Some interesting thoughts on facism

Couple of comments on fascism and fake news in thread by Joerg Fliege (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JoergFliege/posts/WCYzDsxqT2t) I think deserve wider attention. I think that they are not incompatible : just as a sneeze is both a symptom and a method of propagation of a cold, so too may fascist fake news be both symptomatic and transmissive.

I've got some other reservations about the second comment, but I'll just leave it here for digestion.



First, Edward Morbius writes (here shortened by my own inclinations and with minor typographical corrections, see original thread for full) :


My increasingly convinced take: fascism & demagoguery generally are a communications-based phenomenon. It strongly resembles spread of communicable disease.

It's a response to collapse of former mental world models, at societal scale. That triggers an informational overload, not because of more information, but from a loss of formerly-effective filters. We all ignore the overwhelming majority of our sensory inputs.


Attention Scarcity

Not knowing what to ignore means paying attention to everything. And then applying crude and immediate heuristics to filter for salience. These tend to be highly-available, topical markers. Skin colour, accent & vocabulary, the whole slate of tribal markers. The propagandist's playbook: high-contrast brutalist imagery, repetition, emotion, flattery, scapegoatism, etc.

Population distributions of intelligence and ignorance mean it's (mostly) the less intelligent, less educated, and more culturally ignorant who fall first. Intelligent sociopaths see an opportunity, recognise it, and exploit it. This explains much of the rrich/poor split in such movements. The more nuanced middle classes; smart enough to gain professional work, to socialised to climb over others to get to the top, tend to be the resistance.

(Broad brushes, numerous exceptions in all directions, but the general pattern I see.)

Both mass media (from speaker-in-square to pamphlets, broadsides, penny/yellow press, film, TV, cable, Internet, Mobile internet) and shifts in media (generally, new media emergence) feed this. For two reasons.

Media Scale & Novelty

Mass media alone because society-wide attention is finite: there are only so many stories, of so much complexity, which can be assimilated. Changes in landscape because the people, tools, praxis, institutions, and pedagogies acquired in the previous iteration are lost, abandoned, rejected, or simply not seen as necessary or applicable in the new. This is category error.

The result is like gaining a new sense without the capacity to handle the inputs, and the responses are often overwhelmingly emotional. Watch videos of adult deaf people experiencing cochlear implants for the first time. They are overwhelmed. Most first express confusion, then surprise, then smile or laugh, then cry. Children and toddlers often scream. A fair number of recipients refuse to use them after days or weeks, sometimes months, others adapt. But the process is traumatic.

Informational Epidemiology

There are really only three characteristics of an epidemic disease – Clustering, Spread, and Transmission.
http://cureviolence.org/understand-violence/violence-as-a-health-issue/


This appears in disease, violence, propaganda, fads & fashions, innovation, culture. It's not that information is a disease. It's that infectious, and environmentally-transmitted diseases, are information.

Much as thermodynamics was first observed as a technical aspect of the engineering, design, manufacture, and operation of steam engines, I think we will come to realise epidemiology, arising from the narrow domain of public health, describes a set of general behaviours of information flows through complex systems. Some positively affecting their health and function, some negatively.

Hygiene is the ultimate engineering discipline. Seymour Cray was close, with plumbing.

Which means that we can probably look to the tools of public health for stemming flows of toxic information. And nobody beats a bacterial or viral infection by arguing it to death.

Instead you monitor to detect emergence. Where you don't know the agent itself, you observe the community or population for abberent symptoms. You limit routes of transmission; the rate, latency, quantity, and quality of comminications between nodes. Equivalents to handwashing, sterilisation, and antisceptics. You innoculate. Identify reservoirs and fermenting pools. Limit and disrupt these. Address systemic weaknesses and stresses which increase susceptability: hunger and austerity. Where necessary, and effective, treat individual cases. Identify and disable infectuos agents themselves. Raise costs for existence and operation at all levels.

Within human and social systems, disruptions of trust within an antagonist network itself is another tool. (The antagonist is often attempting the same against its own target group.) Trust itself is an immense generator of efficiencies, and a denial-of-trust attack vastly increases workloads within its target.



Secondly a certain Chris C, who G+ won't let me tag correctly, writes :

I'm going to float an idea that I hope will allow everyone to approach the question of "So what do we do?" (as to what that implies) much differently.

Everyone makes very valid points in their comments as it relates to the issue of what I'm going to refer to as fake news (FN) for simplicity. In fact, I would say you have a great handle of the intricate and subtle symptoms of the ongoing problem. But nobody has addressed the disease.

This isn't a unique, or even a new, problem in the world. I will use the US as the focal point in order to narrow the field of view.

Certainly everyone in the comment section here has heard the phrase “paralysis by analysis” before. The current situation in the United States actually resembles Africa circa 1981. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights had to overcome the triple barriers of pessimism, history, and ideology (Odincalu, 2001). These three hurdles, for different reasons, are very applicable today in our FN catastrophe. In the United States we face the same challenges.

Pessimism - people are pessimistic about America in general, both citizenship and from abroad. They are pessimistic about their upward mobility and prosperity, health, and security.

History - slavery, feelings of a lost culture that never existed, and craving for a simpler life they relate to the non-existent time they are nostalgic about.

Ideology - political, religious, cultural.

There's plenty of debate about the Charter’s effectiveness, but it's failures, and successes, are vital to understand. They ignored the underlying problems that led to much of the failure that resulted in, not only not being a remedy, but making some things worse. This happened because they ignored the cause of the core issues they were up against, and instead attempted to implement an overcomplicated system. That's what I see here in the comments. A group of well intended and highly intelligent people, applying a methodology of a highly complex set of ideas to a problem that doesn't address the core issue. I'm not saying FN doesn't exist, I'm saying FN may not be the droid that you're looking for.

I propose that the cause is much simpler than you realize.

As said by Paul Virilio: ”Progress and disaster are the two sides of the same coin. Invention of a ship is invention of a shipwreck, invention of a plane is invention of a plane crash, invention of nuclear energy is invention of a nuclear meltdown. And, the more powerful the invention, the more dramatic are its consequences. So, it is inevitable to reach a point when progress and knowledge become unbearable.”

Or, from an article about complexity from a Dr Branson…

”One of the problems facing our society is that we have lost the ability to determine what kinds of problems are solvable versus the kinds that are not solvable.”

”Please note that it does not matter if you believe that armed global warfare exists and is biome threatening. It does not matter if you believe that drug use is a terrible bane that should end. The salient fact is that with our current technology and understanding of the problems, they are not solvable no matter what we do.”

I'm certain everyone knows where this is going, maybe. Here is one more quote from a source I will link. I suggest everyone read it because it mentions all the most relevant psychological research available today. It also contains the solution to the problem, and it's really as simple as it sounds.

”A message can go viral before any serious truth filter has been applied. This leads to a positive feedback cycle. If one team is passing around unfiltered information, then its opponents feel the need to respond in real time. So they won't be able to check their facts either. The positive feedback is further increased by individuals' tendency not to read very carefully. People share messages without even reading them, never mind evaluating their accuracy.” (emphasis mine)

”We need to foster norms of discourse in which it's OK to challenge what others say without the conversation immediately devolving into invective.” (emphasis mine)

My overall point here is that the solution to this problem isn't about complex systems, and it's not about any type of education (though without question education does allow people to identify FN, but again, that's not the problem). In fact, FN isn't the problem at all. We must learn how to talk to each other again. The solution is that simple, enacting that solution is painfully difficult. Why? I bet everyone reading this, when they read “we have to learn to talk to each other,” instantly their mind conjured up the thought “they don't listen to reason!’ or some variation of that. Guess what, that's exactly what “they” say.

This problem is created by a need to fit in, to be accepted. Nobody believes the Earth is flat, they just want to belong so they adopt that belief. Over time they identify with it more, but they don't believe the Earth is flat. They continue believing it because they are a part of a group.

This applies to party politics as well. We become accustomed to belonging to a group and that group identity means more to us than the truth. Who can honestly say they want to have an open conversation with someone of a different political party? I do it all the time, because I'm part of a group of people that are moderate conservatives who do not like Trump. That's not really the same thing, I'm kind of cheating. But where would that conversation go if I did have it with a Trump supporter? Exactly where you think it would go. Should I try to endure that in an attempt of an olive branch? Probably. Will I? Probably not.

That's why I mentioned that there are things that we cannot fix. We can try to find clever mechanical fixes using technology as filters, but that's a Band-Aid on a chainsaw wound. The real question we have to ask ourselves is “how do we start to talk to each other again?”

I realize that this is probably an over simplistic idea for many reading this. It feels like it should be more complicated than this, but it's not. This is a 100% cultural issue that cannot be solved by technology, nor can it be solved in any way that doesn't involve the coming together of groups of people to learn how to have public discourse again. That is the only solution, everything else is ultimately a waste of time and energy.

Psychology is a pretty straightforward profession, with very complicated subfields. In my neck of the woods, which is clinical psychology, it's technical, not complicated. I haven't met a psychologist yet who says tackling FN is anything more than learning to communicate again. Much like Africa if we continue to try to add complexity in system rather than accepting the fact this is a human to human communication issue we're just going to make it worse.

Being respectful and compassionate is quite literally a concept that would change the world dramatically. We all believe we're compassionate and respectful, but and truth most of us probably aren't. People like us don't tend to like these simplistic ideas, they don't satiate our need for complexity. I'm just asking you to consider it, because it took me awhile to get on board with this concept but it's true and the science backs it up.

https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/03/27/597263367/the-psychology-of-fake-news

Odincalu, A. C. (2001). Analysis of Paralysis or Paralysis by Analysis? Implementing Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights Under the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights. Human Rights Quarterly, 23(2), 327-369. doi:10.1353/hrq.2001.0022