Just minutes ago at Washington Post, in the comments (on a featured column regarding the status of slaveowning of prior U.S. senators), I encountered this gem:
Who decides what is true?
This is where we are. This is the battleground I see in the future, as the march toward fascism continues. People are going to aggressively debate on what constitutes evidence—that is, what we can tell accurately reflects reality. They’re ready to detach from reality in nearly every respect, from what that comment is telling me.
Last night, I wrote a rather lengthy diary about the kabuki exchange between Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz, and part of what I touched on is this underlying indicator, that the right-wing extremists are beginning to jettison even basic standards of what common ground might include.
Propaganda and meta-propaganda correspond at once, in order to strengthen both.
It is in this context that we must view the exchange between Carlson and Cruz. Their interaction, just the body language and tone, informed most of the (male) audience members of Cruz’ capitulation to Carlson rhetorically instead of the actual information the two together were conveying.
This was performative propaganda of the masculinist flavor, a power pretense of pantomime, to confuse the viewer at home as to what a “lie” is.
Do we yet have any sense of shared truth? What about after the stress of the midterms?
At this point, it appears that these folks are Cypher in the Matrix, where they realize that they’ve had blinders on the whole time, that their entire understanding what “real” is has shifted fundamentally, and they’ve decided consciously that they’re turning around to plug themselves back in. “My brain doesn’t know the difference,” Cypher said. (Truer words?)
Many philosophers and observers of culture have warned us that once we lose our fellow feeling for each other, our innate sense of that invisible bond that holds us together as a citizenry, once we lose our own collectively held sense of civic trust, then that is when the transformation happens. That is when the battle is lost. It’s almost impossible to come back from that. (Those of us who’ve been in romantic relationships where a partner has cheated understand this on a fundamental level [that is, we grok]: once trust is squandered, it is a tall order to earn it back. And it has to be earned. On a nationwide scale, what would that even constitute? Could it be done?)
Some actions are irretractable.
[According to Kant, if] there was a universal law that it was generally OK to tell lies then life would rapidly become very difficult as everyone would feel free to lie or tell the truth as they chose[.] It would be impossible to take any statement seriously without corroboration, and society would collapse. — “Truth-Telling and Lying”
Thomas Friedman last May in the New York Times echoed Kant’s warning:
I saw close up what happens when democratically elected politicians think that they can endlessly abuse their institutions, cross redlines, weaken their judiciary and buy reporters and television stations — so that there is no truth, only versions, of every story. And they think that they can do it endlessly — cheat just one more time, break one more rule, buy one more vote — and the system will hold until they can take it over and own it for their own purposes.
Then one day — and you never see it coming — the whole system breaks down. Whatever frayed bonds of truth and trust that were holding it together completely unravel.
And then it’s gone. And there is no getting it back.
Last year, I caught myself telling a rather unnecessary casual lie (some call them “white” lies; they’re just lies) to a former work colleague. In conversation, I’d papered over the fact that I had been laid off during the pandemic, and that night as I went over it I wondered why I even did that. It wasn’t necessary and I felt bad in the wake of it. I was being non-genuine. I was living a lie, a stupid lie at that! So I resolved then to stop doing that. I resolved to live more firmly in truth, every day.
It is only through being truthful that we can be genuine. We become truer to ourselves through this process. Becoming truer to oneself is part of individuation.
These MAGA folks see the nation becoming less and less democratic, with less liberty for all; and they say to themselves, “If I have to choose between that and the Matrix, I choose the Matrix!” They would rather turn away from reality and seek shelter in falseness in order to keep their comfortable illusions about life and their place in it.
I think this is the ultimate battleground, and I think we need to practice and prepare. Because they’re prepared to go full Winston Smith on us, in a setting more Clockwork Orange, with Agent Smith administering the interrogation.
You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.
—Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny