The Ministry of Truth is Real Life

I'm sure by now, everyone is quite familiar with the term "fake news".

While I was experiencing the 2016 campaign, a thought occurred to me. No matter what happens on November 4 (spoiler alert: Clinton lost, somehow), Trump has already made a mark on American culture, probably in the worst way. Terms that he coined during the election are going to become buzzwords. Fake news, bigly, convfefe (whatever the fuck that is), and even actual phrases like "some people say", and "believe me", and "its gonna be huge" are all worming their way into the American linguistic culture, and I hate it. Even people who use the terms in jest are helping to feed the Trump influence on our society.

But, let's go back to Fake News.

Back in 1951, after Fascism in Europe was defeated, and the Red Scare and Cold War were ramping up, Hannah Arendt wrote that the Nazis and Communists were not the "ideal subjects of totalitarian rule". She argued that the targets of these regimes are people "for whom reality of experience, and the standards of thought" no longer can be distinguished. Example: people who would be unable to grasp the concept of a stapler painted red, even though we have the technology to paint other things red, because they've only ever seen black staplers. Basically, people who discount facts, reason, and logic, and rely instead on personal anecdotes, and real life experiences put themselves in a position to be easily manipulated by demagogues, cults, and conspiracy theories.

totally made-up bullshit

Humans have figured out how to manipulate Truth thousands of years ago. Mostly through omitting facts, banning things, and limiting educational resources. There is a reason the Catholic Church banned translating the Bible from Greek and Latin into domestic languages. We as a species are not new at this sort of thing. The lie can be very powerful. The idea that a lie, when repeated enough, will eventually be accepted by the masses as Truth has been echoed by many throughout history. Lenin, Goebbels, Willie Brown, Ron Amundson, Laurence Blair all have said similar things regarding fabricating the truth. I find this amazing that after all these centuries, we still get fooled.

A good example of fabrication of Truth can be seen in the "fact" that people swallow on average 8 spiders a year while sleeping. In 1993 Lisa Holst published an article in PC Professional, which included this bit about spider swallowing. Her plan was to see how long it would take to circulate a myth. Not only did we get to see how long it would take for made up "facts" to be accepted as real, but how long those accepted "facts" would remain within the culture even after being debunked. Search "swallowing 8 spiders a year" and see how many recent hits come up.

Getting people to believe they swallow spiders in their sleep is pretty harmless. But what about things that are far less harmless? What about stories and ideas that cause irrational fear, and promote negativity towards entire groups of people?

There are plenty of examples of poor research, fabricated evidence, and outright urban myth lies that resulted in people believing in crazy things. When the AIDS epidemic took off in the 80's someone spread the fear of catching AIDS from toilet seats. It seems pretty ridiculous now, if someone tried to convince you that a sexually transmitted disease can be caught be touching an inanimate object, but back then your average person had no clue. AIDS was scary, and because it was prevalent within the gay community, any misinformation helped fuel homophobic rhetoric. It took years of PSAs, and a generation of public school health classes to educate and overturn this, and other similar misinformation. There are still groups out there though, that believe "the homosexual lifestyle" is unclean, dirty, and prone to diseases and health risks. Some even go as far as to claim AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality, which is nonsense. AIDS isn't sexuality specific.

this helped too

Anti-vaxxers too still cling to evidence from a 1997 paper published by Andrew Wakefield. This paper has been throughly debunked, Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine, and The Lancet Journal wrote a retraction. And yet, people still claim vaccines cause autism. Far more effort was put into debunking these fake stories than was used to create them, which is the dangerous part. Once out there, it can be nearly impossible to truly delete it.

At this moment, the term Fake News is being thrown around a lot, politically. It is used to discredit actual news, and actual inquiry aimed at keeping the powerful accountable. Questioning the Truth of stories has always been important, but now it has been weaponized, and by the very people that need to be held accountable and be questioned.

I believe this started as a backlash to justifiable claims that unabashedly Right wing news outlets were, in fact, Reactionary Right wing biased. As a countermeasure, every other news outlet not espousing toxic conservative sentiment was labeled as liberally biased. This actually grows out of a decades long conspiracy theory that the media is controlled by Jews, and Jews are liberally biased. The actual truth, aside from a few obvious outliers, is that most news sources are not polar opposites of Fox News, Breitbart, and the Blaze. Eventually, this turned into every media outlet who didn't agree with Alt Right sentiment was labeled liberally biased and discounted by the very people most susceptible to Fake News. There are plenty of credible myth busting assets out there, but they are useless when falsely framed as Leftist.

Don't fall for that "both sides do the same thing" nonsense either. It is a false equivalency, and it's used as a weapon to discredit good journalism and inquiries of accountability. CNN, the AP, Reuters, and NPR are not partisan, or deal in politically biased coverage like Fox News and Breitbart have. There is no Leftwing equivalency to the Alt Right.

During the 2016 election, I said it would be impossible to convince a group of the actual Truth using facts and news, history and Reason, when the group believes in none of those things. And so here we are, halfway through a Trump presidency, already witnessing our cultural language change, with no good answer for how we fix the damage done to the confidence in what is True. Just like with AIDS toilet seats, and swallowing spiders, and anti-vaxxers, it will take so much more time and effort to reverse the damage done to the trust in our journalism, and the changes made to our language.