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Conflict theory predicts that the enemy will try to act in its interests. If you have a smart enemy, that enemy may tell the truth 99% of the time to build its trust and credibility, particularly in an environment where most are not conscious of conflict, and only lie or manipulate when it's truly important do so.
I appreciate the attempt to steel-man mistake theory, but I think you are falling into the pattern that dominates the liberal sensibility against "hate." Hate has critical failure modes, that's true. So liberals will use those failure modes to altogether deny the friend-enemy distinction, or rather to formulate its own conception of the friend-enemy distinction in a way that is in their interests. They portray everyone that makes the friend-enemy distinction (except themselves) as barbarians that will genocide their enemies at a moment's notice.
The friend-enemy distinction is racist. It's hateful. It has these horrible failure modes. So the only friend-enemy distinction we should recognize is that those who dare draw the lines of friends and enemies are enemies. It (intentionally) throws the baby out with the bathwater while reserving it for its own hegemony.
Your post follows a similar pattern where you conflate a failure mode, a false model of a conflict, as an indictment of conflict theory in itself. But there are false models in mistake theory. In a similar way, I wouldn't say that a mistake theorist being wrong about a certain fact would disprove mistake theory. Rather, it may be that the direction of the mistake theorist's error can be explained by an underlying conflict, and that would be evidence for conflict theory.
A conflict theorist being wrong about a conflict is a failure mode of conflict theory, but it's not inherent to conflict theory.
I would say it's the complete opposite. If you're a conflict theorist you have a self-justification for avoiding these failure modes and analyzing the conflict with a sober-headed view. Giving in to "resentiment" or failure modes, like assuming your enemy is always lying when the enemy is not going to pursue that strategy, is going to hurt your side of the conflict. So if you recognize a conflict, you have a responsibility to not cause scandal in a way that undermines your struggle.
Even if those artists are wrong about the tech-bro opposition, are they going to care if they get what they want politically? Mistake theory says yes. Conflict theory says no, and my chips are on "no."
Mistake theory excuses ignorance. It ignores the patterns we see in mistakes. In the absence of conflict theory, mistakes should be random. But they are not. They follow the lines of political actors. Mistake theory excuses ignorance on the friend-enemy distinction which is fundamentally required to build a model that explains the patterns of errors we see all around us.
This is sensible, but so is «rationalists should win», and you know which camp the bulk of those rationalists ended up in (neither yours, nor the winning one, except for half-hearted ones). Inasmuch as conflict theorists act rationally to succeed in their respective conflicts, they are just game theorists. Conflict theory is a somewhat more extreme mindset with stronger priors regarding specific interactions.
Also, it's a frame invented by Scott, who has an innate love of manipulating narratives.
Thanks for understanding my point, in any case.
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