Reality in service to the Narrative
If the republic falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Be Alarmed for the Right Reasons
Over the last few years, I’ve heard dozens of wide-eyed arguments from various political tribes as to why freedom/democracy/our Union of States, pick your superlative, is under threat from the other side.
Variously, the other is then defined by pejoratives such as communist/fascist/anti-science/racist/*.ist, pick your poisonous blandishment.
It seems to me that the objective of these arguments is to cover the weakness of the blowhard’s other arguments: spend your time watching out for that bad guy over there so you don’t have time to examine my positions.
Despite the popularity of these arguments, however, it would be a category error for us to then assume that nothing alarming is going on.
What has emerged this year is nothing new in my mind, but never before has it been so aggressive and easy to see. What makes it alarming to me is that despite that emergence it appears to be working.
What I’m talking about is the triumph of The Narrative over objective reality.
There has always been a tension between facts and truth, between actuality and perception, between events and news. This tension plays out in our daily lives as stimuli rush at our senses, and the more successful we are at filtering out irrelevancies, distractions and red herrings from our perceptions, the more successfully we will apprehend reality and succeed in the world around us.
This is also true of our society corporately. In a mass media environment, we are fed a steady deluge of information to which we cannot be direct observers. How can we possibly know which information comports most closely to important realities, and filter out the irrelevant distractions?
Idolatry of Credibility
A paradigm to which I have seen my friends subscribing is what I call an Idolatry of Credibility. I will bring up some factoid or idea, and the immediate response is “that’s not a credible source”. Often the poisonous othering is thrown on top of the response, as in “that person has been criticized for giving air time to white supremacy.”
To which I reply: “OK, but is the fact a fact or not? Is the idea I expressed good or not?” This is largely ignored due to the Credibility gap perceived.
Credibility is a useful marker; judging the consistency of our sources of information, from weather and traffic predictions to financial or legal advice, is consistent with basic hierarchies of competence and achievement through which we navigate the world.
As an Idol, however, it has some critical rationality failures:
It narrows our world: if we were to believe that everything we know is true and everything true is already known by the clique of the Credibles, it would be a good assumption that the Credibles would be good to listen to for authoritative reality. However, history and logic tell us the opposite is almost always true: the first news is almost always wrong, what is currently understood is almost always not as true as we thought it was, and frequently the most valuable leaps in knowledge were presented by outsiders of the clique.
It supports our confirmation and authority biases: the Credibles are credible because they are authoritative sources. They are authoritative because they are credible. They’ve told us so. They tell us what we need to know, with rough and uncomfortable inconvenient truths smoothed over. Debunked. Ignored. Believed only by the repugnant others.
The first two points combine in an alarming way when you consider this question: who appoints the Credible elites? If a billionaire buys a cable new channel and stocks it with millionaire compatriots, does that make them Credible? If a pop star becomes popular for having a nice singing voice and swaying hips, does that make them Credible on non-music related matters? Given my own confirmation bias, how do I decide who is Credible, if I don’t purchase outright the designation given by media elites?
Given the power Idolators are giving to the Credible to narrow their worldview, isn’t this a critical question that requires far more consideration?
It thus seems clear that absorbing information from a small number of self-appointed professional Credible elites is not an obvious path toward wider truth.
Don’t we have a Free Marketplace of Ideas?
America is the largest economic experiment the world has seen in what is known as the Free Market, and regardless of whether it is actually as free as it could or should be, we have come to recognize the success of the Free Market to deliver low-cost, high-quality goods and services to the most people at the best pace. The success of this experiment is like water to a fish. You have to work hard mentally to go back to the drought years of mid-late 20th century, when the prevalence of centrally-planned economies around the world made the map look like a sea of red compared to the few market economies that held on to prove their worth. Since the adoption of Free Market principles around the world, poverty has been plummeting at an astonishing rate.
A key feature of the Free Market is that in an environment of open competition in which consumers choose the victors, no one company or entity can deliver substandard service for long: someone else will always come in and deliver better service at a better price. We have seen this work time and again, as disruptors such as AOL, Yahoo, Ebay, Google, Facebook, Youtube, Uber and Airbnb have shaken established industries.
In the Free Marketplace of Ideas, this should work the same. If someone has poor ideas, a better idea will replace the poor one. However, there is a caveat: in the economic Free Market, the system of rewards is relatively independent from the system of service delivery. The system of rewards is monetary. Money is earned through an individual’s efforts, skill, knowledge, and a few other factors, all of them mostly unaffected by choice of services. Were this separation to break down, and your employment become dependent on what brand of car you choose to drive or grocery store you chose to shop in for instance, the economy’s broad selection of good services over poor ones would devolve into systems of well-connected services over non-connected ones. The Free Market would simply become another planned economy.
This is the hazard of the Free Marketplace of Ideas. The Ideas themselves can be both the service delivered and drive the attention paid as the reward for the service. News corporations have found a shortcut to success that has made it possible for them to corner the marketplace of ideas and receive attention and accolades in payment for the projection of their raw power: they can fashion a compelling Narrative based loosely on facts, which if marketed correctly and echoed appropriately, creates its own reality which can be substituted for facts.
The Narrative is powerful, not because it is true, but because it is agreed upon. The Narrative must contain enough truth to sustain the patina of credibility, but once enough broad facts have emerged from any new reality to determine the optimal vector, The Narrative steamrolls forward, making itself the news as it rolls along the path to the Objective.
But, you object: with all the competing companies in play, how does The Narrative succeed? Wouldn’t competing narratives put forward by competing groups of Credibles arrive, demanding consideration?
Answers:
If it bleeds it leads: this used to be the cynic’s descriptor for information-hungry newshounds who went for the salacious over the standard new items. This approach is so last century. The Narrative leaps from simple tragic facts to an overarching web of stories that together form a Crisis. Nothing ossifies the eyeballs like a Crisis. This combines with FOMO (fear of missing out) to compel many news entities to bandwagon on the same vector of the same story, competing only for most salacious and outrageous commentary saying the same thing. It’s also why nascent investors blow their money buying into the top of bull markets, but in the case of the news markets, their excess FOMO and crisis mongering only nets them profits, because ideas are both payment and service here.
The more cynical among us might remember the existence of “Journolist” and believe that it never was disbanded, it just moved underground.
If someone stands aside from The Narrative and points out contravening facts and reasoning, they are quickly othered and ejected from the Credibles club. This action serves to promote the Credibility of the Credibles and their Narrative, as the naysayers are only promoting disinformation anyway, and are likely winking at white supremacy to boot.
The target having been marked, The Mob in the form of Narrative-connected movements and companies is then unleashed on employers, business partners, advertisers, co-workers and associates until the target is bereft of even his Free Market economic options. Some unfortunates so targeted have lost their ability to utilize banks and basic utilities.
This is regardless of the actual objective truth of their claims.
If facts emerge that force a change to The Narrative, the market incentives direct Narrative participants to pivot on a dime, charge in the new vector for The Narrative, and pretend all previous versions are efforts of disinformation on behalf of the Others.
The Narrative never stops. Never talk about The Narrative, only echo it. Never betray The Narrative.
What Hath the Narrative Wrought?
As Exhibit 1, I give you these competing Politico stories, on the same news events, separated by just 51 days and one competition for Leader of the Free World:
This image was clipped from Dave Rubin’s excellent review of the pivot in action.
The combination of Narrative participants forms a milieu, an ecosystem of echo chamber progenitors and participants, who work in concert across the infonomic sphere in a constantly churning exercise of self-promotion and preservation.
The most terrifying part of this tale is that the end result of this process is a centrally planned information economy, followed by centralization of political and economic power in the handful of elites who drive The Narrative. In the end the market economy stops working, and in the absence of competing ideas, becomes unrecoverable.
If this is the problem, and you are properly alarmed, what is the remedy?
Just one thing: keep the Free Market of Ideas fully free. All ideas are subject to the same skeptical scrutiny, the same proofs, the same opportunities. Drop the pejoratives. Excel at reason. Flip your own argument around and see if its logic benefits both sides equally. Be consistent, be specific, and be prepared to explain what you believe and why you believe it. Demand nothing less.
What have you heard in the last 120 days that you absolutely knew to be true? How many times did you question those things, and seek source material, proofs and eyewitnesses? If the republic just disappeared in a red mist of crowdsourced fraud, grey technolegalities, information obfuscation, invective and distrust, and The Narrative didn’t notify you, did it really happen? Did any of it happen the way they said?