I am one of a cohort of people who spent practically my entire childhood without the existence of the internet but practically my entire working life with the existence of the internet. This means that I can remember a time when if you wanted to know something, in many cases the only way that you could seek out the facts was to go to a library and look in a book to find them. Society generally held a broad assumption that people who wrote books, had done at least a modicum of research before they went to publication. Similar kinds of standards existed for newspapers and some magazines; which in hindsight was probably a bit naïve.
I remember several key events in my youth which broke my trust of newspapers, when after being in a particular place, they reported things which were blatantly untrue. I knew they were untrue because I'd either been there and the things in question simply did not happen, or in some cases this amount of evidence to back up what the newspaper said was zero. I also remember the very early days of the internet, when a teacher in a Computing class set us the task of writing a paper on what we'd learned using only what we'd found on the internet. Someone in the class who was interested in poultry, wrote an essay on ducks and much to their horror, several of the 'facts' that they'd found on the internet were wrong.
In the quarter of a century which has followed, the internet has only gotten bigger; with real time radio, real time television, and with a massive increase in the amount of stuff that simply isn't true. Who'd have thought that if you added several billion users who didn't have to pass through any kind of fact checking before they went to publication, that the amount of truthiness in the world would decrease? We can all drink from the firehose of stuff, without questioning the validity, logic, sensibility, decency, kindness, or truthiness of any of it.
Newspapers and magazines were already a place where the troubling and the trivial and the banal and the sacred, could parade alongside each other; with no context and no indication of the value of importance. Ironically, television and radio which are linear media, are forced to headline the various types of programming, simply to add context to whatever it is that you are watching or listening to. TV news is almost always sensational, scandal, actual news, political, business and finance, sport, weather, in that order. There has been an increasing tendency for news programs to include advertorial as the tabloidisation of news media is driven by profit; which doesn't exactly help the viewer/listener in evaluating truth.
I would like to think that for a period of maybe a century, society was living in a golden age of increased commitment to the truth but thanks to digitisation of newspapers and magazines online, in place like national archives, I have very much come to the conclusion that this was never ever the case. Truth is and maybe always was an irrelevance to those people who want to sell either goods, services, or a political agenda.
This distinct lack of commitment to the truth has eroded peoples' trust in government institutions and given sufficiently enough space in the world to a very dangerous and unhinged section of the population for whom truth is not actually a concern. The irony is that when you add several billion users to an information exchange system which doesn't have to pass through any kind of fact checking before publication, the propensity for people to self-organise and then believe things which simply aren't true, is massive.
I find several parallels to the century past. A fantastic gilded age where power and wealth was incredibly concentrated in the hands of only a few people who acted as if they felt no responsibility to anyone else, collided with a pandemic in which millions of people died. At the time, newspapers were full of half-baked conspiracy theories and scandal sheets actively ran adverts for products containing heroin and morphine before governments decided that regulation of drugs might not be such a bad idea. This pandemic doesn't quite have the same concentration of media in the hands of the few but half-baked conspiracy theories, adverts for drugs, and a crowd of people ready to believe literally anything placed before them without any kind of desire to fact-check what they are being told, looks very similar.
Consider the following:
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
"Propaganda is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. If the means achieves the end then the means is good."
"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."
"Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will."
"It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise."
"The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it."
- Joseph Goebbels
You might think it strange that I should quote Joseph Goebbels in a piece talking about truth but there is a strange kind of paradox in the fact that those people who want to sell ideas for political purposes, have a commitment to the truth. Someone who is blatantly lying, actually knows what the truth is and will actually acquiesce to that truth, although not explicitly. What they want is for people to believe something that isn't the truth because that way, they can substitute the truth for whatever it is that they want to promote. The sad truth is that quite often, the biggest liars and the nastiest people have learned and studied the mechanics of how the world works; even Goebbels was aware that in order to sell a lie, you needed to be aware of what the truth was in the first place.
There is however a distinct difference between a liar and someone who merely wants to pump crud into the firehose. The liar in promoting falsehood, has at least some purpose for doing so. The liar wants someone to believe what they want to promote, in order to obtain profit and/or power. A crudpumper has no objective. The "do your own research" crowd who have collectively jumped on a bandwagon of some wingnut theory, do not actually want you to do any research but follow their list of links and entanglements without questioning the validity, logic, sensibility, decency, kindness, or truthiness of any of it.
This is a roundabout way of asking you dear reader, to bother and to care. I fear that those basic questions which people used to ask in an imagined golden past (which almost certainly never existed) are never even being thought about any more; let alone asked.
Is the article in question, true? Can the thing that I have been told be reasonably corroborated from a range of reasonably reliable sources. Can I test this thing myself? Do the maths or the basic chemistry work out? Is this a thing when pulled apart and examined, actually able to stand up to any kind of scrutiny?
Is this thing noble? Exactly what is this thing doing in relation to people's benefit, well-being, or character? Have we seen someone acting selfless, or in the interests of others?
Are we looking at something reputable? If someone has an opinion, do they disclose the basis for that opinion? Does the rhetoric match up with any kind of action? What is the motivation for publishing this thing?
How authentic is the source? Are we looking at a work of satire? Have we mistaken a piece of comedy, or political theatre for actual facts? Is this satire or parody?
Exactly how compelling is the thing? Is the thing believable? Or is it so incredibly outrageous that it is not credible and causes outrage?
How gracious is the piece? Does it want you to consider the fate and plight of the vulnerable, the maligned, the hated and the pitied? Does it look at the past and ask to consider correcting the circumstances and making good on past injury? Does it seek to lift people and to empower the powerless? Or does it merely hope to protect private advantage?
I find that things which are supposed to be affirmative and make people feel better but which ultimately aren't true, are about as insidious that those things which purport to be true but which aren't. A lie which makes the recipient feel good, might very well be more damaging to the world if it makes people with itching ears hear what they want to ear and then act in ways which are damaging to themselves and others.
Facebook in particular is replete with things that are not much more than banal platitudes. Platitudes are often vague and cute sentiments, which have as much actual meaning in the long run as a greeting card. While these may look nice on decorative paper, they don’t offer much help or compassion during conversation. They tend not to lead to meaningful action. I don't particularly like the one quote post or question, which is only designed to extract likes or short answers because those things become the salve and antidote to thinking. If all a thing is supposed to do illicit a like, or an "aww", a "cute", then after everyone has seen it, it is thrown away. Platitudes with vague and cute sentiments, are worse than greeting cards because a greeting card might contain thoughts which are precious and become treasured and that's highly unlikely with a Facebook platitude.
Again, we come back to that most basic of principles which may have existed when I were a wee lad. That is that things should be tested to see if they are true. Sources should be tested to see if they have a genuine commitment to the truth. Some things are a matter of opinion and truth might some times be relative but there are absolutes in the world and some truth is never relative.
Please do basic diligence and check to see if the thing that you've shared or said is true. Don't just post stuff which you never even bothered to read or check for yourself.
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