When the Brexit campaign announces ‘Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’ and, on winning the referendum, the claim is shrugged off as a ‘mistake’ by one Brexit leader while another explains it as ‘an aspiration’, then it’s clear we are living in a ‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’ world. Not merely a world where politicians and media lie – they have always lied – but one where they don’t care whether they tell the truth or not.
Possible solution : make telling lies of any sort (edit : but not necessarily under any and all circumstances because that would be extremely silly) equivalent to libel, i.e. something which carries a severe penalty. Newspapers should be forced to dedicate their front pages to admitting the lies they've printed. TV news should lead not with the headlines but with apologies for the lies. And prefacing everything with "my opinion" should not be counted as a defence, since believing the UK spends £350 million per week on the E.U. doesn't make it true - it's still a lie. That would make news networks far more careful about what they say, since even in a "post-fact" world no-one is going to watch a channel that has to start off by telling what it was lying about.
Many blame technology. Instead of ushering a new era of truth-telling, the information age allows lies to spread in what techies call ‘digital wildfires’. By the time a fact-checker has caught a lie, thousands more have been created, and the sheer volume of ‘disinformation cascades’ make unreality unstoppable. All that matters is that the lie is clickable, and what determines that is how it feeds into people’s existing prejudices.
If all the facts say you have no economic future then why would you want to hear facts? If you live in a world where a small event in China leads to livelihoods lost in Lyon, where your government seems to have no control over what is going on, then trust in the old institutions of authority – politicians, academics, the media – buckles.
http://granta.com/why-were-post-fact/
"Possible solution : make telling lies of any sort equivalent to libel, i.e. something which carries a severe penalty."
ReplyDeleteThat's a terrifying idea. The mind boggles at the logistics and repercussions.
But is it more terrifying than a world in which you can deliberately lie and suffer no penalty whatsoever ?
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor yes. A thousand times, yes.
ReplyDeleteLies have penalties, just not as severe as you'd like and not as reliably as we'd hope.
What's happening here is that civilization is no longer in its toddler phase...it's becoming aware of itself and what it really is. It's the 10,000 years preceding this moment in time that's the real delusion here. That's what the Internet is doing to us. It's revealing our nature, and our nature is self-deception, delusion, and no emotional control. It's sex and sex and more sex. It's lying and power. This all sounds scary because it doesn't fit into the modern narrative that everyone is awesome deep, deep down. We're not. We're human.
There's only a few real drivers of human nature and truth isn't among them, and it's hilarious to suggest that this is new. Or that it needs to be hit with the big cartoon hammer of "LAW". The idea that we can somehow outlaw "lying" is as woefully misguided as thinking we can outlaw being mean.
What's required is more logical thought in the populations...and that requires emotional fortitude in the individuals in society. And that's the real issue here. We've raised generations of self-deceptive, emotionally incompetent wimps who require constant gratification and constant mollifying, who aren't able to separate out a "feels good" from a "is logical". People who think collectively and aren't able to stand on their own reasoning.
So they succumb to the whims of the cult of personality that gives us Trump and Putin. They like the lies because the lies make them feel safe and smart. Suggesting that you're going to "fix" this by outlawing it is just plain silly.
The first question is always: how will it be abused?
ReplyDeleteProbably with frivolous lawsuits against a medium to shut it down. If the independence of justice is more of a concept than a principle where you live, whoever influence it can also use it to silence media even more effectively than before.
Would it still be worth a try? Yeah, probably.
Great, then we can use the same argument to stop religion being taught in school or anywhere.
ReplyDeleteChristopher Butler Of course I'm not suggesting that we outlaw lying, because that is both silly and impossible. I'm suggesting greater regulation of the media, nothing more, nothing less. Since politicians now seem not to care if they tell the truth or not (see original article, it's very good), how do we make them care ? Obviously we need more education about critical thinking in schools, I've been saying that for yonks. You know this. But that is a long-term fix. My question here is what do we do about the situation right now ?
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that giving politicians and the media an incentive to care about the truth would go quite some way toward making the world a better place. No, it wouldn't fix it completely - nothing would. That would be an utterly absurd suggestion, which, please note, I didn't make. The only appropriate question is would it make it better ? Answer : I don't know, but I think it's worth considering. Not even the most perfect thinker in the world could ever reach a correct decision if they were only ever given the wrong information.
Rhys Taylor perhaps this paper may be relevant?
ReplyDeletehttps://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1
"Knowledge-Based Trust"
Winchell Chung I'm going to give that one my full attention tomorrow, once this VLA proposal is submitted. :)
ReplyDelete