Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
One of the Sunday magazine shows the other week devoted a segment to a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. It featured interviews with earnest, articulate people professing their belief in the proposition that the earth is flat, and their scorn for all the so-called “evidence” to the contrary: the moon landing, the space station, the stunning images from orbiting satellites — all fake.
The scariest thing about this story was not the weirdness of the mass delusion of ordinary people — I looked very closely to see a glint of irony somewhere, to catch somebody winking, but no — the scariest thing was how normal it all seemed, like just another day at the Trump White House.
It used to be self-evident, as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, that you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. There actually was a time when that statement was so obviously true that it made us laugh. Not any more.
(Nothing could better illustrate the extent to which times have changed than when last year a Republican Senator, arguing for the repeal of Obamacare, used the Moynihan quote to buttress his argument — and attributed it not to the famous liberal Democrat, but to the patron saint of the senator’s tribe, Ronald Reagan.)
This is the age of alternative facts. Facts were once things to be known, things that were confirmed by substantial evidence and confirmable by investigation. Now, and increasingly, facts are things that we believe or don’t believe, about which we have feelings regardless of objective evidence, depending on our tribal memberships. One tribe believes in climate change, another does not, and the beliefs have nothing to do with scientific evidence.
It is the age not only of infinitely malleable facts, but of instant and universal distribution of them. Anyone who has an opinion has a Twitter account, a Facebook page, an Instagram space and more. Everyone is a writer, even if using only thumbs, not because one has studied and trained to be one, but because one feels oneself to be one.
Such prattling used to be dismissed from public discourse for the simple and self-evident reason that if we set our course — as a people, a tribe, a community, whatever — based of ignorance, heedless of facts, we are sooner or later going to run into something hard and unyielding. Reality.
Yet in our world, deliberately, ignorance has been raised up over knowledge, groundless beliefs over established principles, arrogance over confidence, until the ship of state is careening randomly across the seas of the world, not fearing collision with icebergs because we don’t believe in icebergs.
In our world, ragtag crowds of impoverished families fleeing death and desperately seeking a better life become armies of criminals about to invade our country, while climate change, an implacable enemy already hard at work destroying our country with storms and fires and rising tides, is ignored because the leaders of one of our tribes do not believe in it.
In such a world, it really does not matter if we believe it to be flat or round, if we believe in gravity or not, because facts are hard like diamonds, they cut through all forms of bullshit eventually, and when ignored long enough they cut through skin and bone just as easily. Believe them or not, we will feel their truth eventually.
When Al Gore invented the Information Superhighway little did he know it would eventually lead to the democratization of horse shit. Anyone with access to a computer could become an instant expert.
True story: Around the turn of the century, I set up my own commercial website for the purpose of selling screen printed T-shirts featuring the images of major classical music composers: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler, etc…To give the site some credibility among the long-hair set, I wrote a three or four paragraph blurb on each composer – you know, a click-on – a short biography plus some contrived commentary on their music and its cultural significance, yada, yada, yada…All purple-prosey and full of pretense. But harmless enough, I figured. Anyway, T-shirt sales went fairly well.
Then something rather unexpected happened: I got two letters (yes, they still wrote letter back then) one from a major metropolitan symphony orchestra in California, and the other from a musical publication in Montreal (sorry, no names). Each wanted to use my website blurbs – apparently verbatim! The Canadian outfit was preparing some educational material for high schools, and the orchestra wanted to lift them out for their program notes…I was stunned.
I have zero professional or educational background in music. I can’t read a single note much less play an instrument. But why pay a musicologist, a music critic or journalist, a conductor, a musician or even a music teacher for their expert insights when you can get ready-made copy off the internet from a T-shirt printer?…”I mean, how bad can it be, Carl? He’s, like, got a website and all!”
Tom, I ask you, is this a great country or what!?
This is a great country. WHAT?
You kidding me you write this sh*t?
My best friend died when I was nineteen. That’s number one.
The death of my mom and dad, in no particular order, they’re numbers three and four.
Do you what number two is, Tom, number f*cking two (and jockeying for number one -my best friends death, was after all, forty long years ago)?
You guessed it. 9/11 truth.
You know nothing about facts cutting through skin and bone.
Dubunk it Tom, fully, in a column. I dare you.
Cut as per usual. btw how ya doing. I hope you are well. I link to you from r/collapse from time to time. I would link all of your posts, but surprisingly,I think, your doom and their doom does not seem to align as often it should.
Perhaps your doom is still too powerful for most of them at this stage of their development. They are, for the most part, uninitiated youngins.
Of course, the ultimate form of doom is making a fair and balanced* attempt to debunk 9/11. I would know. I tried. For many years I tried. And that’s why I’m here, Tom, calling you out.
Diamond hard facts and truth! Yeah, but wherever they lead?
*Prediction! FOX will be …hmm, I’m going to qualify this a tad… almost irrelevant within two years.
I’m going to qualify my qualifier (can I do that?). FOX will go mostly irrelevant (they will always have race) unless they are the ones that can pivot on 9/11 first. They could. That’s what’s so f*cked up.
The movement is …man, I don’t know… call it 50-50 split. Considering that the right wing did it you would think it would be at least 70-30 left over right, but it’s not. Weirdly, there are lots of Reagan people (ex: Paul Craig Roberts). Capitalists? Everywhere! Anti-gov/Anti-blacks and assault rifle types. You get the picture. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the minority.
Someone is going to benefit, Tom. That’s the point. And the pathetic left could lose this one, just like it has lost everything else.
Max, you can make Fox irrelevant now just by turning off the TV. Sell it to some other schmuck and let it turn their brain to mush. Marshall Macluan pegged it when he stated “the medium is the message”. The propaganda machine is too powerful. The only way to remain independent is to tune out.
I fully agree. But while tuning out FOX, don’t forget to tune out MSNBC as well. Horse manure comes in many guises.
Hi Tom,
While I agree with your article, I think our dilemma is even greater than that: Even those leaders who profess to heed the scientific evidence are not acting upon it. In Germany, for example, none of the mainstream parties are denying climate change (though some may try to downplay the risks involved) and yet we are going to fail our self-imposed CO2 targets miserably. I think politicians shrink away from real measures because many of them realize the enormity of the changes required to effectively counter climate change and the other related problems (predicaments) you´ve written about extensively over the years. I suspect they are actually right to think it would make them unvotable; the general public wouldn´t voluntarily make those required changes. So it´s much easier to let lobbyists line your and your party´s pockets and to engage in environmental tokenism.
greetings
Frank from Germany
Who knows what the general public might be willing to do if those who claim to believe in AGW acted as if they do instead of say, being Madam Saleslady for fracking as the energy future, or flying all over the globe to promote their film on climate change. Churchill did not tell the British that they needed to begin a careful adaptation to being invaded but without really changing their lifestyle, he told them he had nothing to offer but blood, sweat and tears, the royal family visibly collected their ration cards. Certainly their danger was more immediate and clear but that makes it even more important that every believer in AGW, elite or otherwise, walk their talk. And that would mean walking, not driving a Tesla coal burner.
I agree that people might be prepared to do more than one might think at the moment, but only if there was a massive and far-reaching education effort as to what our predicaments really are and what measures need to be taken: It would have to be all over the media, prime time every day, on all channels (private stations, too), and I just don´t see that happening.
greetings
Frank from Germany
As (I think) Ayn Rand said: “You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”
I like your parade of metaphors to describe the Post-Truth Era. I could indulge in excessive pop-psychology analysis here, but I’ll limit myself to chalking things up to an earnest desire among the public for certainty in the face of epistemological chaos and confusion — the sort of thing we used to have when, say, the Catholic Church was understood as the moral center of the world (not without internal conflict, obviously). With so many competing claims to authority, expertise, and truth, one is forced to plunk down and believe in something, right? So why not this, or that, or the other? Evidence might appeal to some of us as a basis for belief formation, but to more of us, emotion possesses far stronger gravity. Thus, defiance and hope in the face of gut-wrenching loss (past, present, and future).
I’ll add that it used to be the mark of a sophisticated, cultured person to develop good taste and exhibit good manners. They were high embodiments of cultural norms that served everyone, not just those who were model citizens. Over time, the relaxation and liberalization of such norms has resulted in indulgence and coarsening of thought and behavior. To whit, the adoption of swear words as everyday vernacular. A similar indulgence has infected subscription to truth, where we now all possess our own standards rather than adhering to any one of many out there in the public sphere. This might be framed positively in terms of free speech/thought and the sovereign individual, but the fallout is social disintegration.