🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
- Starting with the first Trump campaign and presidency, facts and the truth have been under attack in such a way it drowned out the voice of reason in politics.
- Tactics that facilitated this strategy included increasing the amount of disinformation to be so large no entity would be able to systematically and scientifically disprove all statements in time, as well as enforcing a new preference on subjectivity and feeling as opposed to the believe in science.
- The ubiquity of social media and its fragility towards being misused by malevolent people and governments played a huge role in making this possible and so far all measures to change this have failed.
🎨 Impressions
Published in 2018 by former New York Times writer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Michiko Kakutani, this book deals with the fast decline of the importance the general public started to put on truth and facts when the first Trump presidency had just started.
It explores the tactics used, such as the firehose of outrageous statements and flooding of social media so journalists and readers just can’t keep up anymore. As soon as any huge lie had been factually disproven with proper research, twenty new ones in addition to a few more scandals for good measure had already been circulated by the president. The resulting fatigue and resignation experienced by the public allowed the president to get away with a lot more than he should have.
It’s a thoroughly researched book that’s also an entertaining and enlightening read. One of its strengths is its conciseness. Just seven years after its publication, it does seem dated, though. There are a bunch of mentions of current events at the time, such as the Russian interference into the 2016 presidential elections and the resulting Mueller report or the Cambridge Analytica leaks. It does prove the point though: in both cases there was a lot of publicity around it but in the end it all got swept under the rug and no one seemed to have had to suffer the consequences of the clear wrong-doing.
In a way I felt like we are now already way past this. The lying and firehose tactics have stayed at that high level or even increased with no retribution for it in sight. But it’s not the main problem anymore now that Trump has again been elected into office after what could have been called a short hiccup of decency that was the Biden administration. Now, no one seems to care about the lies anymore, not even in the news. It’s just a given. It’s what the American public willingly had signed up for, and, to a degree, a growing number of other countries around the world, too. If crime is factually down but a charismatic government official tells us it’s not and that’s why our lives aren’t going as well as they could, we apparently now just want to believe them.
The term “fake news” is behind us. It’s just “news” now.
The new administration has currently just had a few weeks in power and already they are moving so quickly and destructively, it seems like a coup from the outside. There’s total disregard to what the public reaction to it might be, it seems. And it’s understandable: the people decided in favor of it, blinded by lies and drowned in negativity and false tales of causation.
This book is a historic document. It explains how it all started.
There is no guidance on how to avert this problem. Recognizing it surely is a first step, though. I think the book pairs well with Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny” which is more like a guide on how to act during the early stages of an uprising of totalitarianism. That’s what we’re missing these days.
📔 Highlights
Introduction
If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump—a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a dozen Diet Cokes a day)—she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility.
1. The Decline and Fall of Reason
Leaders like Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama viewed America as a work in progress—a country in the process of perfecting itself. And they tried to speed that work, mindful, in the words of Dr. King, that “progress is neither automatic nor inevitable” but requiring of continuous dedication and struggle.
“If citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives,” Nichols wrote, “they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not.
“I liken the attacks on science to turning off the headlights,” he said. “We’re driving fast and people don’t want to see what’s coming up. Scientists—we’re the headlights.”
2. The New Culture Wars
There are many different strands of postmodernism and many different interpretations, but very broadly speaking, postmodernist arguments deny an objective reality existing independently from human perception, contending that knowledge is filtered through the prisms of class, race, gender, and other variables.
they also warned that extreme views could lead to the dangerously reductive belief that “knowledge about the past is simply an ideological construction intended to serve particular interests, making history a series of myths establishing or reinforcing group identities.”
It was ridiculous, of course, to argue that a researcher’s cultural background could affect verifiable scientific facts; as Otto succinctly put it, “Atmospheric CO2 is the same whether the scientist measuring it is a Somali woman or an Argentine man.” But such postmodernist arguments would clear the way for today’s anti-vaxxers and global warming deniers, who refuse to accept the consensus opinion of the overwhelming majority of scientists.
3. “Moi” and the Rise of Subjectivity
With this embrace of subjectivity came the diminution of objective truth: the celebration of opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts—a development that both reflected and helped foster the rise of Trump.
4. The Vanishing of Reality
At the same time, he instinctively grasped that the new internet-driven landscape and voters’ growing ignorance about issues made it easier than ever to play to voters’ fears and resentments by promoting sticky, viral narratives that served up alternate realities.
People were less interested in whether something was a fact than in whether it was “convenient that it should be believed.”
“it’s a surprisingly short leap from rejecting political correctness to blaming women, immigrants, or Muslims for their problems.”
5. The Co-opting of Language
Among the characteristics of “wooden language” that the French scholar Françoise Thom identified in a 1987 thesis (La langue de bois) were abstraction and the avoidance of the concrete; tautologies (“the theories of Marx are true because they are correct”); bad metaphors (“the fascist octopus has sung its swan song”); and Manichaeanism that divides the world into things good and things evil (and nothing in between).
All the lying and hyperbole eventually reached the point, Klemperer continues, that it became “meaningless and utterly ineffective, finally bringing about a belief in the very opposite of what it intended.”
These sorts of lies, the journalist Masha Gessen has pointed out, are told for the same reason that Vladimir Putin lies: “to assert power over truth itself.”
authoritarians typically test “the limits of what the public, press, and political class will tolerate”
Ur-fascism employs “an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax,” Eco added, “in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
6. Filters, Silos, and Tribes
while 72 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said colleges and universities have a positive effect on the country, a majority of Republicans and Republican leaners (58 percent) have a negative view of those institutions of higher learning.
For many of these committed partisans, supporting their party was like being a rabid, die-hard fan of a favorite NBA, MLB, or NFL team; it was part of their own identity, and their team could do no wrong.
In polls, a huge majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they’re increasingly biased to share our own views.
7. Attention Deficit
If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result. The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse.”
The sheer volume of data on the web allows people to cherry-pick facts or factoids or nonfacts that support their own point of view, encouraging academics and amateurs alike to find material to support their theories rather than examining empirical evidence to come to rational conclusions.
8. “The Firehose of Falsehood”: Propaganda and Fake News
You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.
Lying is both reflexive and a matter of conviction: they believe, she writes, “that ordinary morality does not apply to them … In a rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of ‘the People,’ or as a means of targeting ‘Enemies of the People.’ In the struggle for power, anything is permitted.”
Hitler possessed an instinctive sense of how to capture public attention from the start. “Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?” he wrote about his early efforts to make a name for himself. “The point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.”
“in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Because Russian trolls are unconcerned with veracity or inconsistencies, they can often get their fictional version of events out before legitimate news organizations can post accurate accounts, taking advantage of the psychological tendency of people to accept the first information received on a topic
“the goal of the powerful often is not to convince people of the truth of a particular narrative or to block a particular piece of information from getting out (that is increasingly difficult), but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people.”
There is no Communist ideology in Putin and Surkov’s Russia, just what Pomerantsev called “power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth.”
heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch (Surkov approvingly quoted the lyrics to “Wash It All Away”).
9. The Schadenfreude of the Trolls
As his own books make clear, Trump is completely lacking in empathy and has always had a dog-eat-dog view of the world: kill or be killed, and always get even. It’s a relentlessly dark view,
Some trolls have employed relativistic arguments to insist that their promotion of alternative facts is simply adding a voice to the conversation, that there are no more objective truths anymore—only different perceptions and different story lines.
Epilogue
“Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information,” Postman wrote. “Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
There are no easy remedies, but it’s essential that citizens defy the cynicism and resignation that autocrats and power-hungry politicians depend upon to subvert resistance.
Without truth, democracy is hobbled. The founders recognized this, and those seeking democracy’s survival must recognize it today.
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