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Alan Levinovitz on empowerment epistemology

I’m struggling to find an academic source for this but I’m book marking an idea I’m very interested in: ’empowerment epistemology’ as decisions to believe motivated by the feeling of agency which the beliefs in question give rise to.

And then on top of that, the other thing about an empowering epistemology I think is really important is that it’s a way of dealing with something that historians of technology refer to as epistemic opacity, which fancy, fancy academic talk for not being able to understand how things work. And so whether it’s our technology or our legal system or whatever it is, we’re increasingly surrounded by things, whether it’s medicine or our phones, that we just don’t understand. We don’t understand how they work, we don’t understand the machinery behind them. They are not transparent, they are opaque, and that’s very disempowering. And so again, the crystals or the gun make it very simple. What keeps you safe? Having a gun to defend yourself. What keeps you safe? Eating naturally. And that’s what an empowering epistemology is. And it’s if we want to fight back as you do, and I do against toxic forms of wellness, one thing we really have to do is realize that the market for them exists because people are being disempowered by a whole host of broader forces in ways that I really think are not their fault.

https://rethinkingwellness.substack.com/p/4-the-problems-with-natural-wellness-8a8

I’d add to Alan Levinovitz’s description her that social platforms provide a potent environment in which cultural forms rapidly multiply if they have a sufficiently powerful affective mechanism which draws people in. This in turn adds to the plausibility of the beliefs in question.

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