There isn’t enough time between assaults to be considered. Social media is constant. As the Very Online become Even More Very Online, the battle becomes a never ending one. It triggers what looks an awful lot like PTSD to me. I’ve seen the same symptoms in combat veterans who came back to our unit from Desert Storm - hypervigilance, paranoid theories about ‘the other’ that were firmly based in a lived reality that is no longer relevant in garrison, an attachment to fellow combatants that transcends any facts (because their lives literally depended on one another - the ultimate character test; everything else is small stuff).
The Very Online Left and the much smaller Very Online Right both show signs of this. The abandonment of principle is a side effect. If we want the world to recover, we’d need to change social media in some fundamental way.
Don’t know what you’re on about saying “The right is not demonstrating any aversion to real truth” when the entire policy of the trumpist regime is “alt facts,” lies as strategy (“I actually won in 2020” & “they’re eating the dogs”), and “blame it on the other guy”? Slight nod, also, to strange religious tenets (virgin birth, resurrection from the dead, etc). Well I don’t expect someone with a profile pic of a guy picking his nose to argue reasonably & respectfully so 🤷♀️
I would add that rational inquiry and fair debate alone are not enough to identify “the Truth.” In the end we can only identify (or at least approximate) the truth through experimentation in the material world to see if the results comply with our expectations. We can then iterate based on the results until we get the desired outcome. Ideally, we do so in a controlled small-scale way so the impact of bad results do minimal damage to society.
Even very smart well-meaning experts engaged in rational discussion with each other can be wrong (and sometimes catastrophically wrong). Only interactions with the real world tell whether they are correct or incorrect. Even the best social media discussion will not achieve similar results.
I find myself wanting to blame virtual realities/communities for the bulk of this descent into convenient truths vs real truths on both the (fringe) right and left. But your article cites thinkers who touched on this before the internet became our neighborhood. Perhaps it’s that this meta situation we’re in is fraught with layers of tangled webs of truths and there is no simple answer. And I want an answer I can wrap my head around for my own peace of mind. Here’s an example. I lived for 30 years in minneapolis and my house was 3 blocks from where the police station was burned down-and about 2 miles from where George Floyd was killed. For 4 days we lived through a sort of siege with stores on our Main Street being looted and burned, people coming in from other areas and wandering around our neighborhood, we witnessed someone setting the pharmacy on fire, we stood guard over the only grocery store left standing in the neighborhood, we watched people looting the pharmacy of prescriptions, the target of electronics etc. we were there and we were an eye witness. If you talked to someone from the left it was the proud boys and the neo-nazi’s (and in one case a claim it was the cia) who perpetrated everything. If we heard from people on the right it was black people and antifa who perpetrated everything. But if we tried to say “well we stood in our street all night with baseball bats and saw such and such” - even when discussing with with neighbors who saw the same thing - and they didn’t like what we said, then we were dismissed as (leftists, racists, colonists, haters of America - depended on which truth group the responder belonged to). I’m still recovering from it to be honest. Truth didn’t matter.
Yes, people will just bend reality to fit with whatever their narrative is even when you can quite clearly see the reality. That’s what worries me so much. It’s a shift away from ‘spin’ into entirely creating one’s own reality and being confident this won’t damage your reputation when you are shown to be wrong, because it is virtuous to stick with the narrative, not the reality.
I watched this phenomenon unfold and lost friendships when naively reporting what we witnessed. Notice I live on a remote dairy farm now and my friends are my bovine overlords. They know truth.
And so, what I appreciate about this column is your search for truth frameworks and how to stand steadfast in tornadic truth denominations. Always good food for thought
While I feel that I generally adhere to the principles of reason, my frustration occasionally gets the better of me. When you confront someone on the deep ideologic right or left, you have to decide whether the effort of engaging them is even worth it. Or whether educating them to engage them is possible or just pissing into a hurricane. Good luck out there!
Helen, I am routinely disappointed in your tendency to address these important topics by stretching in two-side moral equivalency... I think in your attempt to try and maintain a bridge with the left that is more powerful in media.
It is like you want to swim in the deep end of the pool while continuing to clutch the shallow in for safety.
Yes, a Marketplace of Ideas Can Only Function if People Care About What Is True. But also, we cannot solve the problem of so much rejection over what is true if we cannot be honest about its source and origins.
The source and origin is Critical Theory. It, particularly in its postmodern iterations,
rejects objectivity as it's traditionally understood, especially the idea of a single, universal, and objective truth. The infiltration of CT in academics has infected the minds of millions of students who have then infiltrated our institutions.
There is no material movement of the right to adopt falsehoods, untruths and lies to further a right political agenda. The right remains pragmatic and objective. It is only in their more aggressive response to the threat from the Critical Theory corrupted left that their tactics can be labeled as extreme. But the goal is to pull the system back to a version of normal where truth and facts rule and not emotions.
I genuinely disagree with your stance on this, Frank. I don't claim any moral equivalency. I am openly more concerned about the motivations and end goals of the post-truth right. Some of this may well be due to me being on the left, but I don't think I'm the one being blinkered here. If you do not yet see any problem with truth, identity politics, lived experience over science & expertise, victimhood narratives and a proliferation of conspiracy theories on the illiberal populist right, it will be because you are determined not to see them. It's very tiresome.
It is an 90/10 thing. Maybe 10% of the right falls into this "woke right" camp, but 90% of the left is fully invested in woke left. The right has no material power influence. They are fringe and will remain fringe. However, the left has been completely infiltrated with and overcome with the woke ideology toxic mind virus that derives from Critical Theory indoctrination within the education system.
My large circle of acquaintances include liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. The conservative Republicans are majority truth-seekers. They are objective and their minds can be changed with arguments of logic. The liberal Democrats I know are majority fully vested in the woke ideology of the left that is emotionally-based and not rationally-based. They reject rational trade-off analyses and demand purity in ideological conviction.
The right's position is twisted into a lie... for example, the right rejects children being given access to books that include woke gender ideology. The left claims that the right is against free speech and supports "untruth" denying gender fluidity. However, the right is only concerned about the trade-off harm to children being exposed to what amounts to influence over gender and sex before they are of an age to make good life choices. The right position is completely rational.
The right rejects trans rights for allowances that cause harm to females athletes and create risks like biological males in female bathrooms, locker rooms and prisons. The left calls this evidence of extreme "woke right", but it is only rational.
The right disbelieves credentialed experts on the topics of vaccines, viruses and climate crisis. But the left has since been proven wrong (lied?) but not before they worked to censor, ban and destroy the lives and careers of other experts that criticized or opposed their opinions.
The right does not agree that material victim group oppression continues to exist in any material-enough form to warrant the left's agitation, activism, protest and riots. The actual facts don't support the position of the left. The right rejects on a rational basis that group outcomes are evidence of white male bias and oppression.
I can go on. There is a rational basis for every core right idea, perspective and opinion. The left has degraded to rejecting rational arguments while clutching a sort of cult-like belief system that is labeled "woke".
Any indication that the right is going extreme in what can be branded as illiberal is in fact a defense against the large and powerful collectivist left that had taken over our institutions... and in the UK are still deeply embedded... and is the only real threat for destruction of our Western liberal principles and system.
I don’t disagree with you to a current asymmetry between Left and Right in Woke-like discourse, but Helen literally wrote the book “Critical Theory as the source and origin.”
Yes, I know she wrote the book... and that is why I am disappointed with her tendency to drag in a right-side moral equivalency comparison. I hate to confirm Godwin with this analogy, but it is like dragging in the French resistance during WWII for their "immoral" acts against the Nazis.
The "expert" class is nearly 100% left-oriented and has been corrupted by the CT/woke indoctrination and proven broken beyond repair. The right is not demonstrating any aversion to real truth, but aversion to authoritarianism as justified by the those credentialed cretins with so many conflicts of interests and corrupt incentives that they promote half-truths and lies and then cancel, attack, de-platform and destroy any that criticize or oppose their mandates.
The right isn't broken, it is trying to fix what is broken.
The Republicans aren’t in general well read enough to have been swayed by Ferdinand de Saussure, and French deconstructionism isn’t a huge inspiration to the right. The happy, mostly offline people who constitute Republican voters aren’t making Lacan-like arguments about how gender or money or work is a social construct.
So I think Frank might have a point here - of course, we should devise some method to survey the denizens of both Right and Left and see if we can glean from historical records when the problem began (2012) and where (Tumblr) and who started it (Your Problematic Faves).
And having done so, then we should ask ourselves if perhaps it’s a mimetic issue, with one side copying the other to attempt to gain some of their power: Republicans as Cargo-Cult Deconstructionists, not understanding the power they’re attempting to tap.
Great essay but there is something really BIG missing - self interest. It is this that forms the greatest barrier to any truth-seeking, whatever methodology being used. Politics is a battle over getting your self-interest over others' (when they are mutually exclusive), and if not "self" exactly then at least "on behalf of", such as all those students in the West protesting for Gaza.
Have you noticed how so many queer "theorists" happen to support positions that just coincidentally advance their self-interest? Judith Butler claims gender is a performance - wait, coincidentally she is a GNC lesbian... You could pick other examples easily - look at all the race theorists that just happen to be minorities in white countries.
There’s been something bothering me about the scientific principle, for a long time now.
It’s Gödel’s Theorem.
For every record player there exists a record that the record player cannot play, as Douglas Hofstadter famously wrote about.
The Scientific Method is vulnerable to a set of attacks that render it useless or worse. I think we’re seeing one play out now: by creating an infinite number of sincere-seeming, plausible hypotheses, we can make it impossible for investigators - even clever, determined ones - to deal with the volume of hypotheses.
This vast volume of plausible hypotheses is a denial of service attack against the scientific establishment.
In order for the Liberal approach to work, the review of propositions each-by-each must converge. It must complete.
If new propositions are added to it at such a rate that the reviews never complete, then no truth can be decided and the Liberal approach fails.
Helen, would you recommend Kindly Inquisitors to someone who's already read The Constitution of Knowledge, or does the latter sufficiently cover what Rauch had to say in the former?
While I feel that I generally adhere to the principles of reason, my frustration occasionally gets the better of me. When you confront someone on the deep ideologic right or left, you have to decide whether the effort of engaging them is even worth it. Or whether educating them to engage them is possible or just pissing into a hurricane. Good luck out there!
There isn’t enough time between assaults to be considered. Social media is constant. As the Very Online become Even More Very Online, the battle becomes a never ending one. It triggers what looks an awful lot like PTSD to me. I’ve seen the same symptoms in combat veterans who came back to our unit from Desert Storm - hypervigilance, paranoid theories about ‘the other’ that were firmly based in a lived reality that is no longer relevant in garrison, an attachment to fellow combatants that transcends any facts (because their lives literally depended on one another - the ultimate character test; everything else is small stuff).
The Very Online Left and the much smaller Very Online Right both show signs of this. The abandonment of principle is a side effect. If we want the world to recover, we’d need to change social media in some fundamental way.
Don’t know what you’re on about saying “The right is not demonstrating any aversion to real truth” when the entire policy of the trumpist regime is “alt facts,” lies as strategy (“I actually won in 2020” & “they’re eating the dogs”), and “blame it on the other guy”? Slight nod, also, to strange religious tenets (virgin birth, resurrection from the dead, etc). Well I don’t expect someone with a profile pic of a guy picking his nose to argue reasonably & respectfully so 🤷♀️
Excellent essay.
I would add that rational inquiry and fair debate alone are not enough to identify “the Truth.” In the end we can only identify (or at least approximate) the truth through experimentation in the material world to see if the results comply with our expectations. We can then iterate based on the results until we get the desired outcome. Ideally, we do so in a controlled small-scale way so the impact of bad results do minimal damage to society.
Even very smart well-meaning experts engaged in rational discussion with each other can be wrong (and sometimes catastrophically wrong). Only interactions with the real world tell whether they are correct or incorrect. Even the best social media discussion will not achieve similar results.
Thanks for your thoughtful article.
I like the phrase “truth denominations”…
I find myself wanting to blame virtual realities/communities for the bulk of this descent into convenient truths vs real truths on both the (fringe) right and left. But your article cites thinkers who touched on this before the internet became our neighborhood. Perhaps it’s that this meta situation we’re in is fraught with layers of tangled webs of truths and there is no simple answer. And I want an answer I can wrap my head around for my own peace of mind. Here’s an example. I lived for 30 years in minneapolis and my house was 3 blocks from where the police station was burned down-and about 2 miles from where George Floyd was killed. For 4 days we lived through a sort of siege with stores on our Main Street being looted and burned, people coming in from other areas and wandering around our neighborhood, we witnessed someone setting the pharmacy on fire, we stood guard over the only grocery store left standing in the neighborhood, we watched people looting the pharmacy of prescriptions, the target of electronics etc. we were there and we were an eye witness. If you talked to someone from the left it was the proud boys and the neo-nazi’s (and in one case a claim it was the cia) who perpetrated everything. If we heard from people on the right it was black people and antifa who perpetrated everything. But if we tried to say “well we stood in our street all night with baseball bats and saw such and such” - even when discussing with with neighbors who saw the same thing - and they didn’t like what we said, then we were dismissed as (leftists, racists, colonists, haters of America - depended on which truth group the responder belonged to). I’m still recovering from it to be honest. Truth didn’t matter.
Yes, people will just bend reality to fit with whatever their narrative is even when you can quite clearly see the reality. That’s what worries me so much. It’s a shift away from ‘spin’ into entirely creating one’s own reality and being confident this won’t damage your reputation when you are shown to be wrong, because it is virtuous to stick with the narrative, not the reality.
I watched this phenomenon unfold and lost friendships when naively reporting what we witnessed. Notice I live on a remote dairy farm now and my friends are my bovine overlords. They know truth.
And so, what I appreciate about this column is your search for truth frameworks and how to stand steadfast in tornadic truth denominations. Always good food for thought
While I feel that I generally adhere to the principles of reason, my frustration occasionally gets the better of me. When you confront someone on the deep ideologic right or left, you have to decide whether the effort of engaging them is even worth it. Or whether educating them to engage them is possible or just pissing into a hurricane. Good luck out there!
Helen, I am routinely disappointed in your tendency to address these important topics by stretching in two-side moral equivalency... I think in your attempt to try and maintain a bridge with the left that is more powerful in media.
It is like you want to swim in the deep end of the pool while continuing to clutch the shallow in for safety.
Yes, a Marketplace of Ideas Can Only Function if People Care About What Is True. But also, we cannot solve the problem of so much rejection over what is true if we cannot be honest about its source and origins.
The source and origin is Critical Theory. It, particularly in its postmodern iterations,
rejects objectivity as it's traditionally understood, especially the idea of a single, universal, and objective truth. The infiltration of CT in academics has infected the minds of millions of students who have then infiltrated our institutions.
There is no material movement of the right to adopt falsehoods, untruths and lies to further a right political agenda. The right remains pragmatic and objective. It is only in their more aggressive response to the threat from the Critical Theory corrupted left that their tactics can be labeled as extreme. But the goal is to pull the system back to a version of normal where truth and facts rule and not emotions.
I genuinely disagree with your stance on this, Frank. I don't claim any moral equivalency. I am openly more concerned about the motivations and end goals of the post-truth right. Some of this may well be due to me being on the left, but I don't think I'm the one being blinkered here. If you do not yet see any problem with truth, identity politics, lived experience over science & expertise, victimhood narratives and a proliferation of conspiracy theories on the illiberal populist right, it will be because you are determined not to see them. It's very tiresome.
It is an 90/10 thing. Maybe 10% of the right falls into this "woke right" camp, but 90% of the left is fully invested in woke left. The right has no material power influence. They are fringe and will remain fringe. However, the left has been completely infiltrated with and overcome with the woke ideology toxic mind virus that derives from Critical Theory indoctrination within the education system.
My large circle of acquaintances include liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. The conservative Republicans are majority truth-seekers. They are objective and their minds can be changed with arguments of logic. The liberal Democrats I know are majority fully vested in the woke ideology of the left that is emotionally-based and not rationally-based. They reject rational trade-off analyses and demand purity in ideological conviction.
The right's position is twisted into a lie... for example, the right rejects children being given access to books that include woke gender ideology. The left claims that the right is against free speech and supports "untruth" denying gender fluidity. However, the right is only concerned about the trade-off harm to children being exposed to what amounts to influence over gender and sex before they are of an age to make good life choices. The right position is completely rational.
The right rejects trans rights for allowances that cause harm to females athletes and create risks like biological males in female bathrooms, locker rooms and prisons. The left calls this evidence of extreme "woke right", but it is only rational.
The right disbelieves credentialed experts on the topics of vaccines, viruses and climate crisis. But the left has since been proven wrong (lied?) but not before they worked to censor, ban and destroy the lives and careers of other experts that criticized or opposed their opinions.
The right does not agree that material victim group oppression continues to exist in any material-enough form to warrant the left's agitation, activism, protest and riots. The actual facts don't support the position of the left. The right rejects on a rational basis that group outcomes are evidence of white male bias and oppression.
I can go on. There is a rational basis for every core right idea, perspective and opinion. The left has degraded to rejecting rational arguments while clutching a sort of cult-like belief system that is labeled "woke".
Any indication that the right is going extreme in what can be branded as illiberal is in fact a defense against the large and powerful collectivist left that had taken over our institutions... and in the UK are still deeply embedded... and is the only real threat for destruction of our Western liberal principles and system.
I don’t disagree with you to a current asymmetry between Left and Right in Woke-like discourse, but Helen literally wrote the book “Critical Theory as the source and origin.”
Yes, I know she wrote the book... and that is why I am disappointed with her tendency to drag in a right-side moral equivalency comparison. I hate to confirm Godwin with this analogy, but it is like dragging in the French resistance during WWII for their "immoral" acts against the Nazis.
The "expert" class is nearly 100% left-oriented and has been corrupted by the CT/woke indoctrination and proven broken beyond repair. The right is not demonstrating any aversion to real truth, but aversion to authoritarianism as justified by the those credentialed cretins with so many conflicts of interests and corrupt incentives that they promote half-truths and lies and then cancel, attack, de-platform and destroy any that criticize or oppose their mandates.
The right isn't broken, it is trying to fix what is broken.
The left is the source of what is broken.
The Republicans aren’t in general well read enough to have been swayed by Ferdinand de Saussure, and French deconstructionism isn’t a huge inspiration to the right. The happy, mostly offline people who constitute Republican voters aren’t making Lacan-like arguments about how gender or money or work is a social construct.
So I think Frank might have a point here - of course, we should devise some method to survey the denizens of both Right and Left and see if we can glean from historical records when the problem began (2012) and where (Tumblr) and who started it (Your Problematic Faves).
And having done so, then we should ask ourselves if perhaps it’s a mimetic issue, with one side copying the other to attempt to gain some of their power: Republicans as Cargo-Cult Deconstructionists, not understanding the power they’re attempting to tap.
Great essay but there is something really BIG missing - self interest. It is this that forms the greatest barrier to any truth-seeking, whatever methodology being used. Politics is a battle over getting your self-interest over others' (when they are mutually exclusive), and if not "self" exactly then at least "on behalf of", such as all those students in the West protesting for Gaza.
Have you noticed how so many queer "theorists" happen to support positions that just coincidentally advance their self-interest? Judith Butler claims gender is a performance - wait, coincidentally she is a GNC lesbian... You could pick other examples easily - look at all the race theorists that just happen to be minorities in white countries.
There’s been something bothering me about the scientific principle, for a long time now.
It’s Gödel’s Theorem.
For every record player there exists a record that the record player cannot play, as Douglas Hofstadter famously wrote about.
The Scientific Method is vulnerable to a set of attacks that render it useless or worse. I think we’re seeing one play out now: by creating an infinite number of sincere-seeming, plausible hypotheses, we can make it impossible for investigators - even clever, determined ones - to deal with the volume of hypotheses.
This vast volume of plausible hypotheses is a denial of service attack against the scientific establishment.
In order for the Liberal approach to work, the review of propositions each-by-each must converge. It must complete.
If new propositions are added to it at such a rate that the reviews never complete, then no truth can be decided and the Liberal approach fails.
Helen, would you recommend Kindly Inquisitors to someone who's already read The Constitution of Knowledge, or does the latter sufficiently cover what Rauch had to say in the former?
They are quite different and KI is exceptional.
While I feel that I generally adhere to the principles of reason, my frustration occasionally gets the better of me. When you confront someone on the deep ideologic right or left, you have to decide whether the effort of engaging them is even worth it. Or whether educating them to engage them is possible or just pissing into a hurricane. Good luck out there!
Thank you. You are so wonderfully clear in your mind, rational, and liberal.