that competing institutions, none of them privileged by government money, is how truth actually emerges — not from a better arbiter, but from the friction between imperfect ones. A child who understands that is immune to establishment in a way that no speech code, no replication study, and no AI disconfirmation engine can manufacture.
The only way that norm becomes real is if we teach it to our children — not which dogma is correct, but why no dogma gets to be final. That’s the load-bearing idea. Without it, the First Amendment is just text, and Lukianoff’s Reality Test Project is just another institution waiting to be captured.
It extends to every field, not just universities and science. The more government controls, the more it locks in yesterday's status quo and destroys the flexibility to respond to changes. And funding leads to control, no matter how much someone pinky swears it is purely altruistic. That's just human nature.
I mostly agree with you on the politics, but quibble with the philosophy. I might say you are too dogmatic in your anti-dogmatism. 🙂 You are correct that every institution relies on dogma. I would go further and say that not just institutions but even any vision or objective unavoidably rests on foundational dogmas. The goal cannot realistically be to avoid all dogma, but rather should be to find the best dogmas and build on those. This is as true of an individual life as it is of an institution.