The perception-of-shit filter
I often ask myself how it is possible that we - otherwise intelligent people - end up believing things which are flgrantly untrue. There are so many answers to that question - ranging from the scientific attempts to rationalise human behaviour (pattern seekings apes etc - see Thomas Gilovic’s excellent book, ‘How we know what isn’t so’) through to dystopian, fundamentally pessimistic analyses that say versions of ‘humans are selfish, stupid and easily controlled by the sociopaths who lead us’. I think there is something true in the whole spectrum.
But in terms of the mechanism, I’ve noticed that there is a perception-of-shit filter which ought to be more effective (if we were better educated perhaps) but seems to get clogged. This manifests at the extreme end with folks screaming about the Rothchilds. This is tin-foil hat territory: the filter is entirely ineffective.
But this isn’t a digital situation: I suspect we are all guilty here to some extent. There are some categories that I particularly notice - presumably playing right out of my prejudices too (though that doesn’t invalidate my observation - it just makes me unbalanced):
1) People who hate Joe Biden or Hilary Clinton without having either any actual knowledge about them, or any balance relating to some of the good stuff they do, or the vastly bigger problems of their political opponents;
2) People who claim to be ‘freethinking’ or ‘rational’: there is a near certainty that they will follow that with precise lines fed to them by Fox News/the Daily Mail/The Telegraph etc - with zero appreciation that this is true. And a sense of outrage if presented with that fact.
So the interesting questions to me are not so much why people are like this but more, how and why do the orchetstrators of public misinformation do it? So who are these people? I suspect there are a few categories:
1) Individuals who enjoy the maverick pleasure of seeing their misinformation distributed. I wonder how quickly they become somewhat sub-human in either believing their own schtick, or believing in their own superiority / the inferiority of the gullible who believe them;
2) Those who derive power and money from it: that includes large sections of the press, and big chunks of our political class. I would point to the right wing as being particular purveyors of dishonesty but that might be because I have a particular blind spot to the left. If so, it doesn’t make me wrong about the right-wing though. And I’ve yet to see any demonstration of this in the organised and systemic way that the right does it.
3) Foreign actors who benefit from the discord created by their propaganda machines. It is easy right now to point at Russia (and for those celebrating Brexit, it ought to have been sobering to note you share your joy with Putin, Duterte, Geert van Wilders, the le Pens, Trump, Modi, Orban: it won’t be sobering at all - and that also might reasonably give people pause for thought. And again, predictably it won’t).
However, our own propaganda machines are also hugely effective. They blind us to the inequality of our reactions to similar events. So atocities in Ukraine are bad, but atrocities in Syria - not so much; Ukrainian refugees are good, but Syrian refugees - not so much; Putin’s attempt to create new countries in Ukraine is bad, but NATO’s creation of the new state of Kosovo, carved from the Serbian motherland (with devastating bombing) is good. Labour party anti-semitism is so bad folks should be encouraged to vote Conservative - even though Conservative racism of all kinds is not just endemic but also part of the identity.
I am highly sensitive to the failure of other people’s perception-of-shit filters - but my only mechanisms for guarding against that failure myself, are
a) an awareness of the issue - which has t be a starting place; and
b) education - and particularly education from non-standard sources.
In general, b) usually means messaging my mate Vlad in Belgrade who will happily correct my biases in relation to eastern European events or misperception of NATO, or reading foreign press and blogs. It’s somewhat depressing how difficult this all is, and yet how confident folks are of their indefensible views.