Ignorance has become a leading force in world politics, calling for a term to label rule by ignorance—agnocracy.
Politicians lie, and governments practice secrecy and deception against each other. These facts are as old as politics itself: if politicians told the truth about what they have done or plan to do, they would lose votes, and if countries told the truth to other countries, they would lose any tactical advantage over them. However, dishonesty has become a guiding principle of governance at the present moment, which Russia scholar Mascha Gessen (2016) dubbed “the Putin paradigm” because Putin’s lies are not only promiscuous but “proud, even boastful.” The same year, a Rand Corporation report used the phrase “firehose of falsehood” to name the “shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths and outright fictions” continuously, loudly, rapidly, inconsistently, and with utter disregard for reality (Paul and Matthews 2016). This behavior is not unique to Putin, though, but is global, following depressingly standard models or playbooks. For this reason, we need a term to designate it, and that term is agnocracy.
Agnocracy (a-, no/without + gnosis, knowledge + kratos, rule) is governance by ignorance, by keeping the public or citizenry ignorant and often by keeping government officials themselves ignorant, offering the latter the precious commodity of plausible deniability. Agnocracy illustrates the point made by Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (2008) in their volume Agnotology (the study of ignorance or not-knowing) that non-knowledge is not always an innocent or even default state but is often constructed and imposed with pernicious intent. Most agnotology studies have focused on corporations and their efforts to keep the public blind to their irresponsible and destructive behavior (from polluting to making unsafe products), but governments are culprits of ignorance-construction too, and never more so than in the present day—ironically, as information has never been more abundant or free.
Agnocracy (a-, no/without + gnosis, knowledge + kratos, rule) is governance by ignorance, by keeping the public or citizenry ignorant and often by keeping government officials themselves ignorant, offering the latter the precious commodity of plausible deniability.
The tricks and tactics of agnocracy are legion. The most basic is secrecy, which means concealing information. Deals and agreements are made behind closed doors; true intentions, and the true impact of those actions, are withheld. For purposes of secrecy, governments employ methods like “classification” (marking documents as “top secret”), encryption, and censorship. Censorship and its adjuncts, including threatening, fining, defunding, arresting, and even killing information-bearers (such as journalists, scientists, and intellectuals), are means to silence criticism and render the public uninformed. Leaders also practice evasion (not answering questions, sometimes not allowing questions), denial, distraction, and platitudes and “politician speak” or uttering a lot of words without actually saying anything. More coordinated and intense are various “information operations” like propaganda, conspiracy theories, and disinformation campaigns. Finally, there are straight-up lies, fakes, frauds, and forgeries. “Fake news” straddles two categories: one application of fake news is media sources that more-or-less intentionally promote false information, while the other is accusations against legitimate news outlets that their reporting is false (that is, when leaders do not like what they report).
Agnocracy is obviously a handmaiden of autocracy, since the autocrat wants to be the only source of knowledge and truth in his country and to discredit or muzzle all rival and opposition voices. Accordingly, agnocracy’s roots are in mid-twentieth century authoritarian regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; it was Nazi propagandists who told us to lie big and often and Soviet officials who gave us the term dezinformatsiya. However, Gessen’s contemporary Putin paradigm is important precisely because it is paradigmatic, that is, it has achieved worldwide usage in Hungary (under Viktor Orbán), India (under Narendra Modi), China (Xi Jinping) Turkey (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), Brazil (under Jair Bolsonaro), and elsewhere, including the United States. The rise of agnocracy is thus closely correlated with the global rise of autocracy, the World Population Review listing 81 countries in 2025 as “closed” or “electoral” autocracies. Some illustrative examples include:
- China’s “Great Firewall” blocking internet access
- India’s army of “shadow advertisers” pumping out propaganda
- Turkey’s “AK-trolls” manufacturing disinformation and fake news
- Russia’s new law criminalizing online searches for “extremist” material.
Lying to, censoring, and misleading the public is not new in the United States: in times of war, information is always controlled, and presidents have withheld truth or promulgated falsity from FDR’s Yalta agreement to Kennedy’s covert Cuban operations and missile crisis compromises to Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin lie, Nixon’s crimes, and Bush II’s Iraq untruths. No president in the history of the republic, however, as ever unleashed ignorance on the country, and kept administration so grossly uninformed, as Trump.
Trump is America’s home-grown agnocrat, a commander-in-mischief. It is well documented that in his first term he was a profligate liar, making over 30,000 false or misleading statements—a rate of 21 per day (The Washington Post 2021)—and he has picked up in his second term where he left off, linking the two with his Big Lie about the 2020 election. The least egregious of his offenses is what he (or his ghost writer) called in his 1987 self-promotional The Art of the Deal “truthful hyperbole,” exaggeration that something or other is “the biggest and the greatest,” like his inauguration crowds or his tax cuts (both false). Much more serious and bizarre are his avowal of conspiracy theories like the nonsense that Haitian refugees were eating pets, his dismissal of COVID-19 as a hoax, his erroneous explanation of tariffs, his execrable assertion that Ukraine was responsible for its own invasion, his rants about windmills and magnets, and of course his personal attacks against mainstream reporters and media as fake news and, worse, enemies of the people—typical populist claptrap. Sometimes he even admits that he just confabulates claims out of thin air, like his 2018 remark about the trade deficit with Canada; often, he qualifies claims with “a lot of people say” or “I heard.”
Nor certainly is Trump alone is fomenting public ignorance. His various agencies have removed data from their websites; like predecessors, his appointments to head agencies and departments are often ignorant of, if not hostile to, the mission of those organizations. His followers repeat—or often originate—his bullshit, and platforms like Fox News both provide and amplify it. Meanwhile, the internet, especially Twitter/X in the hands of his supporter-turned-critic Elon Musk plus any number of right-wing commentators, provides echo chambers and bunkers where followers fester and stew. An entire industry of “pink slime” journalism recirculates the drivel, posing as independent local news. And so on. Most recently, in early August 2025, he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (who of course does not compile such data single-handedly) for publishing unflattering employment figures; when he inevitably appoints a loyalist and sycophant to suppress, twist, or simply fabricate labor statistics, then for the remainder of his baleful administration, Americans will not know the truth about the job market.
The question that arises is, why, especially why now? The American education system has never been particularly successful, but Americans are basically literate, and the internet was supposed to be our salvation – an information superhighway they said, democraticizing knowledge. Instead, the opposite happened. Partisans can find each other more easily than ever, inhabiting their closed epistemic universes and sniping at opponents anonymously. Human psychology favoring dramatic lies over boring truths, disinformation flows faster and further than facts. And we cannot discount the problem that many Americans (and others) are deeply disappointed with the results of neoliberalism, globalization, and democracy itself, ready to grasp at any preposterous alternative; the status quo, they feel, is rigged against them, and they are prepared to follow anyone who appears to pierce the veil of conspiracy and deception, despite the fact that this leader excels in those same dark arts. Indeed, many Trumpers and MAGAs know that Trump lies, but as political psychologists Swire-Thompson et al. (2020) discovered, their stance is that he is a liar but he is their liar, on their side and sticking it to the establishment that clearly isn’t. And once claims are believed, and commitments are made, it is prohibitively difficult to shake people from their positions.
The ultimate explanation is that reality is messy and confusing (and often scary), and facts are frequently not as clear and certain as we like to think. This leaves room for both honest disagreement and cynical manipulation. Since many times we do not know what is true and whom to trust—and the world is too big and complex to fully grasp—we are vulnerable to the demagogue who literally does not care what is true but only what is expedient, efficacious, or self- (and ingroup-)aggrandizing. Knowledge becomes a struggle, and partisans become information warriors (recall Alex Jones’ aptly named InfoWars). As Ignas Kalpokas opined in A Political Theory of Post-Truth, when information is a battleground, and when people cannot distinguish fact from belief, wish, or fantasy—that is, when agnocracy reigns—then “victory is truly what matters” (2019: 14), victory over the opposition and victory over reality itself. It is all about power, and as Gessen said of the Putin paradigm but equally applicable to all agnocrats, “power lies in being able to say what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the facts. He is president of his country and king of reality.” For those loyal to the agnocrat, mendacity is a virtue and a strength, demolishing the last resistance to them and to him—reality itself.
References:
Gessen, Mascha. 2016. “The Putin Paradigm.” https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/13/putinparadigm-how-trump-will-rule, accessed February 25, 2025.
Kalpokas, Ignas. 2019. A Political Theory of Post-Truth. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Paul, Christopher and Miriam Matthews. 2016. “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model.” https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html, accessed February 25, 2025.
Proctor, Robert N. and Londa Schiebinger, eds. 2008. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Swire-Thompson, Briony, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Adam J. Berlinsky. 2020. “They Might Be a Liar But They’re My Liar: Source Evaluation and the Prevalence of Misinformation.” Political Psychology 41 (1): 21-34.
The Washington Post. 2021. “In Four Years, President Trump Made 30,573 False or Misleading Claims.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trumpclaims-database, accessed February 26, 2025.
World Population Review. 2025. “Autocratic Countries 2025.” https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/autocratic-countries, accessed July 24, 2025.
Image credit: Leslie-Judge Company, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
