Guest Post: Why Truth Matters

When nothing is true, anything is possible.

            An environment that is buried in misinformation, propaganda, lies, and conspiracy theories is an environment where nothing is true.  Efforts by independent organizations and individuals to research and fact-check are quickly overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of misinformation.  Truth takes effort to find, establish, and defend, while lies – especially when the lies don’t need to be consistent or make sense, they just need to take up time and space – can be generated with abandon.  Even when a lie is repeatedly debunked, it can continue to cause problems.  If you repeat the same lie over and over and over and over again, it eventually becomes accepted as true, or at least gains a sheen of validity.

When nothing is true, those with power can do as they please.  When nothing is true, then political, economic, and religious elites have no external or internal checks on their actions.  Tyrants, oligarchs, and religious extremists prosper in an environment of confusion, fear, and chaos.  There are no restraints.  There is no context.  There is no justice.  And this situation, by its very nature, will spiral further into chaos.  Things will get worse, policy will be less informed, each new outcome will be worse than the last, more extreme measures will seem justified, and stupidity will compound on stupidity leading to even more stupidity.  When nothing is true, there is no way to arrest this downward spiral – there is no way to mobilize people to act.  Facts are essential if you want to motivate people to march/protest/vote or push for legislation.  Even if people are somehow able to push for change, good grounding in facts is necessary to inform the formulation of the new policy. 

A barrage of distracting garbage is a wonderful environment to conceal evil/stupid acts.  If the media/public is too busy fact-checking and following the lies/drama, then they are not watching what is happening in the background.  Like the audience of a stage magician, their attention is being manipulated by the showman to miss what is happening.  One British politician referred to it as throwing a dead cat on the table.  If you are in a board room meeting and things are going badly for you, you should throw a dead cat on the table.  No matter what the people’s opinion about the cat, all of them are now thinking and talking about it.  They are not talking about whatever it was that they were talking about before you tossed the cat.  A well-timed tweet or stupid executive order can be a dead cat on the national table. 

There also is the issue of the rapid-fire nature of the barrage allowing things to slip through.  The tennis player is serving a dozen shots in a single moment, the pitcher is throwing 20 baseballs at once, and the returner/batter is overwhelmed.  It is a matter of sheer volume of the flood adding to the misdirection efforts. 

As an example: the new FCC head is gutting consumer protections, green-lighting future telecommunications monopolies, and stripping impoverished people of the ability to access information (to be an informed voter, to influence policy, or to lift themselves out of poverty).  Net neutrality is probably going to be killed next – this is something that should horrify everyone who is not the CEO of a telecommunications conglomerate.  In a normal situation, consumers and advocacy groups would be up in arms over this, but instead it just slips past as one small drop in a roiling sea of chaos, misinformation, overwhelmed fact-checking efforts, and distraction.  There are thousands of other such drops in the sea, any one of which could – on its own – create a massive backlash against the administration.  But the airwaves are jammed, so the crimes go unmonitored and unnoticed.

When nothing is true, when opinions supplant facts, when evidence-based reasoning is replaced by emotions and gut reactions, then those who have the loudest voices, the largest platform from which to shout, and are good at manipulating emotions will triumph.  Demagogues, conmen, and those with the resources (wealth, privilege, or political power) to buy public opinion will emerge victorious.  Horrifyingly, the absence of constraints grants freedom to pillage and plunder to those who lack a moral compass.  Those who rise to the top in a fact-free environment are precisely the ones who should not have power.  

A historical example springs to mind.  One of the constant factors of life under Stalin in the Soviet Union was the inability to know what was true.  Facts and truth disappeared under a deluge of lies, paranoia, and propaganda.  Citizens and even officials were constantly inundated with misinformation.  Basic facts about simple things, such as crime statistics, industrial output statistics, harvest size, mortality rates, celebratory crowd size, and historical information became heretical.  Whole branches of science were banned (despite this hurting the people and the regime when “government approved” science “facts” resulted in bridge collapses and crop failures).  People and events were retroactively erased or altered (including primitive photoshopping to remove them from pictures and films) to better fit whatever narrative was needed that week.  This was true throughout Stalin’s reign – collectivization and Ukrainian famine, the Gulags, Great Purges, Five Year Plans, the Great Patriotic War.  Basic facts and truths were relative, subject to change, or just unknowable.  So much misinformation flooded everything – spewing forth from official and unofficial sources, all of which were controlled by the Kremlin – that even when the occasional truth appeared, it was not believed.  People did not know what to believe.  Stalin filled the airwaves and streets with lies and rumors even when it was not serving an obvious purpose.  It would make sense if a lie hid an embarrassing fact or a truth that undermined the regime, but Stalin and his cronies lied about absolutely everything.  While usually focused to support a given narrative favored by Moscow at the moment, some was actually lies and garbage merely for the sake of having as much misinformation as possible.  Even if it was obvious to everyone that the official government line was false, they had no context for establishing a baseline of truth.  Nothing is true, anything is possible.

While Stalin was perhaps the best example of this in recent history, it is not unique to him.  North Korea has operated in such a mode for decades.  China too, to a greater or lesser extent since Mao took power.  Quite a few of the former Easter Bloc countries worked like that (and some still do or are returning to that old form).  But perhaps the best current example is Putin. 

Putin has created a truth-free environment in Russia.  He came to power partly through massive disinformation – there is good reason to believe that the terrorist bombings that launched him to power and popularity were orchestrated by him and his FSB cronies.  Upon taking power, he quickly seized control of the media.  Misinformation and lies became so abundant and so widespread that voices against Putin became lost in the noise (any that began gaining ground despite the sea of garbage were quickly silenced by poison or a bullet).  Putin does not need the message to be all pro-Putin all the time.  He does not even need to control all of the potential sources of information.  He just needs to generate enough smoke, enough noise, enough confusion, enough chaff, and enough lies that truth becomes unknowable.  Various scholars have created terms such as “managed democracy” and “illiberal democracy” to describe his form of government.  The citizens are kept in a constant state of worried fear.  Media sources spout conspiracy and paranoia.  When it comes to elections, people still have the illusion of freedom and choice, but their choices are already dictated by those in power.  The state enriches Putin and his associates, granting them ever-increasing economic, cultural, and political power.  Any real threat of change or challenge is silenced. 

And he wants to spread that environment around the world. 

Moscow employs an army of trolls whose sole role is to actively spread misinformation and mistrust online.  This is not new for Russia.  During the Cold War the Soviet Union actively financed US and European fringe organizations and conspiracy theorists to try to reduce public confidence in government and media organizations.  KGB files that were later leaked, stolen, or declassified showed that they were supporting and organizing such things as JFK assassination conspiracy theorists, protests against the Rosenberg trials, claims that AIDS was invented and spread by the US government, and other anti-government mistrust and agitation.  However, their current efforts take it to an unprecedented level.  The internet, especially social media, has provided them with an unparalleled tool to generate ceaseless noise, jamming the communications channels and fragmenting trust in institutions and trust in fellow human beings.  Much like their misinformation campaigns during the Cold War, some of the people spreading the lies are official channels (such as Sputnik and RT), some are unofficial channels paid for by Moscow, and some are simply “useful fools” in the West and elsewhere.

A global environment of institutional mistrust and all-consuming misinformation helps Putin and those like him.  For Putin, stoking these anxieties and drowning informed discussion in a sea of misinformation creates incredible opportunities.  He wants to expand Russia and make it into a “glorious” super-power again.  Things like NATO, the EU, and strong liberal democracies stand in the way of his ambitions.  However, if he can spread his paranoia, fear, mistrust, and misinformation to other countries, the path will open for him.  European and Atlantic unity, in both EU and NATO forms, will fracture.  Brexit was a success for the Kremlin, as was Trump’s victory.  European disunity over issues like refugees and immigration will create more fissures.  Extremist nationalist groups in the West will peel away support for human rights and the international rule of law.  Each additional sign of discord in Europe is another step forward for Russia to dominate its neighbors once again.  Not just Georgia and Ukraine again, but NATO member states, like Estonia and Latvia, will be pried loose and gobbled up (probably involving the same ground tactics as in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, a so-called “hybrid-war”).

The Trump administration addresses facts and truth much the same way as Putin.  But mysteries about the administration’s actions remain.  Trump is notorious for lying.  Throughout his business dealings, he has been caught up in lie after lie.  He even bragged about it in his first book (as an example from the book: he brags about how he intentionally misled investors at a build site in order to cover up the factual situation).  Trump is a gifted manipulator.  He is a conman.  And, unfortunately, he has a strong grasp on how to manipulate the base feelings of audiences.  Maybe he is aiming for an emulation of Putin.  However, he also is a person with a thin skin and a narcissistic personality disorder.  Some of his lies, such as those about crowd size and voter fraud, may simply be an outgrowth of his refusing to deal with reality when it runs counter to what his ego makes him want to be true.  He is averse to facts and to reading, and prides himself on ignorance of issues.  He prefers his version of reality – he is always right and loved in that version, and facts don’t get in the way in that reality.  This is not consistent with the Putin model.  Putin’s morals may be warped, but he is usually very connected with the facts of the real world and he remains fairly well-grounded in most regards.  However, there is a person in Trump’s circle whose manipulation of misinformation more closely parallels Putin: Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon is a creature of misinformation, lies, conspiracy theories, and social media manipulation.  It is what has allowed him to rise from internet garbage peddler to a seat on the National Security Council.  He has years and years of experience manipulating audiences, vomiting falsehoods, playing to humanity’s worst instincts, and gaming social media.  I have doubts about Trump’s ability to orchestrate misinformation and lies for long-term goals.  He seems too unfocused, short-sighted, emotional, and volatile for that.  Bannon, on the other hand, is capable of the long-con.  While Trump’s success seems largely tied to a subconscious and intuitive understanding of the “nothing is true, anything is possible” principle, Bannon has elevated this effort into a science and an art.  He has cultivated a massive audience, partly through knowing what that audience wants and partly through shaping what that audience wants.  He has mastered the model of Putin at the civilian level and will, if given the chance, up his game further through the powers of the government. 

Facts matter.  Truth matters.  A sea of misinformation, paranoia, fear, distraction, conspiracy theories, and lies is an environment that rewards the ruthless, the merciless, the evil, and the strong while crushing the honest, the weak, the powerless, the just, and the good.  Resistance to “alternative facts” and garbage is difficult.  It will only become even harder to do as time moves forward.  Historical examples and current events show the methods used to create this environment, the motives of those who would do so, and the catastrophic results of such efforts.  When nothing is true, anything is possible.  And nothing good comes from that.

-Mark Swenson