"For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to William Roscoe
Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”
John 18: 37-38
I start each morning with my own version of doomscrolling during this pandemic, opening the Drudge Report and feasting on links to articles from all over the world about the day's events. The news outlets tend to be right down the middle, with neither Daily Kos nor Breitbart anywhere to be seen.
Of course, I guess that would be my version of "right down the middle". In recent days there seems to be a mass movement toward living in one's own reality, and only hearing voices who share that reality with us. For instance, yesterday an old high school friend with whom I survived a couple years of AP classes announced that she was giving up all network news in favor of what she deemed a "reliable" news source, the Epoch Times.
If you're not familiar with the Epoch Times, it's a far-right newspaper with ties to the Falun Gong religious movement. If you scroll their headlines, it won't take long to surmise that their editorial slant is decidedly pro-Trump and anti-Chinese, the latter being fairly unsurprising given that FG is banned in China, and the Chinese government was supposedly rounding up adherents for involuntary organ donations.
Today's headlines all suggest the election isn't really over, and the Chinese are up to no good.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/
If one's sole source of information is this, pretty soon one is on the slippery slope to believing there is a grand liberal plot to take down "our" America and replace it with, well, who the hell knows? If you're wondering where this strange theme of Biden plotting with the Chinese originated, here it is.
And from there, it just gets kookier. A devoutly Roman Catholic friend of mine reposted an article on his Facebook news feed from America, the staid old publication of the Jesuits, noting that Pope Francis had congratulated Biden on his election victory. Only a couple comments from the top was something to the effect that Francis would have held his tongue if he'd realized that Biden and his party's leadership were all pedophiles.
Oh yes, that fever dream again. QAnon, Pizzagate, Pedo Island. Once you cut yourself off from reality, that stuff rises out of the sick recesses of your imagination and becomes truth. A chimera that explains everything.
Eschewing any actual news, social media with its filters on false information is the inevitable next casualty. Enter Parler, ironically named given the decidedly Francophobe tenor of its subscribers. Who needs Facebook and Twitter with all their "censorship" of one's alternative reality, when you can spend your hours in this forum of freedom, finally away from the libtards and all their obsession with truthiness? Here in the echo chamber we'll share our own truth.
Don't think the day's conspiracy theory is real? Just check out the link in that Parler post--it's from the Epoch Times, or One America Network, or Breitbart--real, no kidding news outlets! Voila!
The two developments that make this all particularly toxic are the pandemic and the election. My personal experience is that I have had almost no in-person contact with another human being in eight months. I'm guessing your life may be similar. Here in this quarantine bubble, my only regular contact with society is over the phone, over Zoom, and over social media. The first two outlets are almost entirely professional, while the latter gives me some sense of what's going on beyond the horizon I see out my window. And once that antenna becomes distorted, once it, or I, shape a mise en scene that is a collection of my own choices, there is no guardrail of reality to bounce us back into a shared, objective experience.
And I can already hear the counterargument, that everyone necessarily shapes his or her own reality, myself included, and I am making a judgment by not having both a Twitter and a Parler account (in fact, I have neither because I am old). Maybe so, but I am relying on my education and experience to discern, and it strikes me as just so much post-modernist bullshit to suggest one person's reality is just as valid as another. One could make a consequentialist argument to the contrary--deluded societies tend not to end well, from the Third Reich to Jonestown.
The other development that forebodes the next phase of all this, beyond the isolation imposed by the pandemic, is the likelihood of an endless "election". The MAGA crowd will never accept that Trump lost--why should they, when their sources of information tell them otherwise? And neither will their Barnum-esque leader, whom I predict will leave the White House in a couple months and keep doing exactly what he's been doing in lieu of actually governing for the last four years--holding rallies that feel like tent revivals for the radical right, spreading falsehoods for personal gain and at the expense of the country, peddling his own brand in everything from clothes to media. Get ready for four more years, all right: four more years of pitting us against ourselves, subverting the new administration's ability to govern, blackmailing those miserable Republicans who won reelection into acting as accessories to the destruction of our social and political fabric. That's what's coming. And Parler and the Epoch Times and QAnon will provide the virtual society and narrative that hold it all together, free of contamination from the outside.
Even reality itself will likely disappear. Don't believe me? Check out this chilling bit from the lamestream media:
That's Mark Zuckerberg, but actually it's not. A computer program took piles of snippets of Zuckerberg speaking, and created this confession of his failings. The article explains that maybe a "concession speech" by Trump is in the offing. All of it real. None of it real. How is one to know?
And all of this arrives at the worst possible moment as if there was in fact some divine author, not necessarily benign, writing our national narrative as a cautionary tale. Drudge also linked this morning a thought-provoking essay from the Atlantic (I know--"fake news", if you're over there in Parler with the window-lickers) that profiles Peter Turchin, an ecologist-turned-mathematician who has turned his methodology back on that most studied of creatures, homo sapiens, and created data-driven models to predict the trajectory of civilizations:
His conclusion? Societies go through tumultuous collapse and re-ordering when there is an overproduction of elites with nothing to do. In medieval France that would have been later sons of the nobility with no inheritance; in our age, Turchin suggests, the marker is an overabundance of lawyers. These elites without the trappings, Harvard grads who didn't get hired by the big law firm, then turn into populists, and use their smarts to tear down the institutions that rejected them. Think Steve Bannon, a Harvard grad calling on social media for the beheading of those in government whose views don't suit him. This is MAGA in a nutshell--a bunch of silver-medalists in life's competition for power and prestige, manipulating the masses into destroying their own society in an act of mass revenge against those people who think they're so much smarter than us. Obama was the perfect bogeyman for this undertaking.
So there it is: opportunity (the isolation of the pandemic), means (alternative reality through a closed-system of news and social media), and motive (second-tier elites attacking the institutions that never really accepted them). Buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy few years.
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