I wish I could like this post a dozen times. Your dead on with the arc of history, but the reality is that it is an educational problem. We don't teach true information literacy, and if we did these days it would be subverted by activists. We are all born as clueless babes and need to learn the tools to think clearly.
I wish I could like this post a dozen times. Your dead on with the arc of history, but the reality is that it is an educational problem. We don't teach true information literacy, and if we did these days it would be subverted by activists. We are all born as clueless babes and need to learn the tools to think clearly.
Most people don't even use probabilistic thinking to frame their understanding of the world. People like Kate Starbird will say things like "Biden won the 2020 election fair and square", which she is in no position to know as the vote is impossible to fully audit from voter to vote. The system, by its nature, has an element of the unknowable. Elections require an element of faith, and faith in the system has broken down. I don't truly 'know' whether any fairly close election was fairly decided.
In this case, I need to account for all the evidence, the motivations in a highly charged political climate (why wouldn't you cheat to stop a Nazi?), the knowledge that our security services tried to subvert Trump and are skilled in changing elections in other countries (all speculation, but would the CIA put a backdoor into voting systems like they do with other technologies). Putting it all together with an estimate, I'm ~85-90% sure that Biden won the 2020 election fairly - but to claim 100% certitude is a gross misrepresentation of reality, and is itself misinformation.
In cases where 85-90% certainty is the best we can do, we have little choice but to accept this reality. After all, a standard of certainty that's unattainable even in principle isn't really a standard at all, in the sense of providing a guide for human decision-making. Even in differential calculus we accept that the slope of a curve approaching some value--say, 1--never actually reaches it. Knowing this, we acknowledge the limitation gracefully, give up, and adopt the convention of calling the result '1,' despite the fact that this isn't, technically speaking, 'true.' Might as well: if our result isn't 1 it's 'as good as,' since it approaches 1 infinitely closely. Same story with pi: we can't calculate its value absolutely accurately; but since we can calculate it accurately enough to erect 50-storey buildings that don't fall down, and send space probes to rendezvous with Pluto, we don't really care.
The French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel cautioned against thinking of 'faith' as a species of 'weak belief'--i.e., belief unsupported by adequate evidence. Rather, he said, faith is an 'orientation' that enables us to proceed on the (technically, epistemologically unjustifiable) presumption that beliefs, evidence, and the relations between them, are all as we take them to be to begin with. I find Marcel's argument conceptually persuasive, not merely a terminological quibble. Maybe what's broken down is our confidence that the systems we depend on are functioning as they should, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that such erosion of confidence is rational at present. Where faith enters the picture is in the supposition that those responsible for designing and operating these systems are individuals of good will, who, to the extent that they're able to perceive system limitations, will sooner or later strive to remedy them. This will inevitably never be universally true--there will always be people eager to game systems to their own advantage, at everyone else's expense--but my sense is that it's true enough: I think we live in a world where most people would still rather do right than wrong, the main impediment to their success being not the malicious intent attributed to them by their 'enemies,' variously defined, but widespread confusion over just what qualifies as 'right.'
The question of how individuals should behave, who wish to be socially responsible and exist, as far as possible, on 'right and truth's side,' brings us to game theory. In this connection, I hope you'll find the following tale somewhat encouraging, if you haven't viewed it before:
P.S. You may have gathered that I'm a long-term optimist but also a realist and, short-term, even a pessimist: I have 'faith' we'll eventually "arrive," while lacking confidence (where's the evidence that would support it?) we'll do so by the most sensible, pain-free routes possible. Marcel again:
"For I believe that no man, however enlightened and holy he is, can ever arrive until the others, all the others, have started out to follow him. We never climb alone, though we often seem to do so."
I agree with him, but we're a long way from everyone climbing alongside each other effectively.
P.P.S. We say we're 'misinformed' as shorthand for saying we've been given information that's inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading in some other way; but it doesn't follow from this conventional usage that there's any such thing as misinformation. Ontologically, so-called 'misinformation' comprises a null set: everything that comes to our attention is information.
What we're normally concerned to know about information are its relevance, reliability, utility, etc., and these are matters that can only be settled by empirical investigation. 'Misinformation' is a dodge used by censors to prevent such investigation from taking place, a nefarious label from censorship's arsenal that pretends we already have answers to questions we haven't even been allowed to ask yet. I'm sorry to see information diffusion issues, and debates about the state of journalism, deformed by this deliberately misleading vocabulary.
Thank you for the YouTube link. I'll watch it. Been a long time since I reviewed Game Theory in depth.
My 85%-90% certainty is good enough for me to accept the results, but not good enough to be content with our election system. In Iraq, they made everyone go to the polls and dip their thumbs in red ink to make sure they didn't vote twice and we celebrated it is democracy. I'm not at all convinced that we have a fair system that I can place faith in.
I also think we live in a country where most people are trying to do good. A big difference I see here is unlike in Bush v Gore, Bush v Kerry, or Obama v Romney, we've got a massive contingent of citizens that believes that Trump is objectively evil. I can't understand why those in the system in some of these locales with centralized counting, like in Atlanta, don't cheat to avoid him getting into power.
Couple that with irregularities like covid preventing election watchers from having a vantage point, the bellwether districts failing, and the difficulty in obtaining evidence from within counting operations, I can see skepticism.
Then, when you have the knowledge that a) the media cheated regarding the "fine people hoax", the FBI cheated to start a bogus investigation into Russian Collusion and the security services cheated to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop revelations..... well, I can't argue much with a Trump supporter dropping their estimate to below 50%.
After all, why would every institution be cheating to oust him except for elections?
Then, when you'd think (like in the Iraqi case) that you'd really want to button up election security to instill more confidence amongst those losing faith.... the government (with both parties' leadership disliking Trump) can't seem to do anything to improve it - even though it is a crisis that led to political violence.
The whole thing is maddening. The fact that we aren't making the restoration of faith in our democratic system a top priority is another data point suggesting my 85%-90% estimation might actually be too high.
What people believe about Trump, election fairness and other things is of course closely correlated with what they think they know; and since the truth status of many of the 'facts' cited in your reply is and will continue to be contested endlessly along partisan lines, I don't see much hope of consensus. The Enlightenment supposition underwriting democracy was that people left free of tyrannical interference would naturally pursue the courses of action most compatible with their own best long-term interest; and perhaps if the majority of people were Enlightenment philosophers, this is the direction in which mass industrial societies would have evolved. Of course, that isn't what's happened. My father always said you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear (open a homily and sometimes a world of wisdom falls out), and Huxley warned that it was futile to think humans could perfect their 'systems' before having taken decisive steps toward perfecting themselves.
Yes, our limitations are "maddening;" even now it remains unclear how much the hermetically sealed information silos that undermine attempts at rational dialogue owe to political corruption and an ideologically captured media, and how much to people's perverse willingness to be siloed in the first place. That we can be so self-sabotaging--complicit in our own undermining--is the most maddening thing of all.
"... and how much to people's perverse willingness to be siloed in the first place."
I suspect this is most of it, at all levels. We've never had the technology to so thoroughly silo ourselves before. You used to have to abandon everything and join a cult to construct the kind of silo that we can now through basic technologies.
This has led to 'politics' infecting all aspects of American life, brambling over the pathways into other aspects of the culture that contributed to forming more socially complex identities. We don't have too many clear paths to break the programming. The pain of cognitive dissonance dissuades most from taking up a machete to whack and hack through the overgrowth and visit other parts of our farm.
So Huxley was right about us: we've got exactly the democracy and 'leaders' we deserve, and all the Orwell references we hear today miss the point, perhaps deliberately so. Not exactly a new insight: Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death back in the 1980s (plus Husserl published The Crisis of the European Sciences in the 1920s).
Postman:
“But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
“This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
P.S. Not much point blaming the Russians for any of this. Or the Chinese or the Islamists. They're just watching us self-destruct.
When I read 1984, some 40 years ago. I had trouble relating to it. In spite of my familiarity with the USSR, it was hard to related to. But Brave New World was much more chilling. The path to self-imposed tyranny was already familiar. Matt Taibbi's noble rage against the machine, that I wholeheartedly support, is only necessary because there is fertile ground for censorship to bloom. The Under-30s support both social media and *government* censorship in some polls.
But I'd also like to bring Fahrenheit 451 into the mix. That book never resonated, but there are parts now that are chilling. That foretold the future. Some scattered excerpts from an incredible rant within it interwoven:
----
"And because they had mass, they became simpler," said Beatty. "Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?.....
Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending....
Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace,
Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a
headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the
pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all
unnecessary, time-wasting thought!.....
Empty the theatres save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass walls and pretty colours
running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or sherry or sauterne....More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience....
Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!
Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time..."
----
When I first read this, it seemed absurd. I was bathed in a richness of art and literature. Mildred's three-walled screen where she socialized seemed impossible. As one that has been heavily involved with Internet tech since before the Web existed, I saw it all as unleashing more freedom, for diversity of thought and expression. But now, the above rant comes into clear focus for me - the natural progression of a life staring at screens. What are Mildred's screens really but TikTok? We've come a long way to devolve with the rat-a-tat-tat rapid brain massage into the 'happiness' of warm triviality.
Funny... when I was in grade four, my parents, aunts and uncles realized, "Hey! The kid likes to read!" and so they started giving me books as Christmas and birthday presents. From them I learned the names of the planets, the difference between cumulus, cirrus and stratus clouds, Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile barrier, all about the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus, the Romans, the Vikings, the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, how jet engines work, and so many other things remembered to this day. I prized those books and have them still: some are in display cases in my home library of over eight thousand books. Yet, of all the short stories I've ever read, my favourite remains Ray Bradbury's The Shoreline at Sunset. If you've never come across it and long for lost "richness," I recommend you treat yourself. It isn't very long, so if you don't like it the time investment lost will be minimal. But I suspect you'll find the return on investment profitable.
How strange to hear the nineteenth century dismissed as "slow motion." I think Bradbury was taking artistic license here, or maybe just indulging typical nostalgia for the simpler joys of childhood. As Colin McEvedy points out in one of his historical atlases, in 1815 Britain still ruled the waves with wooden ships not so different from those of several hundred years before; but by 1915 we'd entered and exited the steamship age, the railway age, converted to electricity, left horses behind for motor cars, and were dropping bombs on trenches from aircraft. The nineteenth century discovered dinosaurs and the true age of Earth; it saw Europe industrialize and urbanize faster than ever before or since; and from Darwin and Marx to Pasteur, Durkheim and Freud, it put in place the intellectual foundations that guide the world's politics and history to this day.
If the testimony of literature (Dickens, Gissing), biography and history books is to be believed, plenty of people experienced the consequent, unprecedentedly rapid social and economic changes as revolutionary and dislocating. From among the many frighteningly instructive examples one could pick, there's this one: part of the reaction against the uprooting of traditional village life in Germany, as the new Reich industrialized following the Franco-Prussian War, took the form of developing a Volk ethic that was, predictably enough, xenophobic and hostile to foreign capital--especially as represented by Jewish bankers in Paris. This is the climate in which Adolf Hitler was born; and if you want to understand a man's politics at age forty, look at what was going on in his life when he was ten.
Of course, despite oft-cited advances in science and medicine things are arguably worse now: the world is more crowded and polluted than ever, and to a large extent many in the west have lost confidence in the modernization project that absorbed our energy and sustained our enthusiasm from the beginning of the industrial revolution until at least World War I (think of the gay nineties in Britain, and the Belle Epoch in France), and revived to a certain extent following World War II. I liked growing up in the sixties and seventies well enough, but it's getting harder to see evidence of real enthusiasm these days, when young people can't afford houses and fewer and fewer seem persuaded that the path they're on will make life better for them. None of this is news: people are generally realistic when it comes to understanding what their prospects are, and the most perceptive critics of America have always been Americans themselves (Jonathan Haidt, Bret Weinstein and, yes, Matt Taibbi are in this group).
What this same realism contributes to the gloom, alas, is the recognition that a corrupt and irresponsible ruling class has no interest in listening to these critics. No statesmen of stature have emerged in this era; and while able thinkers who are courageous and ethical (Jordan Peterson, would you agree?) do exist, their influence is at the mercy of internet moderators who face increasing legislative and plainly illegal 'official but informal' pressures to ensure that their voices remain inaudible in legacy media. 'Elites' don't disclose their plans to me, but a plausible inference from available evidence is that they too have lost confidence that 'deplorables' are reformable, or ultimately matter, and that if the west is indeed circling the drain the only option left is for those in a position to do so to enjoy themselves on the way down. What else can the average person conclude from a climate change agenda that includes a session on "responsible yachting?" It's the subway and austerity for me and thee, with a thumb of the nose from those with yachts, private jets, and 'last refuge' real estate in New Zealand.
"... the vote is impossible to fully audit from voter to vote."
Your post is the first time I have seen someone besides myself point this out.
There are workarounds that professional auditors use--some of which you demonstrate in your final paragraph with respect to the 2020 presidential election--but as you note, they don't get you to 100%, like a full vote to voter tie-out (almost) would.
(I also enjoyed the rest of your conversation with Mark Kennedy.)
I wish I could like this post a dozen times. Your dead on with the arc of history, but the reality is that it is an educational problem. We don't teach true information literacy, and if we did these days it would be subverted by activists. We are all born as clueless babes and need to learn the tools to think clearly.
Most people don't even use probabilistic thinking to frame their understanding of the world. People like Kate Starbird will say things like "Biden won the 2020 election fair and square", which she is in no position to know as the vote is impossible to fully audit from voter to vote. The system, by its nature, has an element of the unknowable. Elections require an element of faith, and faith in the system has broken down. I don't truly 'know' whether any fairly close election was fairly decided.
In this case, I need to account for all the evidence, the motivations in a highly charged political climate (why wouldn't you cheat to stop a Nazi?), the knowledge that our security services tried to subvert Trump and are skilled in changing elections in other countries (all speculation, but would the CIA put a backdoor into voting systems like they do with other technologies). Putting it all together with an estimate, I'm ~85-90% sure that Biden won the 2020 election fairly - but to claim 100% certitude is a gross misrepresentation of reality, and is itself misinformation.
In cases where 85-90% certainty is the best we can do, we have little choice but to accept this reality. After all, a standard of certainty that's unattainable even in principle isn't really a standard at all, in the sense of providing a guide for human decision-making. Even in differential calculus we accept that the slope of a curve approaching some value--say, 1--never actually reaches it. Knowing this, we acknowledge the limitation gracefully, give up, and adopt the convention of calling the result '1,' despite the fact that this isn't, technically speaking, 'true.' Might as well: if our result isn't 1 it's 'as good as,' since it approaches 1 infinitely closely. Same story with pi: we can't calculate its value absolutely accurately; but since we can calculate it accurately enough to erect 50-storey buildings that don't fall down, and send space probes to rendezvous with Pluto, we don't really care.
The French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel cautioned against thinking of 'faith' as a species of 'weak belief'--i.e., belief unsupported by adequate evidence. Rather, he said, faith is an 'orientation' that enables us to proceed on the (technically, epistemologically unjustifiable) presumption that beliefs, evidence, and the relations between them, are all as we take them to be to begin with. I find Marcel's argument conceptually persuasive, not merely a terminological quibble. Maybe what's broken down is our confidence that the systems we depend on are functioning as they should, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that such erosion of confidence is rational at present. Where faith enters the picture is in the supposition that those responsible for designing and operating these systems are individuals of good will, who, to the extent that they're able to perceive system limitations, will sooner or later strive to remedy them. This will inevitably never be universally true--there will always be people eager to game systems to their own advantage, at everyone else's expense--but my sense is that it's true enough: I think we live in a world where most people would still rather do right than wrong, the main impediment to their success being not the malicious intent attributed to them by their 'enemies,' variously defined, but widespread confusion over just what qualifies as 'right.'
The question of how individuals should behave, who wish to be socially responsible and exist, as far as possible, on 'right and truth's side,' brings us to game theory. In this connection, I hope you'll find the following tale somewhat encouraging, if you haven't viewed it before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
P.S. You may have gathered that I'm a long-term optimist but also a realist and, short-term, even a pessimist: I have 'faith' we'll eventually "arrive," while lacking confidence (where's the evidence that would support it?) we'll do so by the most sensible, pain-free routes possible. Marcel again:
"For I believe that no man, however enlightened and holy he is, can ever arrive until the others, all the others, have started out to follow him. We never climb alone, though we often seem to do so."
I agree with him, but we're a long way from everyone climbing alongside each other effectively.
P.P.S. We say we're 'misinformed' as shorthand for saying we've been given information that's inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading in some other way; but it doesn't follow from this conventional usage that there's any such thing as misinformation. Ontologically, so-called 'misinformation' comprises a null set: everything that comes to our attention is information.
What we're normally concerned to know about information are its relevance, reliability, utility, etc., and these are matters that can only be settled by empirical investigation. 'Misinformation' is a dodge used by censors to prevent such investigation from taking place, a nefarious label from censorship's arsenal that pretends we already have answers to questions we haven't even been allowed to ask yet. I'm sorry to see information diffusion issues, and debates about the state of journalism, deformed by this deliberately misleading vocabulary.
Thank you for the YouTube link. I'll watch it. Been a long time since I reviewed Game Theory in depth.
My 85%-90% certainty is good enough for me to accept the results, but not good enough to be content with our election system. In Iraq, they made everyone go to the polls and dip their thumbs in red ink to make sure they didn't vote twice and we celebrated it is democracy. I'm not at all convinced that we have a fair system that I can place faith in.
I also think we live in a country where most people are trying to do good. A big difference I see here is unlike in Bush v Gore, Bush v Kerry, or Obama v Romney, we've got a massive contingent of citizens that believes that Trump is objectively evil. I can't understand why those in the system in some of these locales with centralized counting, like in Atlanta, don't cheat to avoid him getting into power.
Couple that with irregularities like covid preventing election watchers from having a vantage point, the bellwether districts failing, and the difficulty in obtaining evidence from within counting operations, I can see skepticism.
Then, when you have the knowledge that a) the media cheated regarding the "fine people hoax", the FBI cheated to start a bogus investigation into Russian Collusion and the security services cheated to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop revelations..... well, I can't argue much with a Trump supporter dropping their estimate to below 50%.
After all, why would every institution be cheating to oust him except for elections?
Then, when you'd think (like in the Iraqi case) that you'd really want to button up election security to instill more confidence amongst those losing faith.... the government (with both parties' leadership disliking Trump) can't seem to do anything to improve it - even though it is a crisis that led to political violence.
The whole thing is maddening. The fact that we aren't making the restoration of faith in our democratic system a top priority is another data point suggesting my 85%-90% estimation might actually be too high.
What people believe about Trump, election fairness and other things is of course closely correlated with what they think they know; and since the truth status of many of the 'facts' cited in your reply is and will continue to be contested endlessly along partisan lines, I don't see much hope of consensus. The Enlightenment supposition underwriting democracy was that people left free of tyrannical interference would naturally pursue the courses of action most compatible with their own best long-term interest; and perhaps if the majority of people were Enlightenment philosophers, this is the direction in which mass industrial societies would have evolved. Of course, that isn't what's happened. My father always said you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear (open a homily and sometimes a world of wisdom falls out), and Huxley warned that it was futile to think humans could perfect their 'systems' before having taken decisive steps toward perfecting themselves.
Yes, our limitations are "maddening;" even now it remains unclear how much the hermetically sealed information silos that undermine attempts at rational dialogue owe to political corruption and an ideologically captured media, and how much to people's perverse willingness to be siloed in the first place. That we can be so self-sabotaging--complicit in our own undermining--is the most maddening thing of all.
"... and how much to people's perverse willingness to be siloed in the first place."
I suspect this is most of it, at all levels. We've never had the technology to so thoroughly silo ourselves before. You used to have to abandon everything and join a cult to construct the kind of silo that we can now through basic technologies.
This has led to 'politics' infecting all aspects of American life, brambling over the pathways into other aspects of the culture that contributed to forming more socially complex identities. We don't have too many clear paths to break the programming. The pain of cognitive dissonance dissuades most from taking up a machete to whack and hack through the overgrowth and visit other parts of our farm.
So Huxley was right about us: we've got exactly the democracy and 'leaders' we deserve, and all the Orwell references we hear today miss the point, perhaps deliberately so. Not exactly a new insight: Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death back in the 1980s (plus Husserl published The Crisis of the European Sciences in the 1920s).
Postman:
“But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
“This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
P.S. Not much point blaming the Russians for any of this. Or the Chinese or the Islamists. They're just watching us self-destruct.
When I read 1984, some 40 years ago. I had trouble relating to it. In spite of my familiarity with the USSR, it was hard to related to. But Brave New World was much more chilling. The path to self-imposed tyranny was already familiar. Matt Taibbi's noble rage against the machine, that I wholeheartedly support, is only necessary because there is fertile ground for censorship to bloom. The Under-30s support both social media and *government* censorship in some polls.
But I'd also like to bring Fahrenheit 451 into the mix. That book never resonated, but there are parts now that are chilling. That foretold the future. Some scattered excerpts from an incredible rant within it interwoven:
----
"And because they had mass, they became simpler," said Beatty. "Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?.....
Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending....
Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace,
Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing,
Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a
headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the
pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all
unnecessary, time-wasting thought!.....
Empty the theatres save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass walls and pretty colours
running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or sherry or sauterne....More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience....
Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!
Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time..."
----
When I first read this, it seemed absurd. I was bathed in a richness of art and literature. Mildred's three-walled screen where she socialized seemed impossible. As one that has been heavily involved with Internet tech since before the Web existed, I saw it all as unleashing more freedom, for diversity of thought and expression. But now, the above rant comes into clear focus for me - the natural progression of a life staring at screens. What are Mildred's screens really but TikTok? We've come a long way to devolve with the rat-a-tat-tat rapid brain massage into the 'happiness' of warm triviality.
Funny... when I was in grade four, my parents, aunts and uncles realized, "Hey! The kid likes to read!" and so they started giving me books as Christmas and birthday presents. From them I learned the names of the planets, the difference between cumulus, cirrus and stratus clouds, Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile barrier, all about the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus, the Romans, the Vikings, the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, how jet engines work, and so many other things remembered to this day. I prized those books and have them still: some are in display cases in my home library of over eight thousand books. Yet, of all the short stories I've ever read, my favourite remains Ray Bradbury's The Shoreline at Sunset. If you've never come across it and long for lost "richness," I recommend you treat yourself. It isn't very long, so if you don't like it the time investment lost will be minimal. But I suspect you'll find the return on investment profitable.
How strange to hear the nineteenth century dismissed as "slow motion." I think Bradbury was taking artistic license here, or maybe just indulging typical nostalgia for the simpler joys of childhood. As Colin McEvedy points out in one of his historical atlases, in 1815 Britain still ruled the waves with wooden ships not so different from those of several hundred years before; but by 1915 we'd entered and exited the steamship age, the railway age, converted to electricity, left horses behind for motor cars, and were dropping bombs on trenches from aircraft. The nineteenth century discovered dinosaurs and the true age of Earth; it saw Europe industrialize and urbanize faster than ever before or since; and from Darwin and Marx to Pasteur, Durkheim and Freud, it put in place the intellectual foundations that guide the world's politics and history to this day.
If the testimony of literature (Dickens, Gissing), biography and history books is to be believed, plenty of people experienced the consequent, unprecedentedly rapid social and economic changes as revolutionary and dislocating. From among the many frighteningly instructive examples one could pick, there's this one: part of the reaction against the uprooting of traditional village life in Germany, as the new Reich industrialized following the Franco-Prussian War, took the form of developing a Volk ethic that was, predictably enough, xenophobic and hostile to foreign capital--especially as represented by Jewish bankers in Paris. This is the climate in which Adolf Hitler was born; and if you want to understand a man's politics at age forty, look at what was going on in his life when he was ten.
Of course, despite oft-cited advances in science and medicine things are arguably worse now: the world is more crowded and polluted than ever, and to a large extent many in the west have lost confidence in the modernization project that absorbed our energy and sustained our enthusiasm from the beginning of the industrial revolution until at least World War I (think of the gay nineties in Britain, and the Belle Epoch in France), and revived to a certain extent following World War II. I liked growing up in the sixties and seventies well enough, but it's getting harder to see evidence of real enthusiasm these days, when young people can't afford houses and fewer and fewer seem persuaded that the path they're on will make life better for them. None of this is news: people are generally realistic when it comes to understanding what their prospects are, and the most perceptive critics of America have always been Americans themselves (Jonathan Haidt, Bret Weinstein and, yes, Matt Taibbi are in this group).
What this same realism contributes to the gloom, alas, is the recognition that a corrupt and irresponsible ruling class has no interest in listening to these critics. No statesmen of stature have emerged in this era; and while able thinkers who are courageous and ethical (Jordan Peterson, would you agree?) do exist, their influence is at the mercy of internet moderators who face increasing legislative and plainly illegal 'official but informal' pressures to ensure that their voices remain inaudible in legacy media. 'Elites' don't disclose their plans to me, but a plausible inference from available evidence is that they too have lost confidence that 'deplorables' are reformable, or ultimately matter, and that if the west is indeed circling the drain the only option left is for those in a position to do so to enjoy themselves on the way down. What else can the average person conclude from a climate change agenda that includes a session on "responsible yachting?" It's the subway and austerity for me and thee, with a thumb of the nose from those with yachts, private jets, and 'last refuge' real estate in New Zealand.
Okay, going to go read BNW. Thanks
"... the vote is impossible to fully audit from voter to vote."
Your post is the first time I have seen someone besides myself point this out.
There are workarounds that professional auditors use--some of which you demonstrate in your final paragraph with respect to the 2020 presidential election--but as you note, they don't get you to 100%, like a full vote to voter tie-out (almost) would.
(I also enjoyed the rest of your conversation with Mark Kennedy.)