Sean Illing's perspective — on our land of propaganda-tethered sheep

© 2020 Peter Free

 

17 January 2020

 

 

No hope to be found in the barn?

 

Good insight entertains me.

 

Sean Illing has some:

 

 

No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship . . . .

 

But there’s another, equally vexing problem. We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading.

 

The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth.

 

If you follow politics at all, you know how exhausting the environment is. The sheer volume of content, the dizzying number of narratives and counternarratives, and the pace of the news cycle are too much for anyone to process.

 

One response to this situation is to walk away and tune everything out.

 

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism.

 

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all.

 

And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.

 

The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content.

 

These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories.

 

This is at the root of our nihilism problem, and a solution is nowhere in sight.

 

© 2020 Sean Illing, “Flood the zone with shit”: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy, Vox (16 January 2020) (excerpts)

 

 

I agree with Illing's assessment of the mechanics . . .

 

. . . of what he calls (Steve Bannon's) "flood[ing] the zone with shit".

 

However, he is probably mistaken in implicitly assuming that people have ever wanted to know Truth.

 

My impression (based on seven decades of personal experience) is that most Homo sapiens, whom I meet, have already solidified their perspectives on the world.

 

The idea of looking for (and at) contrary evidence escapes them. Ours are not usually scientific minds.

 

In short, people are generally ignorant. Often by choice. Sometimes by circumstance. And most of us are not notably bright.

 

That's the human condition. Easily directed irrationality rules.

 

 

The moral? — Today's Communications Age exacerbates a species characteristic that was already there

 

How our (intentionally aggravated mindlessness) problem plays out, over even mini-geological time, remains to be seen.

 

It is possible that being instinctually delusional will keep us predictably dumb and misled — but coherently enslaved enough — to see us survive in behaviorally integrated blocks. Like instinctually directed insects. Or alternatively, like clouds of fluid-stirred amoebae.

 

On the other hand, propaganda-spawned fractiousness and self-destructive resource depletion may inadvertently kill us all.

 

Seen outside in, it's an interesting experiment.

 

And arguably another reason to think that the Simulation Hypothesis has merit.