Simon Sheridan – Page 39

The Socio-Politics of Truth

Whatever the truth is in its truthness – perhaps an attunement to the ground on which the revealing of a concealing manifests as the disclosing of an unfolding (sorry, just channelling my inner Heidegger) – there is an inevitable socio-political aspect to truth. One of my favourite examples of this, which I have mentioned on this blog before, is a study done where they invited test subjects into a room to complete a number of very easy tasks. The subjects came into the room with about twenty others who they were led to believe were also subjects in the experiment but who were in fact paid actors whose job it was to give an incorrect answer to a very simple question “which line is the shortest” in relation to three lines that had been drawn on the board at the front of the room. The lengths of the lines were such that nobody with functional eyesight could fail to see that the one on top was longest and the one at the bottom was the shortest. The correct answer was thus C. The trick was that the paid actors would all be called on first to give their answer while the test subject went last. Put yourself in the test subject’s shoes. You’re in a room full of strangers who all answer that Line B is the shortest even though you know for sure that the correct answer is Line C. Nineteen people go before you and answer B. Your turn comes around and you are asked to answer verbally for all to hear. Do you speak the truth and say Line C or do you just copy the others and say Line B is the shortest? It turns out that a majority of people will copy others rather than speak the truth.

Now you might argue that this is a trivial experiment in which the test subject doesn’t have any skin in the game and is just giving the easiest answer. But that’s the whole point. The extent to which truth is spoken is not just a function of truth. Other factors play a role. This is an uncontroversial statement. People lie when it suits their interests just as they stay silent or follow the group when it suits their interests too. But it gives rise to a field of study which I have seen called the Epidemiology of Truth: the study in how the truth, or lack thereof, spreads through society. One of the factors governing the spread of truth or lies is socio-political and that is what the line length experiment reveals.

This is no mere academic indulgence, however. It is of real-world importance. I recall an example from my working life where the truth should have mattered. I was working on a project where tens of millions of dollars were being spent by a corporation. Several high-ranking managers in the organisation were directly involved in the project. On most projects I have worked on, the high-level managers show up at the beginning to give a pep talk and aren’t seen again until the party at the end. This was the first time in my career I had worked in the same room with such people.

There’s always a period at the start of a new project where things don’t make a lot of sense because you lack the context for understanding. In my experience, it takes about two to four weeks for the fog of confusion to lift. Thus, it was at about the fourth week of this project where I first suspected that one particular high-level manager we were working with was a complete moron. It took me a further month or so to confirm my hypothesis. This particular person would speak nonsense. Not complete nonsense, mind you. It was clear the words coming out of their mouth were elements of more or less grammatical sentences of the English language. Scam artists use this trick all the time. They make the language sound legit but at the end of it you don’t understand what was said and this is where it gets interesting because your decision on where to look for the cause of the misunderstanding is partly determined by the socio-political context. In the context in which I was in, there was a senior manager of a large and successful corporation. That is to say, a powerful person. Somebody who could, if they had wanted, have me fired. Humans are social animals and we arrange ourselves into dominance hierarchies. This happens by default. There is also a meritocracy assumption that we bring to the table. We assume that the people at the top of dominance hierarchies got there by merit. Therefore, we assume a senior manager in a successful company is not a complete moron and when we receive evidence that they are a complete moron we discount that evidence in favour of some other explanation. The most common explanation is “I don’t understand”. In other words, the problem lies with me.

Consider an alternative situation. You could transcribe the exact words of the senior manager and have them read out by a shabbily dressed drunk on the street or an ultra-sleazy used car salesman. In those cases, you wouldn’t assume that “I didn’t understand”. You would assume the drunk was drunk and that the used car salesman was trying to baffle you with nonsense as a sales tactic. Same words, different socio-political context. With the drunk or the salesman, you just walk away. What do you do when you have to work with the senior manager? Again, socio-politics determines the course of action. Let’s say you’re in a meeting and the senior manager is talking nonsense. One thing you can do is ask for clarification perhaps using language that you do understand to try and lead the meeting away from the coral reefs of hogwash and towards the calm seas of meaningful discourse. You ask a question. The answer makes no sense. Can you ask again for clarification? Maybe you can get away with a second attempt. But three times and you’re out of luck. Three times and it is you who is starting to sound like the problem. Why? Because nobody else in the meeting is asking questions. Like the test subject in the room calling Line B the shortest, they just go with the flow. Most people elect to call Line B the shortest and most people in meetings do not ask questions even if they have no idea what is going on. The dominance hierarchy dictates this when dealing with a senior manager. Politeness dictates it when dealing with a colleague. Either way, there are barriers in the way to speaking the truth.

These socio-political issues tie in with individual psychology. At a certain age, young children will believe whatever they are told by somebody higher in the dominance hierarchy than they are i.e. any adult. This normally starts to change in the teenage years when children first start to realise that their parents and teachers are not right about everything which can often turn into the idea that because they are not right about everything they must be wrong about everything. Young people might be disillusioned about their parents but as they join the workforce they still hold the meritocracy assumption. I remember getting a summer job as a teenager in a small manufacturing company. On my first morning, the boss was busy so he told me to go and help another worker, who we’ll call Bill. Bill was a middle-aged man who seemed to know what he was doing. I went over and started to copy him. That was alright until after lunch when the boss came over to check up on me and noticed that we had been doing it wrong all morning. Turned out that Bill didn’t know what he was doing either. It was the blind leading the blind. I remember being very surprised that such a thing could happen but it happens all the time. Of course, nobody is perfect; even the boss. At some point in your career you get enough experience and enough self-confidence to contradict the boss. That works well in functional organisations and it’s the sign of a well-run company when the boss not only allows themselves to be contradicted but wants to be contradicted as long as the contradiction is done with good intention and as long as the truth is revealed by doing so. In my experience, this is almost always the case in smaller companies and almost never the case in larger ones. To return to the senior manager moron from earlier, you did not contradict this person. They had that combination of narcissism and stupidity that is very dangerous for those lower in the pecking order; the kind of person who cannot be reasoned with. The more informal the pecking order, as in smaller groups, the less this kind of person is a problem.

The interesting thing is that many people who work in such large organisations are not even aware that their manager is dumber than a second coat of paint. The reason comes back to the default assumption about dominance hierarchies being meritocracies. That is an assumption we must learn to overcome just as we must learn that our parents are not infallible. But many do not overcome it. For many people, those higher in the pecking order are right and, when there is a miscommunication, it is their fault. They say “I don’t understand” and not “The boss doesn’t understand”. The primary antidote to this is to work in a technical field where things must be made to work. In such fields, bad ideas lead to bad outcomes. The same is not true in corporations where tens of millions of dollars can be spent on some big complex project which achieves no result but nobody knows or cares because it’s not their money. Complexity protects the managers in such corporations. There are too many moving parts to know what the true cause of failure is and most of the time failure is simply swept under the rug and forgotten about. What made the project I was working on interesting was that it was small and self-contained enough to realise who the problem was. It was the senior manager.

The low-level jobs in such corporations are usually bullshit jobs where you spend most of your time trying to deal with the failings of the organisation structure itself. Such failings are almost always communication problems caused by the fact that somebody didn’t tell somebody else what needed to be done which then caused somebody else to screw up. In bullshit jobs, the problem is rarely if ever a technical problem and therefore something with an objective solution. It’s almost always a people-problem and thus a political problem. The cool thing about technical problems is that you can talk about them objectively without anybody getting upset. The same is not true of people-problems. This is one of the reasons that bullshit jobs are psychologically traumatic.

The other cool thing about technical problems is that you realise that nobody has a monopoly on truth and that in order for technical problems to be solved at all there must be an absence of our ingrained dominance hierarchy assumption that just because somebody is higher in the pecking order they must be right. For this reason, the more experienced people at the top of technical dominance hierarchies are usually very humble and happy to be corrected when they are in error. Outside of technical domains, dominance hierarchies become an end in themselves and those who fight their way to the top are often not the best at all. In fact, a combination of narcissism and stupidity can often be a bonus in such situations since it keeps potential rivals and subordinates off balance and once nonsense has been accepted for any length of time it becomes a political impossibility to overturn it. Easier to let the fool rise through the ranks c.f. The Peter Principle and The Dilbert Principle.

What all this boils down to is that truth by itself is not enough. One must encourage the conditions in which truth can prosper. At the societal level, all else being equal, a society of smaller organisations where people work in technical jobs producing things that “work” would be far more likely to be able to deal with truth than a society of large corporations filled with bullshit jobs. The former would feature people who are aware that nobody has a monopoly on truth and that true meritocracies are ones in which it is acknowledged that anybody can contribute to the truth as long as they have the right intentions and good will. The latter would feature people who think truth is whatever those in power say it is and that the cool thing about climbing the ranks is so that you get to be the one to say how it is for a little while. I’ll leave it to the reader to answer the question which of these best describes our society at the moment.

Enlighten-what?

During my internet travels over the past couple of weeks I stumbled across three takes on corona from well-known thinkers that highlighted a facet of the corona event that I have touched on in previous posts but which is now taking on increased importance given that events in Europe are escalating into new and very dangerous territory. The three thinkers are all self-confessed “rationalists” who have constructed a story about corona which is not only incredibly naïve but also dangerous. My first encounter with this story was a tweet by Richard Dawkins which read as follows:

“Ingenious scientists worked around the clock to find vaccines, with spectacular success. Will their noble efforts to beat the virus be defeated because of a new epidemic – new virus, a virus of the mind, the memetic virus of anti-vax propaganda spread by gullible fools?”

There is much to unpack in these two short sentences. Let’s start with semantics. Are these “vaccines“ really vaccines? By the old-fashioned definition of a vaccine they are not because they do not prevent infection. That used to be part of what it meant for a vaccine to be a vaccine and it’s also what the general public still thinks is meant by the term vaccine which is causing all sorts of cognitive dissonance at the moment. Because the “vaccines” do not prevent infection, on what basis can they be called a success let alone a “spectacular success”? The original dreams of reaching herd immunity have gone up in smoke. The vaccines have been rolled out on mass and yet the pandemic continues including in places such as Israel, Gibraltar and Iceland where uptake was as good as universal. Dawkins is always going on about how science is about empirical evidence. Where is the evidence that the vaccines are a success? And what are they a success at? They are not a success at getting us to herd immunity. The next best claim would be that they are a success at preventing serious illness but even that claim seems uncertain giving that any lasting protection seems to rely on booster shots. In the grand experiment that is corona, I would say there is little evidence for success so far and, in any case, we need to gather more evidence. The experiment isn’t over yet and yet Dawkins is already claiming victory. Or is he?

In the second sentence we find out that the supposed success of the vaccines is under threat but not because of any actual problems with the vaccine. No, it’s under threat from gullible fools spreading propaganda. The “virus” that threatens our ability to defeat the biological virus is a virus “of the mind”. How exactly could this virus of the mind stop the vaccine from working? Isn’t the whole point of science that it works whether or not you believe in it according to materialists such as Dawkins? If Dawkins means that the virus of the mind will prevent people from taking the vaccine, how would that negate the success of the vaccine given that we know herd immunity cannot be achieved via the vaccine? And, again, given the examples of Israel and Gibraltar where as good as universal uptake of the vaccine has not prevented further lockdowns, isn’t there numerous grounds to call the success of the vaccine itself into question?

The dichotomy that Dawkins sets up between the noble, enlightened scientists working tirelessly to save humanity and the fools whose ignorance will bring the whole thing undone has very little to do with the reality around corona and everything to do with the Enlightenment values of reason which “rationalists” like him ascribe to. The distinction between the men of reason (the Enlightenment was almost exclusively male) and the mob had been present ever since the start of the Enlightenment. Back when the Enlightenment was really kicking into gear, there was no universal suffrage, for example. Voting was an activity exclusive to land owners and the gentry. Even though the Enlightenment was ostensibly about removing the power of the state and opening up the “public sphere”, in reality the intellectuals congregated in closed societies in coffee houses and salons. The mob, the people who couldn’t see the light of reason, has always been a problem for Enlightenment thinkers because reason is supposed to be universal and yet there exists people who can’t be made to see the light. The Marxists resolved this by creating the notion of “false consciousness” a terrible affliction by which the working class were made blind to the superior reasoning faculties of their intellectual superiors. Nowadays, we don’t call it false consciousness, we call it conspiracy theories or anti-vaxxer. The underlying principle is the same. Thus, by invoking the dichotomy between “scientists” and “fools”, Dawkins follows in a tradition that has been around since the start of the Enlightenment.

This leads me on to the second “rationalist” that popped up on my computer screen in the last weeks; a snippet from Stephen Pinker’s new book called “Rationality”. Pinker is one of the most enthusiastic exponents of Enlightenment values and is the author of Enlightenment Now, apparently one of Bill Gates’ favourite books. Pinker’s new book on Rationality makes explicit reference to the corona event. In the precis for the book, Pinker states “Today humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding–and also appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing?” This is, of course, the exact same dichotomy as presented by Dawkins. The noble, rational scientists set off against the ignorant conspiracy theorists. Later in the book, Pinker would also echo Dawkins’ claim that the vaccines are a great success. For him, they represent a “glorious new achievement in the history of rationality” as vaccines “likely to end a plague” were being administered less than a year after the arrival of the plague. Again, we have semantic quibbles here. Pinker has no problem with calling them vaccines or accepting that we are in a plague. He does, however, at least appear to understand that the idea that vaccines could end a plague is new. This harps back to something that has been present in the corona event from the start, namely the idea that corona could be a “glorious new achievement in the history of rationality”. This was the dream of the “rationalists” right from the get go. But it was just that; a dream. At best it was a hypothesis and a scientist and rationalist should understand that a hypothesis needs to be proven before it becomes a fact. The dream that the vaccine could work needed to be tempered by the inherent risks involved and yet none of the so-called rationalists have ever acknowledged those risks at least as far as I have seen.

This leads me to the third and final “rationalist”, the Australian writer and founder of the Quillette website, Claire Lehmann. Like the other rationalists, Lehmann has been all on board for the vaccine since day dot. She has also become an apologist for the actions of the Australian government variously praising them and lately ignoring the more extreme measures taken. As Quillette is a popular site in the US especially amongst the libertarian and centre-right crowd and as the situation in Australia has become a hot topic among that demographic in recent months, Lehmann has found herself at loggerheads with her US readership who look on in horror as the Australia state governments have done things that would be impossible in America. Thus, Australia has found itself in a strange position of being vilified by the centre right in the US while also becoming something of a poster child for the “rationalist” cause by virtue of having a heady combination of low covid numbers and high vaccine uptake. In order to get there, of course, we have had to trample on the human rights of the population and it is this which Lehmann’s US readership have been up in arms about with particular focus on the Howard Springs “camp” in recent weeks. Lehmann has been happy to write off these human rights abuses as being a necessary element in the “success” of Australia’s response as measured by the low death count relative to the US. As with Dawkins and Pinker, Lehmann seems completely untroubled by how the death statistics were arrived at, how accurate the PCR test is or any of that. She is happy to take the numbers at face value and note that Australia is doing far “better” than the US. Of course, we already know what is in store for Australia. It is the same as happened to Israel, Iceland and Gibraltar. It is still too early to call Australia a “success” but that is what Lehmann, Pinker and Dawkins have done. If it does happen to “fail”, it won’t be the fault of the scientists but those pesky online fools who like to point out that locking healthy people in camps for two weeks without their consent is a betrayal of other Enlightenment values such as the concept of natural rights. Watching the state trample on those rights should have been at least a concern of so-called rationalists who claim to believe in the Enlightenment but apparently this is not the case.

The irony of all this is that the Enlightenment was supposed to be about removing the power from a small handful of people who claimed to be the sole repository of truth and wisdom by democratising access to the public sphere where everybody could have input. The internet is perhaps the ultimate expression of that and yet we now have proponents of the Enlightenment who lament the fools and conspiracy theorists poisoning that public discourse. All this while there are enormous problems with the accepted narrative on perfectly logical and rational grounds. It doesn’t seem to occur to the rationalists that their abject dismissal of reasonable concerns is precisely what is fuelling the “conspiracy theories”. The less we are able to acknowledge the real issues with the vaccine and with the government response to corona, the more likely people are to look for other explanations including that the government no longer has their best interests at heart. In the real world, there are trade-offs and simply ignoring the legitimate concerns and objections of people and pretending everything is a “spectacular success” is not a recipe for a functional discourse.

Of course, it’s worse than that. By invoking the dichotomy of the noble scientists versus the ignorant fools, the rationalists are now providing intellectual cover for what is increasingly looking like a genuine atrocity in Europe where governments now feel empowered to openly discriminate against people based on private medical decisions to the point of locking them in jail. Doesn’t sound very Enlightenment to me. Sounds more like The Inquisition. It sounds like exactly the kind of thing that the Enlightenment was supposed to prevent from happening. That is should be promulgated by people who advocate logic and critical thinking and yet have apparently applied neither to the corona event is all the more strange.

Pinker defines rationality as goal fulfilment. Rationality is a toolkit for achieving goals. The standard of rationality is therefore that which achieves the goal, preferably in the most straightforward way. So, we have a “pandemic” and our goal is to put a stop to it notwithstanding the fact that we have never been able to put a stop to a pandemic in history. We know that “vaccines” prevent the infection and spread of viruses. Ergo, the only thing preventing us putting a stop to the pandemic is the absence of a “vaccine”. Coming up with a “vaccine” to stop a pandemic is “rational” according to Pinker. Anybody who disagrees is by definition irrational. Could such a naïve, literal understanding of the world really be what counts for rationality in these people’s minds? I don’t see why not. Pinker’s book begins with a number of “trick questions” of the type presented in a logic 101 class. The kinds of questions that the average person always gets wrong because they are framed in such a way as to lead them down the wrong path. Rationalists love to get the “right answer” to such kinds of things just like the kid who always put their hand up in school dying to show the teacher how smart they are. The right answer to the pandemic question is the vaccine. End of story.

If rationality is goal fulfilment, who is setting the goals? In school, we know it’s the teacher and behind the teacher the education bureaucracy. The rational answer is that which pleases the teacher just like a good employee will give the “rational” answer which is exactly what their boss wants to hear. Is it rational once in a while to give the wrong answer just to see what happens? Is it rational to refuse to enter into the game of giving the right answer and thereby question the validity of the game? According to Enlightenment thinkers it is not. That is “postmodernism”. It gets into the messy business of power games and psychology which lie in the dreaded realm of the irrational. By definition, the irrational is chaos and disorder and so must be avoided at all costs. And yet even cognitive science has learned that it is the irrational that drives human behaviour. Decisions made on purely rational grounds are rarely followed through at the individual level and are often complete failures at the institutional level. People blindly following the (rational) means to an end without questioning the end is the definition of Kakfaesque and the whole 20^th century provided ample evidence of what happens in those circumstances. Yet here we are in 2021 about to go down the same horrific path and we have the rationalists not only not questioning the matter but actively egging the whole thing on happy to scapegoat those with genuine disagreements. As any good rationalist should know, such scapegoating is an ad hominem fallacy. We appear to be right in the middle of another fallacy: the sunk cost fallacy of “just one more booster”. These are things rationalists might be talking about in more enlightened times.

Here we go again

As I noted in my book on the subject, one of the foundational elements of The Plague Story is that the plague must come from an exotic location far away. In the case of corona, the initial exotic location was Wuhan, China replete with wet markets, bat soup and, it later turned out, murky goings on in viral laboratories. When the delta variant hit the headlines about a year ago, its exotic origin was India. So, last week when a new variant came on to the scene, I noted with wry amusement that its purported origin was another exotic location, this time South Africa/Botswana. Is there any scientific reason why all these variants come from places far away from the West? For the original coronavirus, sophisticated stories were created to explain why the virus arose in China. Maybe it was weird culinary practices or the fact that people live in too close a proximity to wild animals (bats) or what have you. But now we have a virus that, according to the official story, has had two years to spread around the world and mutate. Why then do none of the evil new strains come from Tennessee or Birmingham or Munich? The purported origin of Omicron in Africa is all the more weird given that covid rates there are amazingly low, something that apparently has the “experts” exasperated. Of course, we know now that it has nothing to do with science and everything to do with The Plague Story. The plague comes from somewhere far away. That’s just part of the story. Meanwhile, we are told that variants that arise in the west are “symptomless” or mild. Very convenient, isn’t it? Both the South African and Botswanan authorities were quick to point out last week that they had no indication that Omicron caused more severe disease than other variants but that didn’t stop western governments imposing new travel restrictions just like they did with delta and with the original variant (For delta, the Australian government went to the extraordinary length of even banning Australian citizens who had been to India from returning home, a truly shameful act that won’t be forgotten by a lot of people). Of course, governments take action is another part of The Plague Story and so what has really happened in the last week is that we have begun a new round of The Plague Story. This is actually the third time through. First we had the original variant, then we had the delta plague story. Now we have the third one. Chapter 3: Omicron rises. As news of Omicron circulated, some people wondered whether we are “back to square one”. Indeed, we are. Back to the start of The Plague Story.

This new plague story does have some elements that are different from before. First is the speed with which have progressed through the early parts of the story. In this case it was mere days from the announcement of the variant to governments responding. That is not surprising as all the infrastructure is now in place to enforce new restrictions with the stroke of a bureaucratic pen. What is more interesting, though, is the status of the cure. Recall that the modern plague story ends by the experts providing a cure. For both the original variant and delta, the cure was yet to arrive. But for Omicron, we already have the supposed cure in the form of the gene therapy vaccines that have been rolled out globally. This led to the awkward fact that the only people travelling internationally now are the vaccinated and so, by definition, the only people who could be spreading the new variant are the vaccinated. So, the cure we were promised during the first two plague stories wasn’t really a cure after all. That didn’t stop politicians again promising a cure for this new version of the plague story. Our wonderful state Premier here in Victoria, with the rabid certainty that is his trademark, had no hesitation announcing that the booster would solve it. In Britain, Boris Johnson looked far less certain promising only that the booster might offer “some protection” but nevertheless announcing that the government would increase the rollout of the boosters. Meanwhile, Big Pharma was quick, a little too quick some might say, in announcing it could have a booster specifically designed for Omicron on market within months. Will this wash with the general public? Will the speed with which history repeated cause some people to reflect on why we are back in the same story again? Time will tell. What is noteworthy is the fact that we are back in the same story for the third time.

I have compared corona to WW1 in a previous post and this repetition of the same story, the rehashing the same failed policies that didn’t work before, is once again relevant. The same thing happened in the war too. In the war, it wasn’t new variants that provided the déjà vu but new battles; some great new plan to finally break through enemy lines and bring the war to an end. Just another push, boys. Just another truckload of dead bodies to return home or bury in the mud of the Somme or Ypres. The booster looks set to fill the identical role of the thing that is going to bring corona to an end but never really does. It’s tempting to think that the continued failure of such stories will be that which finally snaps people out of the malaise and brings them back to their senses but that didn’t happen in WW1. Partly that’s because to admit the failure of this particular plague story would invite us to reflect on whether the last versions of the plague story were also failures and you would end up back at the start having to admit the whole thing was a giant catastrophic error. That’s an outcome the politicians can never allow but it’s also true that individuals would not want to contemplate it. Part of the reason is because most people in hindsight would realise the original justification was absurd and this would call into question our entire belief that the world operates according to logic and reason. That is no trivial matter. It is the founding myth of the enlightenment. It’s one of the things our society cannot, as a matter of faith, contemplate.

One of my favourite jokes from the comedian Norm Macdonald, who passed away recently, was this one about how Germany twice went to war against “the world”. It’s funny because it sounds ridiculous in hindsight even though it’s true. What the jokes glosses over, of course, is the historical reality that Germany never intended to go to war against “the world”, that’s just the way it ended up. In fact, Germany got into WW1 explicitly trying not to fight against the whole world at once. Here’s an imaginary dialogue to capture the “reasoning”:-

“Dude, why are we invading France?”
“Because Austria attacked Serbia.”
“So what?”
“So, Russia is threatening war with Austria.”
“And?”
“We need to avoid a two-front war.”
“But we don’t have to attack Russia if we choose not to.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll all be over before Xmas. Schlieffen has a plan.”

I’m sure future comedians will find corona to be a rich source of material. “Remember that time we tried to wipe out the flu? Boy, that was a disaster”. How we got to that absurd outcome is similar to the chain of events that started WW1. Here’s another imaginary dialogue:-

“Dude, why are we going into lockdown?”
“Because China went into lockdown?”
“So what?”
“So, they’ve set a precedent that we can copy.”
“Since when is China the expert on public health science?
“Dude, there’s some models that predict a huge number of deaths. We have to do something.”
“But the models don’t match the known data.”
“Don’t worry. It’s just two weeks to flatten the curve.”

It seems to me that an absurd and invalid use of an existing story/myth such as described in the fictional dialogues above is a feature, not a bug in archetypal takeover because it amounts to an assertion that is beyond logic and is therefore irrational. The ability of irrationality to drive events has been captured well by Nassim Taleb with his concept of the Minority Rule. The Minority Rule states that a minority can bend a majority to its will by being irrationally intolerant (it’s one of history’s perfect ironies that Taleb himself has been one of the most prominent irrational true believers throughout corona and was influential early on in providing the intellectual backing that got us into this mess). The intolerant minority, such as those insisting that anybody who disagrees with them wants grandma to die, can get their way to the extent that the majority are indifferent and consider it easier to go along with them. The example Taleb uses is kosher foods. The majority of the population have no objection to eating kosher. If you have even five percent of the population who will only eat kosher, it is easier to just make all food kosher rather than have a completely separate process that caters to five percent of the market. During corona, the acquiescence of the majority was secured early on by way of cash payments to offset any financial losses. That was fine as long you didn’t care about the state of the national budget and most people were happy to go along with it. That would have been enough to put the matter to bed if government had rolled out the vaccine, allowed whoever wanted it to take it and then brought the matter to an end. But the matter didn’t end and we swapped from the carrot to the stick. Governments are now attempting to win acquiescence through coercion. That is a very weak strategy. It works in the short term to get some unvaccinated to take the shot but governments are now talking of rolling out the coercion to those who don’t want the booster too. At that point we are longer operating according to the logic of the minority rule. Doing the same thing over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Thinking you can coerce whole populations into taking a booster shot indefinitely is a different kind of insanity, but is still insane.

What is guaranteed to start happening now is another mechanism with a successful history: civil disobedience. Some dissenters have been calling for civil disobedience from the start of corona and they are right to do so. But the civil disobedience that makes a difference won’t require any conscious intention to happen. It should happen automatically as a small but ever increasingly share of the population refuse the booster shot. From there we should see the resistance expand into other areas of life as people simply don’t observe whatever restrictions are in place. That has already started to happen where I am. The government still requires masks to be worn indoors but, at least at my local supermarket, half the people are not bothering any more. A similar thing happened earlier in the year on public transport. Civil disobedience is a viral phenomenon and once it takes hold the government will need to explicitly enforce any rules it wants observed. But government does not have the power to enforce the excessive, arbitrary and often contradictory plethora of rules that only a government bureaucracy could dream up. Ergo, the rules become redundant. What we may see is the government trying to win compliance by making an example of a small subset of the population by fining them or sending them to jail. Again, this may work in the short term but not the medium term. Something like that is exactly what happened at the end of WW1 in Germany during the Kiel mutiny. The naval command wanted to launch one final attack on Britain but the sailors were not having it. Some sailors were punished and this worked for a couple of weeks but set off a sequence of events that led to an outright mutiny. The mutiny then spread to the rest of the country and saw the Kaiser abdicate and the period of Weimar Germany begin. That was not a good thing in hindsight because Weimar Germany contributed greatly to the rise of Hitler. That seems to me to be where we are right now. If governments insist on trying to gain acquiescence through coercion, eventually something big will break. Ironically, it’s Germany, Austria and Italy who are pushing that failed strategy again. In the US, a form of civil disobedience has already taken hold and Biden’s mandates look dead in the water as a result. Those are the two options we seem to have from here. Civil disobedience or self-inflicted destruction. Europe looks set once again to destroy itself while the US might get away with it. Here in Australia there are some promising signs that we might follow the US. Let’s hope so because the other pathway leads nowhere good.

Twilight of The Narrative

Recently, I was visiting a friend’s house when a Michael Jackson song came on the radio and my friend said something interesting that I hadn’t really thought about before. He noted that, at the peak of Jackson’s fame, the releasing of one of his albums was a global event with a coordinated marketing campaign which meant that pretty much everybody in the western world and many parts of the non-western world would have known when a Michael Jackson album was released whether they liked his music or not. This is something the young people these days wouldn’t comprehend as they each have their own social media influencer or Youtube celebrity or whatever that they follow in much smaller sub-cultures than before. Even the most popular pop stars of today are only known to a subset of the population never the whole population like Jackson was. This observation got me thinking about a subject that I have been pondering for a while which is the impact of the internet on our culture. It seems to me this impact is not really discussed much anymore even though it is directly contributing to our current woes. One of the main changes wrought by the internet is the shattering of “grand narratives”. A Michael Jackson album release is one. But the pattern extends into other areas of the public discourse where its effects are far more important such as the narratives that hold countries together. As the corona event drags on interminably, there are those in the dissenter camp who still think the “narrative is about to crack” any day now and the “truth” will be revealed. This mindset from the old, pre-internet world is no longer valid in the world we live. There is no unifying narrative any more that is going to crack and be replaced by a better, more truthful narrative. Rather, there are now just a seemingly infinite number of sub-narratives with a dominant narrative imposed on top of the them. The dominant narrative is not necessarily truthful, just dominant. The emergence of the “conspiracy theory” label alongside the daily censorship that now happens on social media platforms are among a number of tactics that are now used to try and subdue alternative narratives in the hope of allowing a centralised narrative to form. But it never does for the simple reason that you cannot coerce people into believing a narrative. Narratives must evolve organically with a feedback loop between top-down and bottom-up. The increasing use of censorious tactics in the last couple of years reveals the underlying weakness of the dominant narrative. The powers that be have gone all out in attempting to hold together a narrative that itself doesn’t make sense as it is changed willy-nilly according to purely political considerations. It’s tempting to think the politicians are doing it on purpose with some larger objective in mind. But what if there is no larger objective? What if these tactics are simply what is required now to create any type of dominant narrative at all? What if these tactics are now the price you pay to create a narrative? If so, that price has gone through the roof. We can usefully call this narrative inflation. If you increase the supply of money, you get monetary inflation. If you increase the supply of narratives, you get narrative inflation. The price to create a dominant narrative has gone up for a number of reasons but one is that the internet opened the floodgates on the flow of information and allowed multiple alternative narratives to be created. This has created its own dynamic independent of the political and economic considerations that are also driving the trend. It may turn out that one of the consequences of allowing free and instant information is to destroy centralised narratives. There are good sociological and psychological reasons why this would be the case.

Eyewitness testimony has long been problematic for police trying to investigate an incident or crime. Even for something relatively straightforward like a car accident, where the eyewitnesses themselves have no personal stake in the story, accounts can diverge radically. Ten people witnessing a car accident can give you ten different stories of the crash. These problems are greatly exacerbated when the individuals involved have a vested interest in the case as often happens in criminal investigations. This eternal problem has been dealt with in numerous fiction and non-fiction works. The best non-fiction work I have seen about the subject is the documentary “Capturing the Friedmans” in which a school teacher is found to have child pornography in his home which leads to a series of events including him pleading guilty to sexually abusing some of his students. The documentary follows the motivations of those involved as rumour of the crime spreads in the local community creating its own dynamic as gossip and innuendo put enormous pressure of the family at the centre of the case. By the end of the documentary, we don’t know whether any of the official story is true as the lies and deceits create second and third order effects that distort the whole picture. This real-life account mirrors one of the best fictional representation of the problem, Akira Kurosawa’s movie “Rashomon”, in which a murder occurs in the forest but we hear radically different versions of the event told by the people involved (including, dramatically, the deceased). The philosophical question raised by both films is whether or not there can be found an objective standard of truth. This is a problem philosophers have wrestled with for millennia but it becomes a practical problem in cases involving crime where we want to see justice served and yet we have multiple, irreconcilable accounts about reality and seemingly no way to choose between them. At the end of the process, the system gives a verdict of guilty-not guilty and this is taken as the “truth” but is it really the truth?

With the internet, we have seen the same psychology applied to the public discourse and this has created practical problems for politics. Politicians love to divide the public where it suits their interest but it’s also true that they need to appeal to a foundation which unites the public. The process is similar to the justice system. Although there is disagreement and competition within the system, everybody must agree to play by the rules. The system itself is the thing people believe in. The public discourse which existed prior to the internet was facilitated through a system in which the media was known as the “fourth estate”. Its job was to hold government to account. Of course, this was not a perfect system but, as the saying goes, it seems it was better than all the others. It was certainly better than the system we have now where the media does not hold government to account at all and is little more than a public relations branch of the government. Recently in the New Zealand parliament, Jacinda Ardern was questioned about $55 million her government gave to media with certain conditions attached about what could be reported on. In Australia, the government waived the usual licence fee for the mainstream media channels back in March 2020. This amounted to around $44 million in subsidies. The theory was that this was needed because covid was expected to reduce advertising revenue, a strange claim given that the whole population was about to be locked at home with every incentive to watch the news. That measure came after the Australian government famously held Facebook and other big tech players to ransom and forced them to pay money to Australian media companies for content. Whatever the ethical dimensions of these issues, what lies beneath is the fact that the media companies are no longer viable businesses capable of existing without government support. Because they are now reliant on government money, their function as the fourth estate that holds government to account has also all but disappeared. That’s a problem for them but it’s also a problem for the government. The “official narrative” is transmitted through the legacy media. If the legacy media goes away, so does the narrative. Governments know that if the media disappeared, so would a large chunk of their power. The government needs the media as much as the media needs the government.

I would argue that the public also needs the media. It needs the media to act as its representative. That was the whole point of the Fourth Estate arrangement. The public paid for the media and that meant the media had an incentive to represents the readership’s interests. But that is all gone now. Some people think the public doesn’t really need the media. For almost any event, we are able to watch live video online now. Once upon a time we needed the newspaper to tell us the facts, but we simply don’t need that anymore. You might think that’s a good thing. We remove the middle man and allow the public to see events for themselves. But that introduces the same problem you have with eyewitness accounts which is that you get as many versions of the “truth” as there are people. The discourse becomes fragmented and the checks and balances that once held disappear. It’s a bit like having a crime investigation without a detective. “The system” can no longer control the discourse the way it previously could. This is not a trivial matter. It leads us back to one of Plato’s most dangerous ideas which is the Noble Lie. The idea goes that society cannot exist and justice cannot be served unless there are a number of lies which bind society together. Lie is, of course, a very strong word. We could soften it by calling them myths or ideals but the effect is the same. The myths and ideals are the glue that holds things together and, according to Plato, without them society will disintegrate.

Our post-internet public discourse provides some evidence for this assertion. It has become completely detached from reality or, to put it another way, it represents only one version of reality: the one that comes from the top-down. This process is especially advanced in the US. It hit a fever pitch with the Trump presidency and has not relaxed since. There are now at least two mutually incompatible narratives going on in the US meaning that agreement about the fundamentals which hold society together is called into question on an almost daily basis. It’s quite common to hear somebody on either side of the debate label somebody on the other side as “crazy” or “insane” and that is one manifestation of the problem. Within this new world, the idea that the “narrative is about to crack” doesn’t make sense. The dominant narrative is held in place by power, not by truth. By definition, the only thing that can “crack” it is another source of power. This was Trump’s genius. He hijacked the entire machinery that generates the narrative and turned it to his own purposes. But I think Trump was the end of the road. They got rid of him but in doing so they removed any last pretence that the narrative was “fair” or “truthful”. You can’t just delete the sitting President and then go back to normal as if nothing happened. As a result, a large proportion of the population no longer has any faith whatsoever in the system. That holds true no matter who is in power. The dominant narrative is now nothing more than the story told by those in power.

In Australia and much of Europe and Canada, we are just now catching up with the US. Here in Melbourne, more than a hundred thousand people marched against the government last weekend. The Premier’s response was to write them off as “thugs” and “extremists”. It reminded me an awful lot of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” moment. When politicians no longer feel like they need to accommodate the interests and opinions of a substantial proportion of the population you know the narrative is already fractured. Andrews may or may not get away with that politically for now but the protestors represent a new group in Australian public life; the ones excluded from the narrative. The same goes for the demonstrators in Europe who are simply ignored by the mainstream media. Because the public discourse no longer pretends to reflect reality, nobody really believes in it including the people who nominally go along with it. Deep down they also must know that it is fake. We are entering a time when even the idea of a centralised narrative is no longer believed in. If Plato was right, this fact alone is an existential threat to the state and it is understandable that the state would strive to fix the problem. But it’s almost certainly too late. All of the censorship and victimisation in the world won’t put humpty dumpty together again. Going forward I expect we’ll still have an “official narrative” but nobody will really believe it. That’s what is implied by the falling revenue numbers of the mainstream media channels. Will that lead to the disintegration of the state? Plato would have said yes. We may be about to test that theory.

Beyond the Fear of Death

Stephen Jenkinson is an author that’s been on my to-read list for a while. Until last week, I didn’t know anything about him other than he wrote extensively on the subject of the death phobia of modern western culture. As my reading list is long and getting longer and as the subject came up last week, I decided to check out this interview with Jenkinson where he speaks at length on the problem of death in the west. I had touched on this problem myself back at the start of the coronapocalypse series of posts and so it was fascinating to hear those themes talked about in more detail from somebody with real world experience (Jenkinson’s take on the subject comes from years of work as a grief counsellor). But Jenkinson also touched many of the other themes I explored in my two books on corona. After watching the video I decided to check out his website. Its title? Orphan Wisdom. But The Orphan is one element of the Devouring Mother – Orphan archetype that I stumbled across earlier this year. Synchronicity much? Clearly I’m going to have to spend a lot more time exploring Jenksinson’s ideas. From quick reading of his site, it seems that his approach is that we need to accept our orphanhood and find a way to build something on it. This seems like a promising idea. In a Jungian sense, we are currently manifesting the shadow side of The Orphan. We need to find the positive side. That idea warrants some future posts. For now, I just wanted to post my main notes from watching the Jenkinson video.

The denial of death as heroism

Jenkinson tells a story from his experience about a woman dying of a terminal illness who had only months to live but said she “didn’t let it be a big part of her life”. This was a pattern he had seen time and again when somebody was facing imminent death. Our culture views this attitude as a kind of heroism. That is, it is seen to be heroic to deny death; to not let it get you down even when you are staring it in the face. That same faux-heroism drives our desire to eliminate death (through medicine, vaccines, lockdowns) and, when all else is lost, to allow ourselves the easy way out that is euthanasia. We must die on our own terms even if that means simply ignoring our death as it approaches. To do otherwise is to “fail” and failure is not heroic.

I mentioned in one of my coronapocalypse posts the weird use of the heroism concept as a propaganda tool during corona. I can now see from Jenkinson’s story why this resonates with the public. It is heroic to do whatever you can to avoid death. But this follows from our phobia of death and our fear of not being in control. For those of us who do not share these phobias, the behaviour looks psychotic and dissociative. Of course, needless death should be avoided where we have the means to do so. But the ultimate judge of those means are whether they work and it is clear by now that lockdowns, masks and corona vaccines do not work. However, the true believers are not looking for something that works. They are acting a part required by our culture; the part of “heroism”. It is for this reason that leaders during corona have needed to be seen to do everything to “fight death” even when it means trashing all the other institutions of society. Of course, those institutions are all subject to the same cultural expectation and acquiesced in the same way. That’s why every single institution now has a “covid safe” plan. All this is demanded by the general culture and it’s for this reason that the corona measures still enjoy general public support. The couching of the whole issue in terms of “heroism” e.g. clapping for the NHS at a certain time of the day, is part of the hero-culture that is really just a denial of death.

Elders, parents and culture

It’s not just that we don’t respect our elders anymore, it’s that we don’t have any elders. It’s not hard to see why. Elders acquire their position through the vague and ambiguous machinations of culture. There is a process to go through to become an elder. I touched on this when explaining the rise of Jordan Peterson, who became an elder in an organic fashion. Our modern faith in “experts” is in some sense the opposite of elderhood. Wisdom is not required for expertise, only knowledge. Elders must be wise but there is no way to attain wisdom through education.

Although not synonymous, grandparents were once well placed to become elders, at least to their grandchildren. However, in the post-WW2 period, we have progressively loaded parents with the whole responsibility of raising children (although, I would argue that parents also desired that responsibility). The relationship of the child with its grandparents is now mediated through the parents and the grandparents have very little say on the raising of the children. In fact, it is a very common source of family argument when grandparents try to intervene and are put in their place by the parents. Having removed grandparents from the “elder” role, there was nobody else to fill the gap. The breakdown of this familial arrangement went side by side with the breakdown of the traditional neighbourhood structure where elders from outside the family might have arisen. The result: we are without elders.

What role have elders played traditionally in society? According to Jenkinson it’s “to ensure cultural sanity”. Given the current state of our culture, this diagnosis seems spot on. We got rid of elders and cultural insanity followed. This ties back to Jung’s point about the destruction of tradition. Elders are there to pass on tradition but we explicitly scorn tradition nowadays. Having foregrounded the parent role at the expense of the grandparent/elder role, it’s no surprise that The Devouring Mother archetype has ascended. She is a parent archetype who represents, among other things, the complete control parents now have over the development of their children independent of elders and any wider cultural network. In practice, this means we have loaded up the parent role with all kinds of expectations and obligations that the average parent cannot fulfil and it’s quite likely that the increasing divorce rates in western countries are at least partly a result of this. In any case, the child’s development is now entirely at the parents’ instigation and management. Will to power. The Devouring Mother’s desire to control everything.

In the meantime, what do we do with grandparents? Having removed their traditional role in family life, they have no economic or social place left when they hit retirement. We send them away to nursing homes. Out of sight, out of mind. The desire to “save them” during corona is part guilt at our complicity in this state of affairs and part control trip.

The Tyranny of Hope

Around this time last year I remember seeing the then Health Minister in Britain, Matt Hancock, give a speech to parliament announcing the government was looking forward to “injecting hope” into the arms of Britons. He was referring, of course, to the vaccine. I involuntarily interpreted his metaphor as one of drug addiction. Who is this drug pusher wanting to inject people? And who are the people who wanted to be injected with hope? Are we addicted to hopium in modern society?

Jenkinson calls hope “tyrannical”. Hope is dissociative. It requires you to ignore the present circumstances which are, by definition, bad, and look forward to an improvement later. Sometimes hope is warranted. If you are trapped in the mountains with a broken leg and have reason to believe a search party is looking for you, you can hope that they find you. But hope in general is debilitating and often comes out of a failure to face facts. We see this deception everywhere in modern society. “They’ll think of something,” we say about how to get out of our energy and pollution predicaments. “Just listen to the experts” is just another way of having hope that the experts will make everything right.

What has led to this state of affairs is not just political and economic trends but our death phobia. If we can deceive ourselves into ignoring even our own imminent death, we can deceive ourselves about anything. The addiction to hope means also the constant dissociation from reality and we have no shortage of that in the modern world through endless entertainment, 24/7 news broadcasts, Netflix, computer games, alcohol, drugs, porn. The list goes on. What if all of this is not the cause but the effect? What if the real cause is cultural: our fear of death. If we can’t face the most fundamental fact of life, how can we face the less fundamental ones?

Grieving as the flipside of Loving

It is often said of modern society that it has no heart. Nevertheless, a great deal of our public discourse is supposedly about caring about the feelings of others. Jenkinson notes that this falls out from our control junkie culture. Death couldn’t give a damn about our feelings. Thus, its presence is an insult to our ethic of control. It also challenges our feelings. We don’t want to hurt the feelings of others because we don’t want our feelings hurt. What is implied is that we do not know how to control our feelings and any unleashing of those feelings threatens our psychic equilibrium. This also implies a psyche that is out of balance and weak. The emotions are a great servant but a terrible master. One should not bottle up the emotions but one also should never let the emotions dictate one’s state of being. But that is where we are as a culture. Everything must be “personal” and few things are more personal than your feelings. This also explains our need to dissociate from death because the torrent of feelings that might be unleashed threatens to overwhelm not just ourselves but our family and friends. We grit through it to protect them too. If nobody can process emotions properly, it’s safer to dissociate altogether and “not let it dominate you”.

Grief is not a feeling. Grief should not be mistaken for despair or depression and, unlike feelings, grief is not transitory in nature. Grief is an exercise. One becomes a practitioner of grief or, in our society, one does not become a practitioner of grief because we have forgotten how to grieve. There is a flipside to this problem according to Jenkinson: “If you’re in love, grief will be part of the deal”. Grief and love are two sides of the same coin. “Grief is a way of loving that which has slipped from view” and “love is a way of grieving that which has not yet slipped from view.” It follows that if one cannot grieve, one cannot love in the fullest sense of the word where that love includes the recognition that the thing that is loved is temporary. And that brings us back to death because death is the ultimate recognition of the temporal nature of things. Death, love and grief are all related. A death-phobic culture cannot grieve but it also cannot love in the truest sense and this is why modern society has no heart.

In one of Neil Oliver’s best editorials on corona he noted that he realised that he was grieving for a way of life that has now gone. That implies that he loved that way of life and so did some of the rest of us. But it’s equally true that many did not. The ease with which we tossed into the bin all of those principles we thought were fundamental to our society implies a lack of love towards that society. That it was done in the name of desperately avoiding death is not a coincidence. We avoid death so that we don’t have to grieve so that we don’t have to acknowledge that we don’t love. There is a giant void at the centre of it all.

This brings me to a point I have been pondering recently and which is touched upon in Jenkinson’s idea of Orphan Wisdom. If many people have no love for the current state of the world, perhaps corona can usher in a new era where there is something to love. I admit this seems extraordinarily unlikely. The Great Reset and the totalitarian direction that we are now lurching towards is the opposite of anything that could be loved. But if corona can have any positive effect it would be this: that a society or a way of life could emerge that is worth loving. This need not involve throwing away everything and starting again. It may be that we must rediscover what was worth loving about our society in the first place. Such a love would only be one part of the story, however. It would have to come alongside learning how to grieve and it seems to me that this is where Jenkinson’s ideas could have found their time. We need to become practitioners of grieving and in doing so we would have to face our death phobia. All that would need to be achieved in the face of powerful forces who are using our fear of death for their own purposes (hello, Devouring Mother). If that fear of death was confronted, it would lose its power. What sort of leader, people or movements that could make that happen is something to watch out for. Aren’t we due for the second coming of a guy who taught about love?