A tidal wave of misinformation

I just finished reading Daniel J. Levitin’s book, “A field guide to lies: Critical thinking in the information age”, published in 2016. It fitted in quite nicely with my own research on the same general subject, that began with the writing of three related books, “Taking the lying out of living”, “Universal skepticism” and “Billions of big babies”, published in 2001, 2003 and 2006. To which I have since added a slew of related articles, in various magazines and newspapers, as well as my current blog, with monthly postings since 2013. A good twenty years of research and commentary on what is probably the world’s most important topic, indispensable for explaining what has gone wrong with our collective mishandling of every single major issue currently afflicting human society. Or all of them together, at the same time.

More than anything else, it is the misinformation constantly being created by millions of ultra-right-wing trolls all over the world, that explains more than any other common cause why we have not been able to deal even minimally with any of the recent, escalating, ecological, financial and geopolitical crises. Nor with the highly related, extremely serious, partly neoliberal and partly neofascist wave of barbarian atavism, taking over every part of the world as well as threatening our collective future as a species. The trolls are not only the anonymous jackasses polluting social media but also the very well-known, and very prolific, creators of fake news currently running most of our governments, political organizations and multinational corporations, as well as most of our religious and cultural institutions. Relatively rational explanations of reality have been almost completely submerged by thousands of irrational fabrications, many of them based on the re-emergence of long discredited, replacement myths dredged up from the distant past. The entire homo sapiens part of the biosphere has been inundated over the past few decades with a gigantic tidal wave of misinformation that threatens to put us all out of commission permanently.

Levitin’s book, as the title suggests, mostly deals with the technical aspects of misinformation, about all the different ways in which human beings manage to misinterpret all kinds of data, such as quantitative (statistical) data, accidentally or deliberately misunderstanding plausibility, averages, graphic representations, reporting biases, sampling biases and probabilities. As well as qualitative misevaluations involving such things as expertise, alternative explanations, counter-factual “knowledge”, and several of the most common logical fallacies. My favourite fallacy in his list has always been “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (“after this, therefore because of this”), that crops up all the time in historical discourse. Which does not mean that succeeding events never have a cause and effect relationship, but rather that they are not necessarily related in that way.

Levitin does not focus very much, however, on what I consider to be the most psychologically damaging kind of mangling of the facts, namely deliberate, official attempts to fool ordinary people into going along with whatever their leaders have previously decided to do (before consulting them), no matter how dangerous the consequences could turn out to be. For example, his reference (page 129) to the U. S. government’s claim about the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq prior to the 2003 American invasion of that unfortunate country. Which he refers to as a “mistake”, even though it has since been admitted that it was a deliberate fabrication to get the U. S. population onside, in a predetermined effort to remove a rival dictator in that region. Somewhat similar to the 1964 “Gulf of Tonkin incident”, involving a supposedly “completely unprovoked” North Vietnamese attack on an American warship, that the U.S. government now admits to have been a deliberate misinterpretation of events, intended to justify major escalation in that earlier war.

Just as I was finishing the Levitin book, I also stumbled upon an earlier work, “The influencing machine” (published in 2011) by U. S. public radio personality Brooke Gladstone, a kind of adult comic book (graphic non-fiction), abundantly illustrated by Josh Neufeld. This book is a very impressionistic, liberal-minded history of the media, almost exclusively focused on “the American exception” (the title of chapter 2), the idea according to which the U. S. constitution guarantees freedom of speech like no other country does, even if the U. S. media and “the American people” in general are constantly forgetting what freedom of expression genuinely entails. Her general proposition is that the media interprets the news the way that “people” (big shots as well as ordinary people) want it to do, so that “we get the media that we deserve”. Which means that according to her, there is nothing particular going on these days that has not been going on before, at least not since the coming into being of the modern media (during the nineteenth century). Except perhaps for her own projection of a future tainted with artificial intelligence (see chapter 15, “I, robot”).

Gladstone, however, is not nearly as naive as Levitin about U. S. government attempts to control the media, readily admitting all sorts of official misinformation, such as the observation (page 72) that U. S. involvement in the Spanish-American war, the First World War, the Vietnam war and the invasions of Iraq (1991 as well as 2003), were all prepared in advance by total media fabrications to make sure that “the American people” would want to go to war as much as its government did. Gladstone, however, very carefully avoids providing any information that could have gotten her into trouble with her publisher, or with her radio audience, about fundamental problems that go far beyond her discussion of the different kinds of media bias on which she focuses her attention (commercial bias, status quo bias, access bias, visual bias and fairness bias).

In her treatment of objectivity, for example, she agrees that “the Communist menace is real” (page 104) before going on to denounce those Americans who dropped all pretence at objectivity in their treatment of the U. S. role in the Vietnam war. Even though she details dozens of horrible examples of all sorts of people being constantly mistreated by those who care only about profits, she never specifically denounces private capitalism as such. She has nothing to say about why so many people all over the world became communists in the first place. Nor does she explicitly state anywhere in her text that private capitalism has in fact been much more menacing to the extremely inadequate kind of democracy that still exists in this world, than the kind of fake communism practised by the geographically-limited Soviet bloc (really only a variety of state capitalism), lasting for a relatively short period of time.

She also readily admits that things happening to people in every country in the world have an enormous impact on people’s lives in every other country, but she nevertheless has nothing whatever to say about how the media works in such places as Russia, China, India, Nigeria,  Brazil, or any other non-Western country. As if the relationship between the media and the people in those “faraway” places has no effect whatsoever on what is going on with the media inside Western nations like the USA. In most of her text, she treats the USA as if it was some kind of microcosm of the whole world. Imagine how much more controversial, and difficult to publish, her book would have been if she had included several chapters about the even more incredible media distortions going on in regions like the Middle East. Or if she had included in her text several chapters about the enormous damage being done to democracy in every major region by what is currently happening to the world’s most important religions. More specifically  by the current wave of ultra-right-wing fundamentalism that has so dramatically contributed to the political and social atavism, all over the world, that I was mentioning earlier.

Every government on this planet, past and present, misuses information on purpose, pretty much all the time, to serve whatever political purpose it may have, on any particular occasion. As do all the world’s major banks and corporations, private capitalism since its inception always having been (congenitally) focused on using hidden or prefabricated information in order to keep ahead of competitors, legislators, customers, employees and pretty much everyone else. It is also true that conspiracy theories as such first came into being long before the capitalist system was invented, like the Catholic Church’s fabrication of a document supposedly dictated by fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine, giving the Catholic version of the Christian message precedence over the Orthodox version. It was not until very recently that Pope John Paul II finally admitted (a thousand years after the fact) that it was in reality a medieval forgery. Nevertheless, it is completely ridiculous to conclude, as Gladstone has done, that misinformation nowadays is just “business as usual”, thereby refusing to admit that it has become a genuine, worldwide tidal wave and not just the normal ebb and flow of ordinary seawater.

The ease with which gullible people all over the world are so easily fooled nowadays was emphasized in Daniel Levitin’s section on expertise, when he referred to numerous individuals who took their medical advice from someone who plays a doctor on television (page 135). Which eerily predates the subsequent election of “presidential” actor Volodymyr Zelensky as the current (real-world) president of the Ukraine. The same Zelensky for whom fake-news U. S. president Donald Trump threatened to cut off military aid if he refused to investigate rival Joe Biden’s possible involvement with political corruption in one of the Ukraine’s most important corporations. Also the same, Russian-supported, “DJ” Trump who recently survived an attempted impeachment over the Zelensky affair by bullying his party’s senators into refusing (for the first time in U. S. history) to call any witnesses or to table any documents during his trial. Also the same neoliberal-neofascist numbskull who was photographed making the raised-fist salute, of the world communist movement, to celebrate his victory over everyone else. As they so crassly say in the USA, “you can’t make up this kind of s—t”!

Thousands of commentators all over the world wonder why the millions of evangelical Christians who support Trump do so in spite of the fact that he seems to stand for absolutely everything that they are supposed to abhor the most. Such as encouraging as many men as possible to mistreat as many women as possible, by promoting promiscuity, prostitution and pornography (“grab them by the pussy!”). Or by encouraging as many white people as possible to mistreat as many “coloured” people as possible by refusing to distinguish between supporters and opponents of white supremacy, during a recent confrontation between rival groups of demonstrators. Not to mention every other ultra-stupid, ultra-reactionary comment that he has made even more recently, on every possible subject, or his unforgivable pardons of a dozen of his favourite underworld collaborators. With the result that he is currently being denounced by the anti-Trump media as himself personifying the same behaviour displayed by the thoroughly corrupt leaders of all the nations that he calls “sh—hole countries”, most of them to be found in the poorer regions of the world.

Could it be that those evangelicals are in fact trying to hasten the onset of Armageddon, provoking their God’s supreme displeasure by deliberately contributing to the rapidly accelerating moral degeneracy of human society? More or less in the same way that such people also support “Christian Zionism” because the Book of Revelations apparently says that at the end of time, the Jews have to first take over the Middle East completely, in order to finally prompt “the Lord” into forcibly converting them at last into good, evangelical Christians? In other words, as Trump himself was reported to have said about recent Muslim radicalism, don’t we want to really “find out what the hell is going on” with all of these antediluvian, fundamentalist movements?

It is very odd, to say the least, that all the ultra-right-wing populist leaders in every region seem to think that the best way to fight corruption at the highest levels (“the deep state”) is by encouraging even greater corruption, at still higher levels than before. Which may help to explain why the Gates foundation recently honoured the increasingly autocratic prime minister of India (Norendra Modi) for building millions of toilets, thereby ignoring one of the most important goals in the United Nations list of requirements for sustainable development, i. e., the need “to promote peace, human rights and the rule of law”. It might also help to explain why the people who run the Nobel Prize for economics recently honoured several neoliberal economists, like climate-change skeptic William Nordhaus, thereby betraying the overall Nobel mantra of only recognizing those giving the greatest possible benefit to all humankind, and not just to a very small section of it.

We currently live in the kind of world in which after every well-publicized incident involving charges of corruption and incompetence, the public relations department of every large corporation or government service always issues a press release about how their particular institution is “committed to the highest possible standards” in doing whatever it is they were supposed to be doing. No matter how many such “incidents” have been recently reported. Deliberate misinformation has therefore become institutionalized at the very highest levels of every sector of every society and of every culture. Typically, very few of the people responsible for any of those incidents ever gets blamed, or punished, for any fault whatsoever.

This same, thoroughly dishonest, denial mentality permeates every kind of discussion concerning every one of the world’s most important problems. This upside-down attitude is particularly obvious whenever the conversation happens to touch on the ever-worsening degradation of the natural environment, not only regarding such imminently dangerous realities as climate change, or the accumulation of toxic waste products in the world’s oceans, but also the increasingly deadly pollution of the air, the water and the soil conveniently situated, most of the time, right next to most of the world’s highly populated neighbourhoods. Far away from where most of the rich people live. Which is happening more and more often, not less and less often, not only in countries like Paraguay and Bangladesh, but also in places like Canada and Japan. Mountains of abandoned mine tailings, forgotten oil wells and decaying industrial sites proliferate all over the world, as the world’s most impervious investors move on from one region to another, leaving death and destruction in their wake, in millions of different localities.

Not that phoney, post-modern, left-wing discourse is necessarily coming up with any more accurate depictions of reality. In an article published in the Montreal newspaper “Le Devoir” (February 1, 2020), about the debate over dogmatism in Western universities, author Stéphane Baillargeon quoted Concordia University sociology professor Jean-Philippe Warren commenting on left-wing dogmatism in the social sciences. To the effect that in order to fight against the hierarchization of knowledge in today’s society, the post-modern leftist interpretation of reality has been to claim, for example, that science and shamanism are equivalent forms of discourse. Imagine that: scientists claiming that the scientific method does not get us anywhere closer to the truth than shamanism, which is based on somehow communicating with “the spirit world” in order to be able to import those spirits’ (non-existent) “transcendental energy” into our own world.

This seems to me to be the worst possible way of fighting against elitism and the enormous, ever-accelerating gap between the social classes, all over the world. Which was created by the alliance of private (neoliberal) capitalism and state (neofascist) capitalism, not by science as such. To be sure, all the world’s ultra-rich and ultra-powerful elitists have been using the discoveries of modern science, including social-science research into the different methods of ideological manipulation, in order to reinforce their control over “the lower classes”. But cutting all the world’s poorer and less powerful people off from those scientific discoveries, by equating the scientific method with the methods being used by shamans, and all the other religious fundamentalists, is not going to get us anywhere at all in the fight against elitism. Just like in the case of the ultra-right-wing populists mentioned earlier, it is only going to make things a lot worse: replacing existing ideological corruption with even more ideological corruption, on a whole new level.

Another case in point being well described in an article published recently in “The Montreal Gazette” (February 13, 2020) by social entrepreneur (and former prostitute) Valérie Pelletier, “Sex work isn’t work, it’s sexual exploitation”. In that article, Pelletier lambasted all the recent, post-modern attempts at treating prostitutes as “sex workers”, who supposedly have the right to ply their trade in a “free” society just like everyone else. She pointed out that in the real world there are very few happy ‘sex workers’, because sexual exploitation of overwhelmingly poverty-stricken women is not at all joyful, but “bleak and identity stealing”.

To which I might add that interpreting prostitution as sex work is just another kind of deliberately fake-feminist misinformation, a lot like the equally false feminism of people who claim that the Muslim-fundamentalist hijab is “not really” a symbol of male domination over women. Or those who believe that the Super Bowl half-time show in the USA, featuring Latino performers Jennifer Lopez and Shakira dressed in ultra-revealing costumes, was not a good example of hyper-sexualization because they were just celebrating Latin culture (and Middle Eastern culture as well in Shakira’s case). As if sexism only applies to Western culture, and everything emanating from “oppressed” cultures has to be supported, no matter how debilitating its content.

Which is also quite similar to the so-called “intersectional” argument according to which feminists should be concentrating on helping the world’s most oppressed women (poor, non-white, etc.) rather than fighting against sexism directed at all women in general. With the result that the intersectional crowd end up having no idea what to do whenever they are faced with a conflict between two opposing groups of oppressed women. As in the case of transgender activist Jessica Yaniv’s denunciation of South Asian (Sikh) women in a British Columbia beauty salon, who refused to shave (his/her) decidedly male genitalia. To what extent are people supposed to believe that a person self-identifying as a woman really is a woman, in the original sense of the word, if that person is unable to become pregnant, or to bear children? In other words, how is the real world supposed to interact with the imagined world these days?

Yet another fascinating example of how weird ideological misinterpretation can become these days is how some of Canada’s Jewish leaders, who should know better, have gotten extremely upset about Montréal mayor Valérie Plante’s refusal to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-semitism. It seems that a small minority of revisionist Jews had a certain influence on the mayor’s decision, since they believe that the proposed definition could include banning any discussion of Israel’s origins. Which is certainly plausible given the enormous controversy that erupted inside Israel when historian Shlomo Sand published a book (“The invention of the Jewish people”, 2008) according to which today’s Palestinian population are largely the descendants of the Jewish population of ancient Israel, most of whom converted to Islam later on.

He also argued that most of today’s Jews, the majority of whom currently support Zionism, are in fact descendants of various different peoples who converted en masse to Judaism at various different times, and that the forced dispersion (diaspora) of the Jews in the ancient world never happened. In addition, he has accused Israel of having adopted an increasingly ethnocentric attitude over the past few years, “doubling down” (like Donald Trump likes to do) on its colonialist attitude towards the Palestinians. A fact that prompted emeritus history professor Yakov Rabkin, of the University of Montréal, to describe today’s Israel as having become an inspiration for all the white supremacists in the world, from Poland to Bolivia.

Needless to say, Sand’s version of Jewish history has been completely rejected and denounced by dozens of other mainstream historians who support the official point of view, and therefore consider Sand to be a traitor to the Jewish cause, that they equate with the Zionist cause. The Jewish leaders in Montréal who denounced mayor Plante undoubtedly know all about that controversy, but they curiously do not refer to it at all (the sin of omission) in any of the newspaper references to that controversy that I have read, preferring instead to make it appear as if the city administration is merely being anti-semitic. This is a truly excellent example of how even such a serious charge as anti-semitism can be turned on its head by thoroughly dishonest people who have no interest in partaking in any kind of civilized debate about anything whatsoever.

To be sure, identity myths like the Israeli one are currently being revived and refashioned all over the world nowadays. Canada, for example, was originally founded in 1867 by the imperial parliament’s “British North America Act”, accompanied by a historical myth about how the new nation was based on the “peaceful coming together” of two founding “races”, the “English” and the “French”, later replaced by “the anglophone and the francophone communities”. When Prime Minister Pierre-Elliott Trudeau got the Queen of England to sign an ideological reconstruction of Confederation in 1982, he reworked the original Canadian myth, replacing the “two founding races” with a “multicultural Canada”, theoretically combining all the indigenous peoples living north of the U. S. border, all the descendants of the English and French “races” that settled in the same region before 1867, and all the (immigrant) “cultural communities” that have set up shop in this country since that time.

The only people consulted directly by P.-E. Trudeau (the father of Canada’s current P. M.) for his 1982 Canadian constitution being the premiers of the nine (mostly) anglophone provinces, the one (mostly) francophone province (Québec) never having signed on. But then, neither did any of the indigenous peoples of Canada, since they were not invited to the reconstruction conference in the first place. Nor, for that matter, were any of the immigrant (cultural) communities specifically invited. Such are the workings of modern, representative “democracy”, a situation that has only gotten even worse since that time, not only in Canada but also in every other country that likes to brag about being so very democratic.

Canada’s treatment of its indigenous peoples has generally been a lot worse than its treatment of any of its other minority populations, such as the Québécois, the francophone minorities living outside of Québec, or any of the immigrant groups. Most of the indigenous communities spread out all over Canada are still living in very backward conditions, like the ones that still prevail in most “Third World” countries, lacking such basic necessities of modern life as drinking water, readily available health care and high-school graduation. Not to mention such abominations as the residential schools, designed to “take the Indian out of the Indians”, or the deliberately botched inquiry into what happened to thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women. It is not much of a consolation to any of those communities that indigenous peoples in other countries, such as the USA, Australia, the Russian Federation, China, India, and practically every other country in the world, are not treated any better.

This world-wide mistreatment of indigenous populations is also another good example of misinformation as well, since very few of all the countries harbouring these peoples have ever honestly acknowledged their own colonial responsibility for this extremely unequal treatment. The misinformation aspect is particularly galling in Canada, whose current government seems to be the world’s most glaring example of an enormous contrast between what the government says that it is doing to rectify this situation (a lot), and what it is really doing instead (not much). As can be readily observed during the current crisis over the very serious indigenous blockades of Canadian railroads, to protest against pipeline construction in the province of British Columbia (B. C.), primarily to move natural gas to Asian markets.

Nevertheless, it must not be thought that indigenous peoples are not also themselves participating in this global tidal-wave of misinformation. About a year and a half ago (September 17, 2018), I published a blogpost called “Holistic remedies for narrow-minded communitarianism”, in which I presented the main ideas contained in a book, “First Nations 101: Tons of stuff you need to know about First Nations people” written by Lynda Gray, an indigenous author from B. C. In my blogpost, I was quite sympathetic to most of what Gray had to say about Canadian ethnic and cultural genocide aimed at the indigenous peoples in this country.

However, I also included extensive criticism of what I considered to be her naive presentation of pre-contact indigenous culture as being totally devoid of war, sexism, the killing-off of large mammals, or anything else that most people nowadays might define as objectionable behaviour. Useful Information that historians of all the other cultures and civilizations in the world normally include in their works. It seemed to me to be practically impossible that none of the indigenous groups living in what is now called Canada, before the modern European invasions, ever did anything at all that anyone living nowadays might not like very much.

The use of the term “First Nations” itself could also be easily misconstrued, if it is used to suggest that each one of the indigenous peoples currently living in some particular region have always been living in that very same region since time began. The history of so-called “prehistorical societies”, prior to the invention of writing or some other arbitrary criterion, is changing all the time, with each additional discovery about what was really going on during the first 200 000 years of human existence on this planet. But one of the characteristics of that history that seems certain, alongside the intermingling of our species with various other kinds of (now extinct) human beings, is that every last one of the world’s identifiable cultures all belong to that same (homo sapiens) species, the various cultural groups of which have been moving back and forth across the planet for thousands of years.

Making it extremely unlikely that more than a few currently existing cultures live in exactly the same region nowadays as they did when our species first arrived in any given area. Which means that even the expression “indigenous peoples” should not be used to imply permanent occupation of any predetermined geographical setting. History is one thing and mythology is another, in spite of what any particular identity quest for complete and total ethnic purity might come up with, as an “alternate reality”.

There are, obviously, hundreds of thousands of other examples of deliberate misinformation being foisted on everyone these days, by all kinds of ideological manipulators pretty much evenly spread out all over the world. They are all contributing to the current tidal wave of alternative realities now being proposed by everyone out there with an axe to grind. Deliberate denial of the existence of an identifiable real world is just the most convenient way that all those axe-grinders have of refusing to come to terms with any of humanity’s most pressing problems. If someone judges some particular reality as being too much for that someone to handle, that person just has to pretend not to see it, nor to hear, smell, touch or feel it. Which, unfortunately, will not be enough to make it disappear for real.