This week the Australian government introduced a so-called misinformation and disinformation bill into the parliament. I’ve heard of a number of other western nations introducing similar measures in recent times, so this is yet another example of seemingly independent countries magically operating in lockstep with each other, thereby fuelling the exact kinds of conspiracy theories that governments want to call disinformation in the first place. Maybe if governments could figure out how not to act as if they were in a conspiracy, people wouldn’t think they were. Just a thought.
As part of the initial debate on the bill, I learnt for the first time what the words misinformation and disinformation mean. Apparently, misinformation is incorrect information, while disinformation is incorrect information with intent to mislead.
Now, the English language already has perfectly good words for all this. One of them is falsity, and the other is deception. We could use this normal language and rename the bill The Falsity and Deception on the Internet Bill. Apparently, it will soon be illegal to be wrong on the internet.
The Ten Commandments has a clause against deception—thou shalt not bear false witness—but it does not have a clause against being wrong for the obvious reason that humans are often wrong, and making it illegal to be wrong makes everybody a criminal. So, we’re all going to be criminals shortly, or at least potentially criminals.
It reminds me the way that we were all potentially “asymptomatically infected” during the Corona hysteria. Thus, the misinformation and disinformation nonsense fits the recent pattern of western governments viewing the citizens of their own countries as the enemy. As we will see in this post, they have good reason to do so.
All of this debate revolves around the still relatively new technology of the internet. The paradigm of a new technology challenging the entrenched power structures of society is nothing new. In fact, we have an excellent template by which to judge the current goings-on in a historical event that was also precipitated by a revolutionary new technology: the Reformation.
At that time, the judge of misinformation and disinformation was the Catholic Church and especially the papal authorities in Rome. They had another word for it, course. They called it heresy.
The word heresy comes from the Greek and originally meant something similar to a philosophy or ideology. There were many religious sects in the ancient world and each of them had a theology that they believed in. That’s what a heresy was—a doctrine. Later, once the Catholic Church had taken upon itself the right to enforce the correct opinions about things, heresy came to mean quite literally a doctrine that differed from the Church’s doctrine.
By the time the mad monk from northern Germany, Martin Luther, wrote a pamphlet pertaining to the Church practice of the granting of indulgences in the early 16th century, the Church had a long-established practice for dealing with heresy. In modern parlance, Luther was initially charged with misinformation. He had accidentally strayed from the correct opinion and needed guidance on the matter. He got a visit from the Church authorities inviting him to correct the record.
This was the first step in a process that had very serious consequences. Failure to correct an unapproved opinion meant the charge was upgraded from misinformation to disinformation, and the end of the road for that was death at the hands of the Church authorities. Again, the Church had lots of practice at that. Many a heretic had been put to death over the centuries, and Martin Luther was all set to become just another statistic in the Church’s exquisitely kept record books.
But things had changed by Luther’s time, and what ultimately saved his life was his mastery of a new technology known as the printing press. Like all the early Protestants, Luther was a university man. Reading and writing were much more than just a profession for people like him; they were literally a religious practice. Luther was one of the best writers of his time. Far from apologising to the Church for his wrongthink, he decided to turn his skills towards writing screeds openly challenging the system.
Luther had an ability to capture the imagination of the people of his time in memorable phrases. The title of his later pamphlet, “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants,” gives you an indication of his turn of phrase. He was bombastic, belligerent and very entertaining.
Luther’s mastery of the language was combined with an understanding of the possibilities opened up by the printing press. His writings spread quickly and earned him fame and popularity both among the general population and, more importantly, among some of the kings and nobility of northern Europe. It was the patronage of one of these, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, that ultimately saved Luther’s life.
The political aspect of all of this was one that Luther clearly understood since he openly spoke to the nobility of Europe in terms of their self-interest. The Catholic Church was sucking enormous amounts of money out of the relatively poor lands of the north, and Luther pointed out the advantage that could be gained if that money remained where it was earned. This patriotic side to Luther is not that well remembered these days.
All of this was made possible by the printing press. The king of a small northern European province could not stand up alone against the might of the Church. If he did, the Church could instruct the local priesthood to defame him at the Sunday sermon and bring him back into line. The printing press broke the Church’s monopoly on communication. It was a brand new information technology that allowed the relatively decentralised spread of ideas, and Luther weaponised it to criticise the Church itself.
It is here that we see clearly the parallels to our own time. The promise of the internet was always that it could be as revolutionary as the printing press. That sounds nice in an abstract sense, but what we’re seeing now is the real-world political manifestation of that playing out. Whether the internet will break the status quo in the same way that the printing press broke the Catholic Church remains to be seen. But we can use the template of the Reformation to understand what is going on.
It is no small irony that we’ve ended up with a political structure that is very similar to the one that existed at the time of the Reformation. The Catholic Church was a transnational institution that levied taxes and could wield military force against the peoples it controlled. However, its power was exercised mostly through its monopoly on the flow of information. If we take a purely secular view, we would say that the Catholic Church governed psychologically through the threat of eternal damnation. The value of indulgences was directly proportional to the credibility of that threat in the minds of the general public.
The problem for the Church was that it was so rich and powerful that the people who represented it became corrupt. That was especially true in Rome, but even many of the local monks and priests scattered throughout Europe earned reputations for idleness, hypocrisy, and worse. This created the conditions by which the general public had become disillusioned with the system, and it was this underlying sentiment which Luther expertly tapped into.
The structure of the Reformation, then, was a heroic figure, Martin Luther, capturing the affection of the general public against the multinational institution of the Catholic Church, with the nobility of northern Europe subtly manipulating the dynamic to pursue their own agenda against the Church. The overall trend was towards decentralisation, facilitated by a technology that made that possible: the printing press.
How does this template apply to our time? Well, we clearly have multinational institutions now that do not just span western Europe but the entire globe. There are many of these, but I think the most important one for our purpose is one that is not official. Let’s call it the Liberal World Order. The Liberal World Order is the nations of the West, including close allies Japan and South Korea. The reason why the leaders of all western nations seem to act in lockstep is because they are all card-carrying members of the Liberal World Order.
If we compare our time to the Reformation, we can see that the Liberal World Order fills the same role as the Catholic Church. It is a multinational institution that has economic and military capability but which mostly operates through control of ideology, just like the Catholic Church did. The internet clearly maps to the printing press as the new technology which is a threat to the status quo.
That raises the big question: who is Luther? Who is the hero who will master the new technology in order to challenge the power of the multinational conglomerate which reserves to itself the right to determine the very nature of truth?
The obvious answer here is Trump since it was Trump’s victory in the 2015 presidential election that has precipitated the Liberal World Order’s crackdown on the internet.
It’s hard to think of two more different kinds of men than Trump and Luther, and yet their use of the new technology is almost identical. Remember that Luther was a master of memorable language and used the printing press to be able to get his message in front of the general public. That’s clearly what Trump also did, and he did it by making statements that were completely outside the acceptable range of opinions but which resonated with the general public. I don’t think it’s misinformation to say that Trump could never have been president without the internet.
Thus, Trump is the heroic figure who uses the new technology to bypass the gatekeepers and get his message directly in front of the general public, where he taps into the underlying resentment that the public has toward the established multinational power structure. But the parallels do not stop there.
Luther was not trying to overthrow the Church. He was a puritan who wanted the Church to weed out the corruption of the system and return to its roots.
There’s a very important point about puritan ideologies that we have to understand. The picture-perfect characterisation of the Church as it once was back in the glorious past is an illusion. It is an idealised vision that never really existed.
But therein lies the power of puritan movements which can actually present an optimistic vision for the future. This gives them an advantage against mature institutions which have become cynical. The Catholic Church was mostly definitely in a hyper-cynical state during Luther’s time, and our current political structure is the same.
The world-weary cynics who derided Trump’s Make America Great Again as childish or stupid thus missed the point. The puritan reformer is a Fool in the archetypal sense, and the Fool is kryptonite for corrupt and cynical institutions who no longer even pretend to offer anything in the way of idealism or the promise of something new and better (this is why, as I previously pointed out, the Trump story is a comedy).
Rather than offer anything new, corrupt institutions can only govern through fear. The climate catastrophe or the once-in-a-generation pandemic of the Liberal World Order thus fills the same role as the eternal damnation of the Catholic Church, while vaccines have become modern-day indulgences both in the psycho-political sense and in the sense that they make enormous amounts of money at the expense of the general public.
As one final parallel between Trump and Luther, we saw earlier that unrepented heresy usually resulted in death at the hands of the Church authorities. Luther narrowly escaped that fate a couple of times in his life, and we all know that Trump recently had just such an incident himself.
In short, we might be living through a re-run of the Reformation.
What does all this portend for the future? Well, even if the Reformation pattern is correct (and it may not be), what comes next may not have much to do with the overt movement that is now underway. The Reformation did bring some changes that Luther would have supported, but it also brought in just as many that would have horrified him. It seems that the role of the Heroic Fool is simply to bring down a corrupt establishment. What follows in the wake of the Fool is more dependent on those who come next.
In Europe, that role belonged to the northern nobility and also to the newly-arrived capitalist class. Who will follow Trump? We’ll have to wait and see but we can get some idea of a possible direction by looking for those who have thrown their support behind him and what their vision for the future is.
One of the most difficult things I’ve had to accept over the last several years is that the idea that misinformation or disinformation is simply modern day heresy is itself considered a heretical thought. In trying to point that out I’ve either got the standard thousand yard stare, or occasionally spittle flecked denunciation that there is not, will never be, has never been anything at all incorrect about the flawless and eternally perfect Truth that is the Liberal World Order.
It is such a perfect example of Newspeak I just walk away in a stunned daze.
In this vein Aurelian2022 on Substack terms the LWO as The Party, which I prefer mostly because it is more amusing and helps me realise none of this is new. The rhymes of history keep repeating; to my complete lack of conscious surprise and utterly devastating unconscious shock.
Daniel – self-awareness is a rare quality. We are like the proverbial fish who don’t know they’re swimming in water. To extend the metaphor, maybe a fish only learns about water when it’s taken out of it. But that is traumatic for the fish and all its instinct is to avoid that outcome.
I was thinking these bills will backfire, because it will take the pseudo dissent off the internet, where people just fire off takes with no real world effect and think that is doing something, and put it back in the localised real world where it very much could do real world damage.
Skip – it’s a sign of how fragile the system is if they need to take such blatant and ham-fisted measures. But that’s also a parallel with the Reformation. The extra-special indulgences were needed because the Church coffers were empty.
Indeed they’re desperate. The internet is their biggest corralling and control weapon, and to incentivise people to get off it by blatantly censoring all of it (rather than the shadow methods they usually use) seems a strange play. But of course the whole thing is very factional so there are winners and losers from every hand that is played.
The internet itself might also be load shedding as it starts to feel resource pinches, like airlines it depends on mass consumption to be able to fund it’s crazy expensive infrastructure. The days of the (in theory) free internet are probably numbered. Already all the biggest sites are trying to funnel people into subscription methods.
Yeah, the internet giants all based their business model on monopolistic behaviour that would be illegal in other markets. I think they’ve probably extracted as much value as they can now, so the expected behaviour would be to see “consumers” leaving the market due to the increasingly negative quality on offer. Just look at how bad google search has become. It’s nothing like what it used to be. All that would be true even without boneheaded government interference.
Which raises anther interesting point. The internet was supposed to be the next big thing. What does the world even look like if people turn away from it and how would governments deal with such a world?
Bingo, Tim Watkins over at consciousness of sheep was writing about this exact issue recently. The entire control grid is predicated on mass internet use, but if it’s entering its own death spiral due to shrinking mass consumption, and people can’t afford subscriptions, and all the while costs are increasing, then the whole future western governments invision is toast. All of it depends on the communication infrastructure that might not be maintained.
To be honest we are already seeing this in rural Aus. The new 5G network is great if you’re in town but if you’re out of town good luck. So even though it seems the dystopian net is tightening, it’s also shrinking.
This is probably a natural systemic response to resource constraints. Suck in to the core, and live there in a very tight straightjacket, or live out in the fringe, relatively free but on your own.
Whether it was intentional or not, the internet has ended up being a giant exercise in globalist rent-seeking, which translates to enormous sums of money being siphoned back to the US. So, there’s also an imperial angle to this too. Pretty sure that is what is behind a lot of misinformation stuff. Governments are probably betting on a period of sustained economic contraction and the internet has already proven capable of facilitating colour revolutions in such circumstances.
Brilliant – haven’t seen that analogy anywhere else.
So Trump is as (if not more) supportive of Israel than the Democrats. Its like Martin Luther unable to separate himself from being a follower of Christ.
Craig – that’s an interesting idea that hadn’t occurred to me. Of course, the Catholic Church was mucking around in the holy land a thousand years ago too.
Hi Simon,
Hmm, change is always risky and I too wonder where we’re all headed with this. There’s something quite amusing about the idea of Donald Trump playing the role of the Heroic Fool with the narrative being that of a comedy. Thanks for bringing this concept into our awareness.
It’s interesting the mischief which goes on, in lock step too – as you pointed out. One of the aspects to this which troubles me, is that for all of the ever increasing government borrowing and spending (and it’s like a monster which can never be fed enough), the returns are not all that great. Although, like the changes Martin Luther set in motion, some things I guess can get better, whilst others will get worse. Dunno. A lot of the economics side of the story stopped making sense to me years ago.
Are you getting any vague notions as to where things are headed?
Cheers
Chris
Chris – On the economic front, the answer seems quite simple. We now have shortages of teachers, nurses, doctors and builders. These are all the things you need to actually get stuff done. Meanwhile, there’s way too many bureaucrats. Simple problem, although the solution won’t be easy to implement because the bureaucrats have enormous political power.
This is excellent! 🙂
And the comparison with Inquisition/Reformation is very apt.
Many years ago, in th early naughties, when I tangled once or twice with some of the early “disinformation busters” (they called themselves “debunkers” in those days) such as “Quackwatch”, just for an example I got to know well… I couldn’t help noticing that their long articles “debunking” this or that (in this case, this or that modality of “alternative” medical treatment) were always very short on addressing evidence of any kind, and long on character assassination. Their aim seemed to be to fill people with such apprehension at the dreadful charlatans just waiting to bilk the gullible, desperate and sick, lurking at the edges of “real” medicine, that they would remain within the fold and look no further. In my own mind, I began very early on to think of their “debunking” activities as a new, dressed up form of “heresy-hunting” modelled on – yep – the Inquisition. Although, then, they were more like scattered apostles preaching a new religion, whereas now the religion has become entrenched and institutionalised.
However, while I have considered this set of “parallels” for many years, you have certainly gone very deeply in here. For one – the link between vaccines and indulgences is brilliant and novel!
Thank you. I shall be thinking on this some more!
Scotlyn – the even sadder part is that many of those going into the “disinformation” organisations nowadays are actually people who have done degrees in journalism but can’t find work as journalists. Interestingly, there are a couple of publications that have been started by former professional journalists who were outed for heresy and are now fighting back against the system. Then there’s also “experts” who have become heretics too. Robert Malone and Professor Bakdhi come to mind. There’s no shortage of would-be Luthers around 😉
I do think this period of history is “rhyming” very resonantly with Reformation times. Or, possibly, a bit earlier, with the initial creation and entrenchment of the Inquisition.
But my own ancestors are still proudly revered in my evangelical family for their “freethinking” and “protesting” and “doing their own Biblical reading for themselves” ways…
(They don’t quite “get it” when I cite that ancestral example as an element in my own “hesitancy” vis-a-vis the sacrament-du-jour, but well…)
Scotlyn – the reading thing is a very crucial part of that story. The Protestants were not just pro-reading the bible, they were against the rites of the Catholic Church, or any rites at all. Given the current, almost farcical, state of academia and with computer-generated text already here, we may be at the end of the road for the read-it-yourself ideology and power structure.
“In short, we might be living through a re-run of the Reformation.
“What does all this portend for the future?”
War. Big bloody wars.
Jinasiri – that certainly seems likely.