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I’ve said that many current political movement and party leaders aren’t liars, what do I mean?
Well, they don’t lie, per se.
They bullshit. Which, frankly, is worse.
A successful liar must construct a lie carefully, and must first know the truth. Because the lie must be different from the truth, meant to conceal it. To lie successfully is to distinguish reality from fiction and attempt to convince the other person that one is the other, but always knowing yourself which is actually correct. The facts matter to the liar.
But these people do not do that. They bullshit. In order to further their goals, any actions and any words are permissible, because they see themselves as inherently good (and that goes for narrative and reality). In order to gain an advantage in the immediate “now”, anything can be said. To them, it doesn’t matter if it’s truth or lie, as long as it serves their purpose right now. They craft a situation, a story, narrative, a reality, in which they convince The Other (and even their own) that they are right and good. You see, they must always be right because they are good. The narrative itself need not be consistent or even coherent.
Think of the hundreds of bizarre conspiracy theories in which they are the secret heroes opposing evil. Pizzagate, Satanists, autism vaccines, Qanon, baby-eating liberals, flat Earthers, you name it. Those aren’t lies in the traditional sense of the word. Those are a constant, desperate struggle to be the Good side at all times in spite of evidence to the contrary, and without concerns about what is real and what isn’t. Unlike with lying, the facts, truth, and objective reality don’t matter here. They can be substituted and changed on a whim - the infamous “alternative facts.” That is what bullshitting is.
Debating real-life issues with them becomes futile because their reality is completely fluid and can change in an instant. One day an “engineered bio-weapon Chinese death virus funded by the Clinton Foundation” is going to kill us all, and the next day it’s just a harmless flu. Not because if anything they learned, but because of how it makes them feel, and as I’ve said again and again since age 14, feelings are the enemy of logic.
But if it suits their immediate needs, then something like COVID is a Chinese-Clinton-Gates bioweapon again. And if they don’t feel like wearing a mask in the store, it’s just a flu again. Or it could be a hoax and Fauci made it up. Doesn’t matter as long as the bullshit helps them in the immediate situation. Maybe they believe it, maybe they don’t. They can even apply a form of doublethink to believe two or more contradicting realities simultaneously.
Disregard objective reality, absorb only the reality you choose to take in. One moment Democrats / Liberals / “The Elite” (but only the ones they don’t like) run a global vampiric cabal that rules the world from the shadows in humanity’s single greatest feat of secrecy, and the next moment they’re bumbling idiots who can’t tie their shoelaces, unfit to govern anything.
Climate scientists are making billions by convincing people that climate change is real, and at the same time are a bunch of poor hippie losers stuck in a dead end university job. And those stats that you can measure yourself? Uhhh… SHUT UP! WHY’S THERE STILL SNOW THEN, SMART GUY?! Biden is a weak coward bending over for anything Putin says, and simultaneously a warmonger who’s destroying good relationships with Russia and starting WWIII.
Jan. 6 protesters in jail are good, innocent people who are victims of a witch hunt, because Jan. 6 were just peaceful tourists. And they were also violent BLM actors performing a false flag operation. The fact that those rioters filmed and so outed themselves is not in their advantage to say because it goes against the narrative, and so it doesn’t enter that reality.
A liar wouldn’t get away with such internal inconsistencies in their crafted alternate reality. They would immediately be found out, and they would be a terrible liar because a lie needs that internal consistency to be believable. But with bullshitting, the concept of truth never even played a part in it from the very beginning. Bullshitters don’t care if you believe them or not. Their reality is whatever they want it to be at any given time. They are no longer part of “consensus reality”, that which everyone can show, see, and test to be objectively true. And being detached from consensus reality is an extremely dangerous position to be in for further radicalization. They become unable to distinguish fact from fiction anymore, and can eventually turn their imaginary beliefs into real actions. Like shooting up the Pizzagate place. Bombing abortion clinics. Breaking into Pelosi’s home and assaulting her husband with a hammer. Trying to kidnap a governor.
Those people you saw in the news had already left consensus reality long ago, and they were without a doubt True Believers in whatever new reality they found themselves in.
Whether they created that new reality themselves or whether it was pre-made and spoon-fed to them is another matter.
One of my biggest areas of disagreement with Chomsky was that he presented conservative politicians as, essentially, liars. He felt that they knew very well that the policies they were advocating were objectively bad. They’d want their own children to be able to have abortions, for instance. They just took the positions they took because the culture war is easier to fight than the policy wars that would cover things like lowering the cap gains tax.
To whatever degree that might have been true when he wrote Consent, it started to unravel by the mid 90s at the latest. We started to get more and more true believers in positions of power. You still had bomb-throwers like Gingrich, but you started to see an influx of people who actually believed what the so-called paleo-cons claimed to believe.
What’s most dangerous in your argument is that it’s no longer a difference of opinion on policy. It’s a different and infinitely malleable reality. And it’s not just the radio and TV hosts - it’s people with real authority and power.
I don’t know how we’re going to come back from this.
I feel there have to be a lot more neutral fact-based discussions. Everyone, no matter the side, has to make very clear to the more psychotic aspects of whatever side they choose that some things are not acceptable, logical, or welcome. We need viable platforms for third-party candidates so people don’t feel pushed to radicalization from lack of perceived action from heir leaders.
But that relies on people thinking positions through fully, and deescalating politically divisive topics. Of course, this starts with people being more willing to admit that they were wrong.
News accountability would help with this, and potentially re-instating the Fairness Doctrine.
People also need faith in leadership again and that needs to come from allowing a complete gutting and re-establishment of process and powers.
My concern is that I believe the approach you’re advocating is predicated on humans as rational actors. That’s not a belief I subscribe to for a number of reasons including my own research. I don’t mean that in a “do your own research” sense of the word, but based on my own academic publications. In fact, I don’t really subscribe to the idea of free will at all at this point, but even when I did believe in it a bit, I still understood it to be highly canalized and extremely susceptible to social and mass media influence.
That’s why I tend towards pessimism on the idea of reconciliation. I think that groups of people can get wedged into a position that makes it very difficult or impossible to get unstuck from. If someone sincerely believes you’re gaslighting them, saying “I’m not gaslighting you” just continues to feed their belief.
I think if we were to take neuroimages of large portions of the population today, we’d find hypertrophied amygdalas and hypotrophied prefrontal cortexes, along with a easily triggered fear reaction and an ego-identity that has, as you point out, parted ways with reality.
And that’s just something I don’t know how to address at the population scale. I don’t think our concept of reality. - which is still very much grounded in the rational actor model - even allows for that kind of concept.
Well, as other commenters have said, logic education and fixing some of the gaps in school systems would be a very solid start. In one of the other topics here, we had a very solid discussion about fighting misinformation that sort of ties into this.
I still very much do believe in free will because every takedown I’ve ever seen of it doesn’t account for randomness, although you may be correct a large majority of the time for people who basically live their lives on autopilot. I believe that people change and be reached, although sometimes it may not be worth it.
There’s definitely not going to be a random fix that helps the majority of the population at this stage but we can still fix the future.
I don’t want to derail the discussion with a debate about free will, but I would suggest you check out Robert Sapolsky’s most recent book. Sapolsky is a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon at Stanford who has been working on the subject for years. I had previously been of the position that there was a very highly constrained version of free will (so, free within very tight bounds, like an animal in an enclosure), but he presents such a coherent argument that I ended up abandoning that position. His arguments include addressing randomness and complexity theory, and I have not yet found a counter argument that consisted of much more than a rejection of the conclusion because of the moral implications.
Robert Sapolsky
Nice! Just ordered it. He’s extremely educated and very worth hearing out if nothing else. Thanks for the recommendation! If you’d like, I’d welcome a quick thread here about the idea to hear it out in a little more detail.
I still very much do believe in free will because every takedown I’ve ever seen of it doesn’t account for randomness
I don’t. Randomness is a bizarre thing to call “free will” in fact.
To my eyes, I can see only three reasons for people taking actions:
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They take actions based on accumulated observation, experience, education, and reasoning (however flawed each item might be), with the selected action being the inexorable product of these ingredients. This is not free will. This is determinism.
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They take actions based on purely stochastic (weighted or otherwise) whimsy. This, again, is not free will. They’re slaves to the dummy dice, so to speak.
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Some blend of #1 and #2. Since neither #1 nor #2 are free will it is pretty obvious that #3 is not in any meaningful way free will.
There is no free will. There is some mix of stochastic processes, with varying degrees of mechanistic weighting based on accumulated experience ranging from 0 to 1 (0 being purely random and 1 being purely mechanistic) and none of this being “free will”.
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What I heard (in simplified language) from a cognitive science type I played RPGs with is this: “Logic is not built into the human brain, unlike, say, language. The human brain is basically a huge, high-speed, moderately-accurate pattern matcher. Logic is just one of the patterns it can match.”
Everyone, no matter the side, has to make very clear to the more psychotic aspects of whatever side they choose that some things are not acceptable, logical, or welcome.
The way I have already worded this is “police your crazies or be judged by them”.
Because I don’t have time to carefully research each and every political group to see if the loud voices shouting stupid and violent things are truly representative of that group or not. There’s too many groups, and a whole lot of crazy out there. It’s best to just avoid anti-abortionist (or antifa (or MAGA (or evangelical (or vegan (…))))) types and write them off as useless crazies if they’re not willing to oust their crazies.
Life’s too short to be wary of broken stairs. I’ll avoid the staircase.
Tangentially related to the topic but of importance in the discussion - when the quality of choices available to us is low (Trump/Hillary/Biden or Trudeau/Jagmeet/Poillievre) it can have the effect of lowering our standards and expectations overall.
If I were to be cynical, I would say that maybe some element of the candidate selection process in various parties keeps things such that leaders who are -too good- (for the people, and who would be liked) are kept out of the spotlight so that leaders who will difficult abide by the parties desires and be easy to control will rise to the top.
(I would also highlight that there is some general public awareness of the selection process lacking which is why we got things like Sanders and to a lesser extent Trump back in 2016. I think it’s likely the parties have aimed to control things even more tightly since then. I also like to point out to people who hate Trump that if someone like him looks good then what you’re offering has to be pretty mediocre. Trump would never in a million years beat someone like Obama).
I think the problem is both simpler and more horrifying than most of us want to admit.
It’s actually pretty simple. Outside of the actual expertise we’ve acquired through education, training, and experience, we just coast along in neutral with no brakes and no steering. Even when we have expertise, we often engage it unthinkingly by rote.
Every little bump in the road shifts our path this way and that.
Every hill slows us down or speeds us up. If we get caught between two hills, all progress stops.
Every curve with guardrails causes us to change course. Every curve without guardrails tips us into the ditch or over a cliff.
Then we make up stories to explain what happened in terms that show we were in charge the whole time.
The only protection we have against ourselves is that a few of our fellow travellers are looking around and documenting things, but most of us prefer our own stories.
A few of those attentive travellers use what little awareness they have to control the direction of others by telling stories that are compatible with our personal stories.
Unless and until we have enough of those more aware fellow travellers guiding us into positions where we are least try to occasionally look around for ourselves, we will always be at the mercy of our own story-making.
