Liberalism And The Sealt Belt Probelm

Every once in a while, I come across a meme that's more provocative than the usual self-righteous bullshit that pervades my social media feed. Now, this one certainly does feel like the typical holier-than-thou variety...

... but that last one got me thinking. The others are straightforwardly due to self-interest. But it's maybe less obvious why the media should be uninterested in providing the truth. 

One answer comes from the underrated Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies, in which a newspaper editor tries to instigate World War III (through careful misinformation and manipulation) to drum up sales. It's very silly, but good lord has its main theme aged well. Still, surely in reality plenty of interesting stuff actually happens which ought to sell copy easily enough. "Lack of interesting stories" doesn't seem like a credible motivation for lying, still less in starting a war.

A key component of the meme, though, is "a world run by". This is different from the real-world situation in which the various components of society are roughly in some sort of balance. It suggests instead a weird, top-heavy power structure in which one group has become uniquely privileged. This is a big difference to reality. If the media is not unduly powerful (and is independent of other power groups), it's in their own interest to provide the truth because there's more than enough corruption for them to report on anyway.

Or at least, we might naively assume so, at least for the purposes of what I want to explore here.

Clearly if the media themselves were in charge, or more pertinently if they had undue influence, it would not be in their own interests to report on the truth (not the whole of it, any rate). As the movers and shakers, reporting on their own corruption would do them little good – it would commit the cardinal sin of harming sales and ruining their bottom line.

So a media-heavy power structure would indeed "never know the truth", in a sense. I think it would be more accurately be described as being drenched in perpetual bullshit : a media-ocracy would have no problem reporting the truth when it served the journalist's interests, but would equally have no scruples about barefaced lying when that was more to their advantage.

The optimal structure of society is much too big an ask this post, but I would also briefly refer to this meme as well :

True, the specific economic realities aren't really directly comparable, but the point of the meme is surely the moral intention rather than fiscal policy...

STOP ! I don't want to go down that road. Instead, what the first meme mainly got me thinking about was.... seatbelts.

Yeah, seatbelts. See, this to me has always seemed like a possible weakness in classical liberal theory. If the idea is that we should allow everyone to behave as they wish so long as it doesn't interfere with others*, doesn't that mean we should allow people to ignore their own seatbelts ? How can we fine people or take away their driving licenses for only putting themselves at risk ?

*Excepting that we're allowed to discuss with them and to try and persuade them of right action when we disagree with their choices.

Well, if they really do only put themselves at risk, maybe we can't. Similarly, we don't generally suggest outright bans on smoking, only on smoking in public areas where others are affected. The restraint afforded by a seatbelt, on the other hand, can also help drivers maintain control of their vehicles and thus make their own driving safer, thus helping protect other people as well.

That's were the media comes back in. Here the consumer has to bear a measure of responsibility as well as the producer. Sure, we can rant and rave about the manufacture (and it often is manufacture, not reporting) of clickbait and ragebait, but we can also choose not to consume it. The problem is that we don't. Lots of people actually enjoy this kind of content : if they didn't, the market would have self-corrected by now. Markets are far from perfect at this, but it does happen.

Excessive consumption of garbage media by a lone individual does little direct harm to anyone except themselves. If they want to be an idiotic dumbass, one might think, then that's on them. The problem is that true hermits are nearly non-existent, and one stupid person has to interact with everyone else. The old adage that bullshit takes more than an order of magnitude more effort to refute than to produce is correct, so one person sinking into the addictive clickswarm of useless prattling articles is doing more than just harming themselves. Like a virus, they afflict everyone they come into contact with : to bring them back to sanity requires a protracted effort of their community, if it's even possible.

The tragedy is that the media production of these articles is not entirely the result of cynical profiteering. It's because we really do enjoy them. It's not all corruption and exploitation – it's also just human nature.

So, maybe, what we have to do is treat this deleterious effect on mental health in the same way we treat physically harmful activities. Suppose that someone is in a situation where removing the seat belt really would only risk themselves and no other. There, we would still protest that allowing rare exceptions does more good than harm. It's easier, and better overall, to make wearing seatbelts a blanket rule : it inflicts only the most minor of inconveniences on a tiny minority for the sake of the (much more valuable) effect of protecting a large number of lives.

And we might even go further. We might allow ourselves to say, "this is for your own good -– we don't want you to die, so we won't allow you to take this pointless risk". People simply don't always know what's best for themselves; we might also take the angle that an injury suffered as a result of ill judgement requires resources we aren't prepared to utilise when we could have prevented it instead.

Managing the media as component of mental health would also allow us to control a public health crisis. A few smokers are something we can handle; an epidemic of lung cancer is clearly something we want to avoid. A few stupid people are entertaining; a horde of them are one of the most dangerous forces on the planet.

This is perhaps an illiberal position. The problem is that relatively few people are interested in, or have the time to, consider detailed reports and the full context of a story. Bad journalism thrives in part because people don't want good journalism : they want the emotion-inducing nonsense instead. And just as the odd cigarette or two won't do anyone much harm, but the risk of addiction may be deemed too great (certainly we accept this for some drugs, at any rate), so too may it be for crappy journalism. There's a sort-of "tragedy of the commons" about the whole thing, in the sense that one person reading one bit of celebrity gossip causes zero harm, but the cumulative effect can be seriously hazardous to community health. 

If we are prepared to ever say, "we can't allow you to do this enjoyable thing – we've found the consequences for society outweigh the benefits for the individual", then surely the ability to think clearly and rationally is something to which we should apply this reasoning. 

Obviously, we cannot regulate intelligence, nor prevent stupidity. But we can take action to make it becoming worse than it otherwise could be. And following another liberal principle, we can also minimise these interventions, making the smallest restrictions for the greatest gain. So this doesn't mean running wild with regulations or banning everything left right and centre, which would just replace one problem with another. We proceed on a case-by-case basis : this is problematic, apply what regulations are required to restrict it (using outright bans only as a last resort, the goal should more be a realistic minimising of bad behaviour than utter prevention); this is truly harmless, let everyone go nuts.

Finally, in order to improve any ability it must be operated at its limits. Consuming and analysing every piece of media clickbait, or more to the point, every bit of verbal effluence that spews from Trump's anus – sorry, mouth – is unhealthy. It is, I suggest, literally weaponised incompetence, designed to keep people stupid by having them exercise their brainpower in utterly unproductive engagement. Even if it doesn't actually degrade critical thinking skills, at the very least it becomes a pointless distraction. Endlessly proving that the latest thing that Trump said is wrong is counterproductive. We know he's a moron ! Saying it a thousand times for a thousand different reasons is unnecessary, fucking exhausting, and worse - every moment spent analysing the latest bit of garbage is a wasted opportunity from working out how to overthrow this deplorable fascist monster.

Rant over. I do not believe in maintaining a liberal society through illiberal means, but I trust that this is not what I'm suggesting. Rather, if we know that an activity leads away from our goal, we have to take steps to avoid it. If an activity is seemingly harmless and only affects an individual, but actually turns out to have provably harmful effects on the whole of society, then we don't ignore it. We rarely ban but frequently regulate to keep things from spiralling out of control. Sometimes, we surrender our own judgement as being inferior to that of experts, and allow them – under proper accountability -– to save us from ourselves.