Reality Bites

"I know why they were lying to me; but why were they lying to *themselves*?"

In the Social Media age we talk about epistemic bubbles all the time; closed groups of people agreeing with each other and isolated from unpleasant facts. What’s less commonly spoken about is that bubbles are historically good, and normal; civilisation could not have arisen if people didn’t spend the majority of their lives surrounded by others who saw the world as they did. No, the unique sensation our age is of being trapped in someone else’s bubble, someone else’s dream, and knowing that it’s a dream without being able to do anything about it. 

Up until the recent Presidential debate, the portrayal of Joe Biden was an archetypal example of this phenomenon. For at least the past two years your social media feed had been peppered daily with images of a man who was demonstrably incapable of doing anything more strenuous than falling asleep in a rocking chair with a tartan blanket pulled up to his chin; it’s been a festival of zombie shuffling, inaudible mumbling, unaccountable explosions of rage, and sentences that disintegrate into mush like paper mache sculptures left in the rain. Yet when you turned to the official record you were told this was either not a problem or that the information you were receiving via your own eyes was false.

That’s not to say it wasn’t covered at all, of course. While there was lots of arse-covering reporting on the issue of Joe Biden’s mental acuity prior to the debate, in general it has been a masterpiece example of how the press cover a story they don’t want to cover. The first step is if at all possible don't report on it; if you have to, put factual reporting in the opinion pages so it can be falsely dismissed as a subjective take. When it would be embarrassing not to cover the story as real news, the next option is some mixture of “teach the controversy” (in America this the “Republicans pounce” approach), and to cover without drawing the obvious conclusions or linking to other publicly known information that is what makes the story notable and worth reporting in the first place. And of the course the journalism produced by these tactics is always massively outnumbered by that which just flatly tells you you’re not seeing what you’re seeing.

The absurd end result of all this is that a person who got all their information about Joe Biden’s health and performance from Joe Rogan or Infowars would have a more accurate assessment of those things than someone who got all their info from any major respectable news outlet from the Guardian to the new yorker. Quite aside from anything else, that’s so *embarrassing*.

All of which is to say that post-debate, many people’s overwhelming feeling was not one of rage, or schadenfreude, or fear, but of intense relief that the prison-bubble we’re all inside of had popped. It was confirmation at last that just because a particular point of view is presented back at you repeatedly by the magic mirror of the media doesn’t mean that it's true; and that there will come a point where a concrete price has to be paid for pretending something is true that is verifiably isn’t. This lesson is applicable to a wide range of issues from immigration to gender. Reality will out.

Since we’re ruled by very academically smart people, why is it that they keep falling into this pattern of destructive self-deception? Even from the point of view of his supporters it would have been better to have a realistic appreciation of Joe Biden’s difficulties, or to allow those difficulties to be presented truthfully. It’s certainly not in the class interests of the media to be forced into a rhetorical position where you can’t admit and act on something important that everyone can see. I understand why they were lying to us; but why were they lying to themselves?

Our society differs from older ones in being mostly run by people who proved themselves the best at passing exams in subjects that test the ability to manipulate words and ideas, organise information into the required forms, and manage processes, rather than actually *do* things. Humans enjoy flexing their strongest muscles, which means this is not just what these people are good at but what they enjoy and how they see the world, and what they are.

As a result, the most powerful people in our society constantly mistake controlling the content and output of the conversation for managing the underlying reality that the conversation is about. The problem is compounded by the fact that they are very good at exercising that control, by the existence of technological tools that make it very easy, and by the volume and immersiveness of conversation created. In such circumstances, any deception executed with sufficient skill will inevitably become self-deception. Hate Speech and Misinformation laws are an archetypal example of this problem. In one sense they are an exercise in pure power; if the political officer hears you saying something he doesn’t like, you’ll be disgraced and flung in a cell. But in another way they are based on a kind of magical thinking, that if I can stop a problem being discussed then the problem goes away, because the discussion is all there is. But that’s not true.

One of the strange side effects of being on twitter for the last few years is that it has massively lowered one’s valuation of IQ and intelligence in and of themselves. Divorced from any narrow technical application, a facility with words and ideas is almost invariably applied to boosting the applier’s social status, maintaining their place in a hierarchy and finding reasons justifying whatever it is they already believe. To be on social media is to watch everyday as the most intelligent people apply their rhetorical skills to the most pressing moral and philosophical problems of the day and make absolute cunts of themselves.

The situation with Joe Biden and the press, and the wider trend of destructive self-deception enabled by the media, is part of this problem. Ideally in future the process of selection for high office would be entirely divorced from the easily manipulated realm of words and ideas by introducing a purely practical test, with concrete physical consequences that you can’t talk your way out of, or convince yourself that you’ve met. I for one would look forward to a presidential campaign in 2028 if it meant the candidates would be selected on the basis of their ability (say) to survive for a week on a desert island, single-handedly design and build a functioning bridge, or raise and personally lead a mercenary force to take the capital of an obscure african nation. Whatever the outcome of that process, at least it wouldn’t be a lie.