The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. I call this tendency the "Seneca Effect."
I am still reading paper books. I think they favor concentration in a way that on-screen books cannot provide. Books are also one of the few places left in the memesphere where you can say what you think without being aggressed by a band of zombies or censored by brain-drained idiots. So, during the past few years, I have been reading a series of books, most of which, I think, deserve a comment. And I'll see to publish a few; not really book reviews, but just ideas derived from the books I read.
Why do people do things that harm themselves? It is a good question that nobody seems to know how to answer -- yet, it happens all the time. Scott Erikson tackles the question in his book, "Mommy, Why did America Collapse?" A nice addition to the catastrophist's bookshelf.
Erikson writes in a light mood; his analyses do not pretend to be quantitative models of the collapse of complex systems, but he tells a fascinating tale in the form of a bedtime dialog between a mother and her daughter. The fascination is not in the story itself: for those of us who are hard-core catastrophists, there is not much that we didn't know before (mommy is one of us!). For those who are not catastrophists, the book will probably fail to appear convincing.
Yet, the problem is there, and many past stories show how exactly people can and do harm themselves by doing things that may appear intelligent in the short term but lethal in the long term. Throwing oneself naked into a thornbush to collect berries is a paradigmatic example, but, in a more pedantic kind of analysis, Ilaria Perissi and I noted how the fishing industry has consistently destroyed the fish stocks that made them live in our book "The Empty Sea." How could it happen? We cite several examples of how people simply trade long-term survival for short-term gains. It is the way the human mind works. We need just one word to describe it: "greed."
That's exactly the point that Erikson makes over and over in his book. It is not so much an analysis of the reasons why America did (will) collapse but how a profound failure in communication caused the collapse. More than a problem of communication, it is a problem of trust. A mother can say things at bedtime that her daughter has no reason to mistrust (unless mommy wants to sell the munchkin to the bad witch for cooking in a cauldron).
But, apart for bedtime stories, we are always dealing with people who are trying to sell us to the canned meat industry -- often figuratively, sometimes perhaps even for real. So, if there is no trust, there is no truth. And if there is no truth, there is nothing at all. Only noise. And who has the time for bedtime stories, anyway?
We CAN beat propaganda, but it takes some effort to avoid falling prey to the simple, yet effective, methods that the powers that be (PTB) use to control us. You need first of all to understand that there is no such thing as an "authoritative source." All sources can be wrong, and many are there to trick you into believing that something is true when it is not. So, you need to listen to everybody and trust nobody. In this way, you can "grok" your information and not be grokked by the PTB.
I remember how, as a young scientist, I spent long hours at night perusing scientific journals in my department's library, at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The administrators wisely kept the library open all night for us, students and postdocs, to nibble at the treasure of knowledge stored there. It was the equivalent of what we do today when "surfing the Web", it was just slower and more laborious. But it was a great experience: I soon learned that not all the articles found in scientific journals were trustworthy, nor were the scientists who had published them. When I started my career, frauds and lies in science were still rare, but even in "high-level" scientific journals, there were plenty of evident mistakes, unjustified assumptions, sloppy work, or, simply, irrelevant babbling.
It was a different story when I was a student. As a student, you are supposed to be "trained." The term comes from the Latin "trahere, ‘to pull.’ It implies that your teachers can force you to learn whatever they think you must learn. So, you can pass exams in college without having understood anything of what you regurgitate to your examiners. But things change completely when you become a professional. You must learn to consult many sources and sift good information from the bad. If you are a good professional, you listen to everybody and trust nobody.
We can describe this attitude by the term "grokking," invented by sci-fi author Robert Anson Heinlein to indicate the kind of in-depth understanding that professionals have of their field. In Heinlein's fictional Mars, "to grok" also means "to drink." You assimilate knowledge just like you assimilate the water you drink. It is strictly related to the concept of "empathy" as discussed by Chuck Pezeshky in his blog. (It is also part of the concept of "virtual holobiont," but let me skip that, here).
The "grokking-style" learning is based on the idea that you don't trust a source just because it is "authoritative." No. You are the one who decides whether what you are being told is true or not. And you base your evaluation on having more than one source, and critically evaluating all of them. It applies to scientific research, but also to all kinds of information collection in ordinary life. Or, at least, it should apply if you want to really understand what you are learning.
It is here that we have the problem, a big problem. Universities don't teach you how to grok. Probably, it is because the old saying is true: nothing worth learning can be taught. At least, not in the traditional way. Even good professionals are often completely naive when they leave their specialized field and are exposed to propaganda. Yet, it is not impossible to learn how to grok. It is a recursive affair: you must grok how to grok!
Nowadays, with a tsunami of propaganda submerging all of us, I am discovering that many people I know use the same grokking strategy that I use. Typically, we avoid TV and mainstream media, and we use aggregators, feed readers, and similar ways to access multiple sources. Many people seem to have developed this learning strategy by themselves. Not long ago, my good friend Anastassia showed me how she does it: she has hundreds of telegram channels she follows. She clicks on the titles of posts that seem interesting to her, reading them if they turn out to be really interesting. She doesn't trust any of them, but she listens to all of them. I have a feeling that there is some correlation between this style of learning and the fact that she is among the brightest people I know.
Personally, I tend to use feed readers rather than Telegram (I described the method in a previous post), but it is the same idea. In addition, some blogs and sites are structured as aggregators, and they will do a good job for you by alerting you about new information arriving (a good one that I follow is Raul Ilargi's "Automatic Earth."). In any case, you want to be in control of what you receive: so, no Facebook, no Twitter, nothing like that, even search engines are biased. You don't want others to decide what you see. You want to be in control of the information you receive. You listen to everyone, and you trust no one.
This method of managing information has the advantage that it makes you nearly invulnerable to propaganda. I say "nearly" because we are all human beings, and we all tend to believe in what we would like were true. But, surely, a good grokker is a hard target for the classic propaganda techniques that consist mainly in suppressing the sources of contrasting information. Then, by repeating the same thing, over and over, it becomes true (you surely remember Karl Rove's statement about "creating our own reality"). If you watch TV, you are their slave, but if you are reading this blog, you probably aren't. So far, it is still possible to collect a fan of information sources sufficiently distant from the official truth to be able to grok the situation.
On the other hand, there are problems with this strategy. One is that, by abandoning the mainstream sources, you risk rolling down the other side of the disinformation hill. In this case, you'll find yourself fishing out rotten morsels from the soup of madness that often surrounds "alternative" news sources. You know, things like the moon landing hoax, graphene in the Covid vaccines, viruses that do not exist, and the like. It is bad information that comes in part from people who have gone Martian coconuts, and in part from paid disinformers who just want to trick you. As an example, Igor Chudov makes a good case for the "viruses do not exist" meme as a psyop created by the PTB. He even could identify the site that created the meme and diffused it. You risk "inverse grokking," which means that the powers that be are grokking you!
The other problem, much more serious, is that if you are a serious grokker, you place yourself outside the mainstream beliefs and views. You may find that your friends and family think that you are "strange," that when you walk toward someone you know in the street, she may cross the street to avoid getting close to you. And woe betides those who try to discuss with non-grokkers. You will be ignored (at best), ridiculed, and even insulted by people whom you thought were your best friends. I don't have to tell you that being in this situation can be bad for your mental health and, in some cases, for your physical survival. You may remember the ominous sentence about the unvaccinated, “what do we do with these people?” expressed by Canadian prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It sounds very much like what was said about the "Jewish Problem" in the 1930s. You know how some people thought they could solve it. Some solutions are truly final.
So, knowledge carries a risk, something that has been known from the time of Adam and Eve. On the other hand, we are always seeking truth, an activity that every good person on this planet should pursue. And so, onward, fellow grokkers!All you have to lose is your ignorance.
If you have time, you can tell me in the comments the way you use to gather and process information. I suspect that many readers of this blog are good grokkers, but many of them may use creative methods.
In the following, some excerpts from a post by "John Carter" which inspired these reflections of mine. Note, though, that if you read his whole post, you may notice that not even he is completely immune from being grokked by reverse propaganda. Probably it is also my case.... alas. See also a recent post by Todd Hayen on "Off Guardian" that expresses very similar concepts.
"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties." - Francis Bacon
"Where do you get your information from? What are your sources?"
I really hate this question.
Part of it is that a lot of the places I tend to go to collect information would strike the normie as batshit insane conspiracy sites. Once you're on the other side of the great hyperreality bifurcation, you're experiencing a world in which very fundamental assumptions of the old societal mainstream, ranging from 'what is true' to 'what is moral', are no longer taken for granted and, indeed, are widely rejected.
Another part of it is that a great deal of what gets circulated within the hydra originates with anonymous or pseudonymous writers. By the very nature of communicating one's thoughts from behind a veil, it is impossible to verify whether they really know what they're talking about. A normie used to the anodyne pronouncements of credentialed experts being fellated by talking heads on CNN will find the idea of taking seriously the words of random Internet schizos to be a bit jarring.
But the single biggest reason I dislike this question is that it's the wrong question. 'Sources' have absolutely nothing to do with how I gather information; and from what I've seen, that's true for most of us.
The general assumption in normieland seems to be that there are reliable and unreliable sources of information. The former carry the stamp of approval of established authorities, who go to great lengths to ensure that the information they communicate has been extensively vetted for accuracy, with obvious mistakes removed by dedicated teams devoted to the rigorous vetting of every piece of information that gets included. The latter consists of wild speculations, rumours, and crazed ramblings. There's some nuance there - most people will admit that politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate marketing executives will usually put some spin on the information they communicate - but in general the heuristic that gets applied is "there are reliable sources, and unreliable sources; all you need to do to have an accurate view of reality is to limit your information diet to the former and ignore the latter."
....
When you're attempting to scale the walls of Chapel Perilous in the weird corners of the Internet, you don't have the luxury of relying on authoritative sources. The very concept of 'authoritative source' loses all meaning, and of necessity one develops a very different approach to information gathering and belief formation. Inside the datastream of the Internet, no one perspective is privileged as being unimpeachable. Nothing is to be trusted. Nothing is ever to be 100% believed. Everything one comes across, from any source, whether an established blogger with hundreds of thousands of daily readers or some rando in the comments section, is greeted with more or less the same response:
Here's what I do; and I suspect it's pretty much what the rest of you do, too:
I've got a variety of news aggregators I tend to go to, each more or less reflecting the worldview of the individual or team who maintains them through the lens of the topics that attract their attention. I skim these feeds and occasionally click on something if it catches my own attention. There are a few forums that I frequent, where various topics are discussed, and people share links to things they think are interesting together with whatever impressions they have of them. Social media plays a similar role; while I'm not on Twitter or Facebook, I do subscribe to a couple of hundred Telegram channels, some of which I'll peruse throughout the day, once again clicking on anything that looks interesting. Add to this an archipelago of blogs which provide some degree of original analysis, but are mostly the Internet's editorial page; in these cases, I gravitate towards those authors I find to be consistently interesting. Then there are podcasts and livestreams, most of which take the form of a free-ranging conversation between hosts and guests.
In most cases I have no idea about the identities or credentials of the authors, and I could generally care less. The contribution of an anon on 4chan can be every bit as insightful and correct as the analysis of a facefag whose CV I can review in detail. Equivalently, the facefag can be every bit as wrong as that of the shitposter. The salient detail is not the identity of the person originating the information, but the structure of the argument.
When perusing something, at the same time that I'm evaluating the information, I'm also evaluating the worldview that produced the information. What are the ideological biases of the author? Is he a libertarian, a post-liberal, an old-school leftist, a nationalist, a trad-Catholic, a deep ecologist, a neoliberal managerialist, a critical race theorist? Does the author have something to gain from what he's writing - is he trying to get me to buy something, or being paid to advance a perspective that will enrich his paymasters? The author's perspective is inseparable from the argument being put forward, as it structures what the author considers to be interesting, and what he believes to be axiomatically true and false - creating attentional foci and blind spots.
This doesn't mean that something is to be rejected or accepted merely because it conflicts or accords with a worldview I find personally agreeable - that's ultimately just a version of the 'authoritative source' mindset, one that leads straight into an echo chamber. In principle, valuable insights can come from almost anywhere. The purpose of the exercise is rather to discern the model of reality that produced the perspective leading to the information being organized as it has been.
All models are by their nature simplified schema that fail to capture the full complexity and nuance of the world. They emphasize some things and omit others. That's why it's important not to get overly attached to them. However, some models are more accurate than others, much more likely to correctly predict unfolding events. By foregrounding the models that produce the hot takes, one begins constantly testing these models against one another. As events unfold, one notices which models are more, and which less, accurate. New information can then be evaluated on the basis of the model that generated it, and its probability of being accurate weighted accordingly.
As this goes on, one inevitably begins to construct one's own model of reality, simply by combining the elements that seem to have worked from the models that one has been exposed to. There's nothing particularly special about having a model of reality - we all do, of necessity; the advantage lies rather in that this process becomes conscious and deliberate. One makes one's own model, rather than simply accepting whatever model is offered by 'authoritative sources'.
The normies still trapped in the mass media holodeck cling to the certainty that their 'reliable sources' can be trusted, and the result is that they inhabit a nightmare world of shifting illusions that has driven them quite entirely mad. It frequently happens that they wake up to one or another of the lies of which the control system is built, but having perceived the deception on a given topic, they react by looking for an authoritative source elsewhere that they can rely upon. Invariably in this case, they get trapped in a different lie - trading the regime ideology they've left behind for a new ideology, one that they accept whole as uncritically as the one they were raised with. That's what that boomer in the bar was looking for. His first instinct, upon being confronted with plausible arguments that he'd been systematically misled by the legacy media, was to reach for something he could trust. To trade one gospel for another.
In truth, there are no reliable sources, and there never have been. Paradoxically, it's only by letting go of the desire for reliability, by holding things conditionally rather than absolutely true, and by constructing one's own provisional reality model, that one can find one's sea legs on the shifting and uncertain waters, and successfully navigate the ocean of the real.
Note added after publication: Several people have expressed surprise at the fact that I placed 74 links in the list. "How can you follow so many blogs?" they ask. The fact it that I don't "follow" all of them. I skim through the list of titles and I open the links that I think are interesting. Then, I may or may not read the whole post -- some people publish posts that are so interesting that I can't miss them. But not all those linked here, only a minority Note also that almost all these links refer to single-author blogs which publish no more than one-two posts per week -- often even less frequently. I make an exception for "The Automatic Earth" by Raul Ilargi, which publishes daily, because it is so interesting. But some links that you see in the list above have already disappeared from the updated list. For instance, I removed "Tehran Times" -- too many posts, and too flatly aligned with the Iranian government.
The Resurrection of Christ -- by Piero della Francesca (ca. 1465 AD).
The Roman Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca lived in difficult times, not unlike ours. Then, as now, a Great Empire was starting to follow a road that would eventually lead to its final collapse. That was clear for those who could see beyond the veil of lies that pervaded everything, then as now.
Seneca could never really face the ultimate consequences of what he was seeing, but sometimes he peered into the future, and he saw a better world that was to come. In his "De Ira" (about rage), Seneca wrote "Dandum semper est tempus: veritatem dies aperit." (There is always time, and the days disclose the truth).
Seneca was also a contemporary of Jesus Christ. It is likely that neither knew of each other, but they shared one thing: the need for truth. Christ went beyond Seneca when he said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Seneca was still a man of the past, Christ was the future.
There will be a moment when the mass of lies that surround us will collapse and fade away. On the day of resurrection, the day of Easter in Christianity, truth is revealed, and we might discover that it was always in front of us.
Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? (John 18:38)
What is truth? We often have a "Hollywood" model of truth: we expect it to triumph at the end of the movie, when the bad guy confesses his crime and everyone agrees on what really happened.
Reality is very different. Truth is multiple, fractal, hierarchical, a game of mirrors, never showing herself in full. Think of the pandemic: aren't we in the age where the "scientific method" gives us a rational, objective view of the world? And yet, the multifaceted aspects of a hugely complex story seem to be beyond our capability to process it rationally. Truth is not coming. It may never come. (And you may also be reminded of another case whose 20th anniversary we recently commemorated -- there, too, the truth did not come out and probably never will).
In the post, below, Sheridan analyzes the structure of the memesphere and challenges at the core the idea that the "narrative (about the pandemic) is going to crack" any day now and that the "truth" will be revealed. He says, "There is no longer a unifying narrative that is going to crack and be replaced by a better, more truthful narrative. Rather, there is now only a seemingly infinite number of sub-narratives with a dominant narrative imposed over them. The dominant narrative is not necessarily truthful, it's just dominant."
In essence, the memetic sphere has shattered into an infinite series of closed microspheres. The dominant macrosphere can no longer control them, despite its desperate efforts at censorship, intimidation, and obfuscation. But if the microspheres don't talk to each other, the truth won't come out, whatever it is.
Recently, I was visiting a friend’s house when a Michael Jackson song came on the radio and my friend said something interesting that I hadn’t really thought about before. He noted that, at the peak of Jackson’s fame, the releasing of one of his albums was a global event with a coordinated marketing campaign which meant that pretty much everybody in the western world and many parts of the non-western world would have known when a Michael Jackson album was released whether they liked his music or not. This is something the young people these days wouldn’t comprehend as they each have their own social media influencer or Youtube celebrity or whatever that they follow in much smaller sub-cultures than before. Even the most popular pop stars of today are only known to a subset of the population never the whole population like Jackson was.
This observation got me thinking about a subject that I have been pondering for a while which is the impact of the internet on our culture. It seems to me this impact is not really discussed much anymore even though it is directly contributing to our current woes. One of the main changes wrought by the internet is the shattering of “grand narratives”. A Michael Jackson album release is one. But the pattern extends into other areas of the public discourse where its effects are far more important such as the narratives that hold countries together. As the corona event drags on interminably, there are those in the dissenter camp who still think the “narrative is about to crack” any day now and the “truth” will be revealed.
This mindset from the old, pre-internet world is no longer valid in the world we live. There is no unifying narrative any more that is going to crack and be replaced by a better, more truthful narrative. Rather, there are now just a seemingly infinite number of sub-narratives with a dominant narrative imposed on top of them. The dominant narrative is not necessarily truthful, just dominant. The emergence of the “conspiracy theory” label alongside the daily censorship that now happens on social media platforms are among a number of tactics that are now used to try and subdue alternative narratives in the hope of allowing a centralised narrative to form. But it never does for the simple reason that you cannot coerce people into believing a narrative. Narratives must evolve organically with a feedback loop between top-down and bottom-up. The increasing use of censorious tactics in the last couple of years reveals the underlying weakness of the dominant narrative. The powers that be have gone all out in attempting to hold together a narrative that itself doesn’t make sense as it is changed willy-nilly according to purely political considerations.
It’s tempting to think the politicians are doing it on purpose with some larger objective in mind. But what if there is no larger objective? What if these tactics are simply what is required now to create any type of dominant narrative at all? What if these tactics are now the price you pay to create a narrative? If so, that price has gone through the roof. We can usefully call this narrative inflation. If you increase the supply of money, you get monetary inflation. If you increase the supply of narratives, you get narrative inflation. The price to create a dominant narrative has gone up for a number of reasons but one is that the internet opened the floodgates on the flow of information and allowed multiple alternative narratives to be created. This has created its own dynamic independent of the political and economic considerations that are also driving the trend. It may turn out that one of the consequences of allowing free and instant information is to destroy centralised narratives. There are good sociological and psychological reasons why this would be the case.
Eyewitness testimony has long been problematic for police trying to investigate an incident or crime. Even for something relatively straightforward like a car accident, where the eyewitnesses themselves have no personal stake in the story, accounts can diverge radically. Ten people witnessing a car accident can give you ten different stories of the crash. These problems are greatly exacerbated when the individuals involved have a vested interest in the case as often happens in criminal investigations. This eternal problem has been dealt with in numerous fiction and non-fiction works. The best non-fiction work I have seen about the subject is the documentary “Capturing the Friedmans” in which a school teacher is found to have child pornography in his home which leads to a series of events including him pleading guilty to sexually abusing some of his students. The documentary follows the motivations of those involved as rumour of the crime spreads in the local community creating its own dynamic as gossip and innuendo put enormous pressure of the family at the centre of the case. By the end of the documentary, we don’t know whether any of the official story is true as the lies and deceits create second and third order effects that distort the whole picture.
This real-life account mirrors one of the best fictional representations of the problem, Akira Kurosawa’s movie “Rashomon”, in which a murder occurs in the forest but we hear radically different versions of the event told by the people involved (including, dramatically, the deceased). The philosophical question raised by both films is whether or not there can be found an objective standard of truth. This is a problem philosophers have wrestled with for millennia but it becomes a practical problem in cases involving crime where we want to see justice served and yet we have multiple, irreconcilable accounts about reality and seemingly no way to choose between them. At the end of the process, the system gives a verdict of guilty-not guilty and this is taken as the “truth” but is it really the truth?
With the internet, we have seen the same psychology applied to the public discourse and this has created practical problems for politics. Politicians love to divide the public where it suits their interest but it’s also true that they need to appeal to a foundation which unites the public. The process is similar to the justice system. Although there is disagreement and competition within the system, everybody must agree to play by the rules. The system itself is the thing people believe in. The public discourse which existed prior to the internet was facilitated through a system in which the media was known as the “fourth estate”. Its job was to hold government to account. Of course, this was not a perfect system but, as the saying goes, it seems it was better than all the others. It was certainly better than the system we have now where the media does not hold the government to account at all and is little more than a public relations branch of the government.
Recently in the New Zealand parliament, Jacinda Ardern was questioned about $55 million her government gave to media with certain conditions attached about what could be reported on. In Australia, the government waived the usual licence fee for the mainstream media channels back in March 2020. This amounted to around $44 million in subsidies. The theory was that this was needed because covid was expected to reduce advertising revenue, a strange claim given that the whole population was about to be locked at home with every incentive to watch the news. That measure came after the Australian government famously held Facebook and other big tech players to ransom and forced them to pay money to Australian media companies for content. Whatever the ethical dimensions of these issues, what lies beneath is the fact that the media companies are no longer viable businesses capable of existing without government support. Because they are now reliant on government money, their function as the fourth estate that holds government to account has also all but disappeared. That’s a problem for them but it’s also a problem for the government. The “official narrative” is transmitted through the legacy media. If the legacy media goes away, so does the narrative. Governments know that if the media disappeared, so would a large chunk of their power. The government needs the media as much as the media needs the government.
I would argue that the public also needs the media. It needs the media to act as its representative. That was the whole point of the Fourth Estate arrangement. The public paid for the media and that meant the media had an incentive to represents the readership’s interests. But that is all gone now. Some people think the public doesn’t really need the media. For almost any event, we are able to watch live video online now. Once upon a time we needed the newspaper to tell us the facts, but we simply don’t need that anymore. You might think that’s a good thing. We remove the middle man and allow the public to see events for themselves. But that introduces the same problem you have with eyewitness accounts which is that you get as many versions of the “truth” as there are people. The discourse becomes fragmented and the checks and balances that once held disappear. It’s a bit like having a crime investigation without a detective. “The system” can no longer control the discourse the way it previously could. This is not a trivial matter. It leads us back to one of Plato’s most dangerous ideas which is the Noble Lie. The idea goes that society cannot exist and justice cannot be served unless there are a number of lies which bind society together. Lie is, of course, a very strong word. We could soften it by calling them myths or ideals but the effect is the same. The myths and ideals are the glue that holds things together and, according to Plato, without them society will disintegrate.
Our post-internet public discourse provides some evidence for this assertion. It has become completely detached from reality or, to put it another way, it represents only one version of reality: the one that comes from the top-down. This process is especially advanced in the US. It hit a fever pitch with the Trump presidency and has not relaxed since. There are now at least two mutually incompatible narratives going on in the US meaning that agreement about the fundamentals which hold society together is called into question on an almost daily basis. It’s quite common to hear somebody on either side of the debate label somebody on the other side as “crazy” or “insane” and that is one manifestation of the problem. Within this new world, the idea that the “narrative is about to crack” doesn’t make sense. The dominant narrative is held in place by power, not by truth. By definition, the only thing that can “crack” it is another source of power. This was Trump’s genius. He hijacked the entire machinery that generates the narrative and turned it to his own purposes. But I think Trump was the end of the road. They got rid of him but in doing so they removed any last pretence that the narrative was “fair” or “truthful”. You can’t just delete the sitting President and then go back to normal as if nothing happened. As a result, a large proportion of the population no longer has any faith whatsoever in the system. That holds true no matter who is in power. The dominant narrative is now nothing more than the story told by those in power.
In Australia and much of Europe and Canada, we are just now catching up with the US. Here in Melbourne, more than a hundred thousand people marched against the government last weekend. The Premier’s response was to write them off as “thugs” and “extremists”. It reminded me an awful lot of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” moment. When politicians no longer feel like they need to accommodate the interests and opinions of a substantial proportion of the population you know the narrative is already fractured. Andrews may or may not get away with that politically for now but the protestors represent a new group in Australian public life; the ones excluded from the narrative. The same goes for the demonstrators in Europe who are simply ignored by the mainstream media. Because the public discourse no longer pretends to reflect reality, nobody really believes in it including the people who nominally go along with it. Deep down they also must know that it is fake.
We are entering a time when even the idea of a centralised narrative is no longer believed in. If Plato was right, this fact alone is an existential threat to the state and it is understandable that the state would strive to fix the problem. But it’s almost certainly too late. All of the censorship and victimisation in the world won’t put humpty dumpty together again. Going forward I expect we’ll still have an “official narrative” but nobody will really believe it. That’s what is implied by the falling revenue numbers of the mainstream media channels. Will that lead to the disintegration of the state? Plato would have said yes. We may be about to test that theory.
One of the 16th century reliefs still existing at the monastery of "San Vivaldo," in Tuscany. It is an early example of a purely image-based communication: an attempt to tell complex concepts, the stories of the gospels, to people who couldn't read. It was a failure, but also a remarkably innovative approach. The time for image-based communication may return with the rapid loss of literacy affecting our times. The problem with this evolution is huge in science, with fewer and fewer people able to read the scientific literature. We are now depending on professional interpreters to tell us what "Science" is, just like long ago illiterate Christians were forced to rely on professional interpreters ("priests") to tell them what the scriptures said. The result is that Science is becoming whatever these scientific priests say Science is. And this is bad, although perhaps not beyond redemption.
Let me start this post by citing a fascinating article written by "Marty Mac's and Cheese" I don't know who Mr. Marty Mac is, but he clearly has a remarkable cultural vision. He notes how Catholicism and Protestantism evolved along separate lines of thought. Protestantism was born as a literature-based religion: Protestants were "people of the book." Conversely, Catholicism catered more to the illiterate.
You can see the difference in the respective churches: Protestant churches are normally austere, while Catholic churches are highly decorated and full of images. The image below is from Marty Mac's post.
The idea of using a visual language was exploited in full by the Catholic Church. The multi-colored reliefs of the San Vivaldo monastery, in Italy, are one of the few remaining examples of the attempt to create a completely new visual language that would bypass the Babel of spoken languages that Europe was in the late Middle Ages. It did not work because of the development of the printing press and the gradual expansion of literacy in Europe. Universal literacy would not arrive before the 20th century, but already during the Renaissance, the European elites were able to read and write in their national languages. A text was a much more sophisticated and flexible tool than the reliefs of San Vivaldo, no matter how impressive they looked.
But literacy is not a fixed concept. It evolves. Marty Mac makes some very interesting points about the transformation of literacy in our age. Even those who are still able to read, no longer have the ability to follow an articulate and complex discourse as one might find in a book of hundreds of pages, to say nothing of the 1400+ pages of the English version of the Christian Bible. The Protestant Church, nowadays, is changing as the result of this evolution. The Pentecostals are a manifestation of this trend with their spectacular services, people singing, "talking in tongues" and the like. They are no more "people of the book."
I think it is worth reporting an extended excerpt of Marty Mac's considerations: remarkably sharp.
A mind trained with the written word is different from a mind without it. The organization of thought required for reading is very different from that in an oral environment. The differences come entirely from communicative form.
Oral communication is nearly always discursive. Even when someone gives a monologue, it is to an audience, which reacts (perhaps silently) and participates. But monologues are rare and nearly always have a particular social purpose: relating important cultural narratives, or persuading people or expounding to them from a position of authority (what the ancients called rhetoric). But discourse is more typical of oral communication.
Discourse is by its nature unstructured. When you speak with someone, the other person can disagree, change the subject, extend your thoughts in a new direction, or bring up something new. Discourse is extremely unlikely to follow a set of logical presuppositions and explore them all the way to their end. By its nature it jumps around, assembling different ideas from multiple people in a back-and-forth which may or may not represent a coherent whole.
None of this is bad. It is just the nature of having multiple minds in real-time communication with one another through the medium of linear speech. Valuable knowledge can be imparted and also discovered in this process. A single mind following a single set of logical presuppositions cannot arrive at complete knowledge. But oral communication is by nature unstructured.
Not so the written word. Writing forces communication to be continuous and follow some particular path. There is no interlocutor to correct, derail, or add to the argumentation. If discourse is by nature a hodge-podge, with different thoughts from different minds combining to make a gestalt, writing has the ability to unmask whether the thought itself, expressed in language, has internal coherence. The act of writing forces the writer to pay attention to this. The act of reading brings to the attention of the reader whether what is being said has structure and consistency. Literacy is an avenue to greater coherence and precision of thought.
Literacy changes the way people think, or rather it opens up a new manner of thinking. It doesn’t necessarily supplant the discursive oral communication (elite Ancient Greek society, existing on the bleeding edge of the novel technology of writing, considered both oral and written language, in their proper uses, to be learned forms of culture). However, literate cultures have different qualities from illiterate ones. This kind of research is inevitably controversial, but it appears to be the case that written languages (even when they are spoken) more frequently use conjunctions and have more types of conjunctions. Many languages around the world lack a word for ‘or’, not to speak of ‘however’, ‘nevertheless’, or ‘yet.’ You can get on just fine with no conjunctions, or with a smaller number of conjunctions, or just a single generic conjunction that means ‘mostly and.’ This should not be surprising. If language occurs mostly in a context of unstructured discourse, there is less need for lots of connectives that link one set of thoughts to the next (contrariwise, there is more need for discourse elements acknowledging and addressing the interlocutor!). The increased attention to internal coherence in writing seeps back into the oral language here it is in an unexpected way: a multiplication of conjunctions.
Complex mathematics do not arise in oral cultures. This is not to say oral cultures cannot do math — you can find oral cultures comfortable with surprisingly high multiplication baked into their number systems. However, no purely oral culture has developed algebra or complex geometry. This kind of lengthy, step-by-step algorithmic process is something our brains are not naturally very good at. We seem to require an external aid for structuring, in the form of writing, to jump-start higher mathematics. After people are taught step-by-step mathematical processes, they can become quite adept at doing (some limited amount of) math in their heads. It just seems to be true that to take that first step requires writing the mathematical formulae.
Literacy is not just a communicative tool, although it is that too. Literacy causes a shift in how people think. It enables and enforces certain kinds of structured thought and is a step away from the gestalt, ad hoc compositional thought of discursive or oral communication. We all begin our linguistic lives with only oral1 communication, and only later learn to be literate. Literacy is not a replacement for oral language: it is built on top of it, both historically and in each person’s personal development.
The loss of literacy skills has been impressive during the past few decades. I note that from my students. They can repeat what they read, or the notes they took in class. But in terms of understanding a complex matter, well, it is a disaster. I note the same trend with my colleagues. When I was a student, I was impressed by the ability of my teachers to go through complex mathematical calculations with just pencil and paper. Nobody does that anymore: when successful scientists need to make a complex calculation, they pay someone to do it for them.
That may be just an impression of mine, but there is clear evidence that literacy is declining everywhere. We are losing what Marty Mac defines as "The kind of lengthy, step-by-step algorithmic process." In religion, it is the defeat of Martin Luther's approach, who had been maintaining that everyone should be able to read the Bible by him/herself. There follows that today in a sense we are all Catholic (or maybe Pentecostals). You may argue that this is nothing bad in itself. Indeed, it is not: it is just that things are different than they used to be, and that's the normal way the world works.
The problem -- the very big problem -- is with science. Science normally used the Catholic approach, in the sense that ordinary people were not supposed to read the original sources in the scientific literature. That may have been the reason why scientific "papers" are normally written in an obscure and hyperspecialized language -- understandable only by those who work in the same field as the authors. Not just that, but scientific papersare inaccessible to the public, hidden behind paywalls for the profit of publishers.
So, you need an interpreter, a scientific "priest" to tell you what "Science" (with a capital "S") says (Tony Fauci has reached the status of "Scientific Pope"). This is a disaster because the "scientific literature" is so huge that any scientific priest with a veneer of expertise in a certain field can claim more or less anything without too much fear of being contradicted, just because so few people can really understand that field.
That does not normally happen with religions: Imagine that your local pastor tells you at the Sunday service that Jesus Christ recommended human sacrifices. You may not be a theologian but you know enough to suspect that something is wrong. That makes Martin Luther's approach viable: the Bible is a huge book, but its main points are understandable more or less by anybody.
But when the director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Rochelle Walensky, tells you that "Masks can help reduce your chance of Covid19 infection by more than 80%" how do you react? Would you believe that she invented this number from whole cloth?
Yes, she did.
There is not a shred of evidence in the literature that face masks of any kind can attain that level of protection, surely not the kind of masks that people buy and wear. I can tell you that from my own analysis of the literature. You may also check the opinion of Vinay Prasad (Epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco) and of many commenters to Walensky's tweet.
Fine, but why should you trust me or Prof. Prasad instead of Dr. Walensky? In the Protestant approach, you would check the literature yourself. But do you have the capability to look up the relevant papers? Do you have access to the literature without having to pay the exorbitant prices charged by scientific publishers? And even if you have the relevant papers, can you understand them, written in the kind of heavy, involved, purposefully obscure style, typical of scientific papers? And do you have the capability of filtering away the evident frauds resulting from corrupt scientists publishing to please their sponsors?
You see what is the problem. Science has become so huge that it has gone beyond the human capability to understand it. Outside one's hyperspecialized field, scientific truth has become little more than what you read in the slip of paper you find inside a fortune cookie in the Chinese restaurant. Maybe you read, "You have a secret admirer.” Oh, yes? And where does that come from? You are not supposed to know. It is the same problem you have when listening to your TV scientist appearing on the screen to tell you "wear a mask," or whatever. Where do those statements come from? You are not supposed to know that. Science has expanded itself beyond existence.
Now, pause for a moment to breathe after realizing that more than two centuries of scientific research have led us to a dead-end street. It has been said that a scientist is someone who knows a lot about very little and who aims at knowing everything about nothing. If we keep going like this, it is a prophecy that's going to come true.
And now what?
At this stage, the normal proposal is that we should do something to improve our schools and, in turn, that is supposed to improve the average literacy, scientific and otherwise. But the loss of literacy, in the sense of the capability of understanding complex texts, is probably irreversible. The idea of public schools financed by the state is modern: those schools have existed only for less than two centuries, from mid 19th century. They came into existence as tools for the linguistic and cultural homogenization of the newly formed nation-states. But, with the coming of image-based communication, mainly TV, they became obsolete.
Things change fast in our world: in little more than one year, we saw schools turned from a central element of our society into dungeons inhabited by little plague-spreading monsters to be kept masked all the time. How our society could turn so nasty, so fast against its children was an unexpected confirmation of Seneca's observation that "ruin is rapid." But it is also true that ruin occurs when evil meets opportunity and there is no doubt that the powers that be were bound to discover, sooner or later, that schools were not needed anymore. Why spend money to teach people how to read and write? Just let them sit in front of the TV.
History moves always onward and if this is what is happening, there is a reason for it to happen. Think that for most of humankind's history, spanning at least a few hundred thousand years, there was no such a thing as "written text." It appeared some 5000 years ago and up to very recent times, it was a skill of a tiny minority of people. We tend to see "universal literacy" as an achievement of our civilization. But it is not obvious that knowing how to read and write makes people better. You could argue for exactly the opposite (Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 18:3). So, we are simply returning to something that was the normal way to be in earlier times, except that, by now, the exchange of ideas is done over the Web rather than physically face to face. Maybe it is an important difference, maybe not. We'll have to see that.
In any case, Visual languages made a comeback, pushed by the new tool of Internet-based communication. We are not anymore limited to exchanging translated text: we have a wide variety of image-based communication tools, starting from the simplest "emoticons," smiling faces, and the like, to the capability of making elaborate video clips at low cost. This new range of communication tools was going to have a profound effect on the ways people speak to each other. And it is happening.
And how about Science? Well, science has been an offshoot of our text-based civilization. As it is now, it does not serve a useful purpose anymore, having become mostly a money-making tool for corrupted people and corporations. It will change, too, not because we want it to change, but because it has to. Science will use a different kind of language, it will aim at different purposes, seeking different kinds of knowledge. But we will still recognize it for what it is, we humans were born to seek for the truth. And we'll keep doing that.
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