Caught between stories

When trusted authorities propagate the Big Lie, it rends the fabric of society.

Take a 5-minute survey — fun and thought-provoking.

I’d say without qualification that

The Internet has been the single
biggest cultural event in world history.

People everywhere have access to an enormous range of facts, perspectives, and philosophies from the world over. The potential boon for democracy is more than revolutionary.

There are rich and powerful people who would prefer less democracy, and they recognize the global up-wising that has taken place over the last 30 years. They know that their power is threatened, and they know that if the Internet can be brought under central control, it can have the opposite effect — instead of fostering independent thought, it can be a tool for homogenizing world opinion.

Fortunately for us, unfortunately for them, the Internet was designed with a distributed architecture. There is no global hub through which all messages go. Instead, each message wends its way to the intended recipient, server-to-server, via an unspecified and flexible route. This was a design feature in 1974, when DARPA wanted a system that could survive a nuclear war.

So the Elites can’t seize control of the Internet by force. Instead, they have been working since 2016 with a cultural meme. They want to convince each of us that “we” are smart but “they” are too gullible, and will fall for “misinformation”. The fact that some of that “misinformation” consists in true facts is beside the point. People cannot be trusted to evaluate claims when a variety of unsavory sources are trying to hijack their minds with propaganda.

The Trusted News Initiative and the Fact-checkers and Nina Jankowicz and the White House staff that instructed Facebook each day to take down posts that disagreed with them — all these want to centralize your “single source for truth”.

In case you have any doubt where I stand on this: I’m for a broad interpretation of the First Amendment. Deciding what is true is too much power to be placed in the hands of any one person or one organization or one consortium. Part of the messy business of democracy is that the task of evaluating credibility is spread broadly through the populace.

Bad things happens when those with the biggest megaphone broadcast lies

The Children’s Crusade of 1212 is a candidate for history’s most egregious example. Remember the Alamo! Remember the Maine! Smedley Butler warned us that all wars are promoted with lies, and David Swanson offers more recent examples. The Gulf of Tonkin lie and the Weapons of Mass Destruction lie were used to roll out American imperial wars; the lies were less well-disguised than Pearl Harbor and the Lusitania. America has spread freedom and democracy through the world, one bullet at a time.

Slavery cannot exist without a culture that dehumanizes slaves. In the 19th century, mercury was what doctors prescribed to treat syphilis.

Before the Internet, a Big Lie from the Church or the Government often prevailed. In the 21st century, Government lies still have the power to sway (or at least confuse) large numbers of people. There is dissent. There is conflict.

Human societies are knit together by stories. When authoritative sources propagate lies, the effect is to rend the fabric of an entire culture. Friends are estranged. Families have been torn apart. Doublethink has infected the brains of the Western World. Professional classes and academics, who are accustomed to relying on trusted sources, fall into a state of suspended reason.

Since 2016, there has also been censorship. Since 2020, the lies and the censorship have affected our everyday lives — socializing, family gatherings, churches, employment. It is almost impossible to be a healthy human in a society founded upon deception. All of us have suffered, whether we aligned with the majority or stood out in dissent.

The COVID deception has been most in our faces, but there are other official lies as well. The Internet is rich with mistakes and deceptions of all kinds, and it is not easy to tell which conspiracy theories to believe.

Here’s a survey
where I hope you’ll have fun choosing Story #1 or Story #2.
I’ll report the survey results after 2 days.