I have written many blog posts on how the structure of the ‘information society’ leads to massive distribution of disinformation and misinformation.
While I agree that falsehood and fantasy have always been rampant, see Charles MacKay Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds for example, some of the things discussed in Mackay’s book are perfectly normal and understandable.
Tulip Mania and the South Sea bubble, are standard financial bubbles. The prices of goods and stock did rise, and with skill and luck a person could have made a fortune if they got out at the right time. That people appeared to be becoming rich, was not a fantasy. That the economic fundamentals were bad is not an obvious reason for not participating. When Amazon launched onto the stockmarket, its economic fundamentals were terrible, but anyone who bought shares then might be worth a fortune now. It seems odd to blame people for normal market behaviour.
Likewise, if you have ever fiddled with chemistry you will know that chemical combinations can have surprising and transformative results even when the textbooks can tell you what to expect because of 100s of years of experience. Weird things happen quite naturally. If you have impure substances then weird things will happen even more, or nothing might happen. Alchemy had a coherent and logical set of theories. For the alchemist there was no necessary boundary, or distinction, between psycho-spiritual experience and action in matter. Spirit was as much part of the world as matter. That some people believed in it is not surprising. That some people lost their health and livelihood is also not surprising. How many crowds were obsessed with it is debatable – probably few.
Magnetisers were possibly demonstrating hypnosis or the placebo effect, in an era without even vacuous words like ‘placebo’ to explain mysterious healing away. Again not a big deal, I’m doubtful it affected political rule that much.
Fantasies have always had the potential to seize politics, that is true. But in my long years of watching politics, I have never seen a situation in which a US party is pretending it had an election stolen from it, without any reasonable evidence. I take the lack of reasonable evidence to be demonstrated by the recounts, and by the courts refusing the evidence and legal arguments over 60 times, and the apparent refusal of many of Trump’s lawyers to even allege fraud.
Sadly this denial of loss has not been just a momentary aberration, it appears to be one that is strengthening, despite the growing lack of evidence. And it has consequences: if a side keeps telling people the election was stolen, then it jacks up hostility towards those who accept the election and justifies desperate, and possibly illegal, measures to combat the ‘fraud’ – nothing is out of play. Purging the party of dissent is not a good sign for liberty
We should also note that Republicans did not, as far as I know, allow the presentation of evidence at either of Trump’s impeachments. This could indicate they have little intention of being evidence based.
For instance can see an apparently coordinated attempt by Republican media to make it impossible to discuss race relations in the USA in a way which might offend anyone who thinks the real problem is black racism. Again they demonstrate that Black lives do not matter, and that real problems can be avoided rather than faced.
And big tech/media censorship used to be approved and even gloated over by the Right when it did not affect them, but now it affects them they are trying to make it a left wing thing, even if facebook and twitter helped Trump to win the 2016 election by delivering continual streams of positive misinformation to people interested in Trump.
This is by no means an attempt to defend the Left. The mainstream left is almost as frightened of and addicted to plutocracy and problem avoidance as the mainstream right.
The great thing about fantasy is that fantasy avoids problems. It allows us to think that by not discussing problems they go away. We can feel we have solved the climate crisis by proposing fantasy technology, and doing nothing to bring that technology about, as the fantasy serves its purpose by providing an imaginary solution.
And we can just abuse anyone who disagrees because they are contemptable, and not one of us.
Tags: Disinformation, disorder, politics
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