“Merely rearranging their prejudices” Day-laborers like Joey on the construction site were not an educated bunch. But they had opinions. Lots of them. When Joey began a sentence with, “Now, I’ll tell you what’s the truth …”, it was time to buckle up. Here it comes. Brian Klass does not invoke truthiness in writing this morning about knowingness, but the two are cousins. An essay by Jonathan Malesic at Aeon provoked Klass to explore the latter. “We know there is something wrong with the way we know,” Malesic explains: Knowingness, as the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear defines it in Open Minded (1998), is a posture of always ‘already knowing’, of purporting to know the answers even before the question arises. When new facts come to light, the knowing person is unperturbed. You may be shocked, but they knew all along. In 21st-century culture, knowingness is rampant. You see it in the conspiracy theorist who dismisses contrary evidence as a ‘false flag’ and in the podcaster for whom ‘late capitalism’ explains all social woes. It’s the ideologue who knows the media has a liberal bias – or, alternatively, a corporate one. It’s the above-it-all political centrist, confident that the truth is necessarily found between the extremes of ‘both sides’. It’s the former US president Donald Trump, who claimed, over and over, that ‘everybody knows’ things that were, in fact, unknown, unproven or untrue. When evidence becomes meaningless Some of us exist in a parallel dimension, an Upside Down in which the epistemological analog of…