You can fool some of the people, all of the time | Hacker News Reader

You can fool some of the people, all of the time

economist.com

243 pointspseudolus216 comments

I think the rise of lies has little to do with humans being hardwired to resolve questions using emotions over reason. We prefer lies because we want a complex world to be simple, predictable, and manageable. Obviously it's not, so the only way that powerless people can believe their lives aren't spinning out of control is for authority figures to tell them what they want to hear: 1) every problem is simple and 2) a simplistic solution will fix any problem and return their world to the perfect Eden they believe it can and should be.

Happy fantasies are sustained only by lies. That's why we prefer lies.

3) Bad things don't happen for no reason. "They" do it.

Are these mutually exclusive ideas? I feel there's overlap between them. Acting based on emotional pull can also reduce cognitive overhead compared to the expensive process of making decisions predicated on logic.

On the other hand, lies don't necessary simplify worldviews either. We shouldn't forget that a significant part of the population is willing to engage in conspiracy theories that all too often draw lines between loosely correlated events.

I think belief in conspiracies serves the same end as wishful thinking -- we can blame others for creating the evils of the world. Us-vs-them thinking also serve our need for being surrounded by 'friends', something you can do only if you have enemies. So inventing conspiracies and enemies are great ways to give yourself comfort amid a messy largely random world you can't control. If only we could get rid of our enemies, our world would be a much better place.

I think there's a conspiracy attempting to discredit alternative explanations. In the end they want you to belief there's no such agency.

Hate to be political, but as one Trump supporter said, when asked on Trump and his lies:

"I think what most liberals are missing is that this isn't about right and wrong, it's about winning and losing. I've attached my entire worldview to this man and I am going down with the ship. Not one of you is going to convince me otherwise."

Some people are simply willing to accept lies, if it resonates with their beliefs. A means to an end.

You can see that all the time in securities markets - completely ridiculous valuations and then bagholding all the way to the bottom. It's human nature. It's like people would rather be right than make money.

Also, I have no idea why people think this is new. If this is the age of dishonesty - when exactly was the age of honesty? I prefer Soros' approach of accepting human fallibility as an important part of the world, a part that's not going away just because I think it's "ugly".

That was clearly not an actual supporter. I mean, that is pretty obvious. A more realistic defense: Trump lays on the BS but it doesn't matter if you support X or Y policies and he's the only horse to bet on.

I don't believe that to be an actual quote, but having said that, we live in a post-truth world. We have recognised, at last, that the ends justify the means.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskTrumpSupporters/comments/dct1be/...

Whether or not he's a real supporter? Who knows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Very cool actually. I like this response and how it was downvoted: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskTrumpSupporters/comments/dct1be/...

Also a shame how confusing the new interface of reddit is... Yes I know I can go to old.reddit.com but still.

That may be one guys opinion, but you understand the other side is lying, correct? What I didn't fully appreciate until Trump was how much of politics is theater.

More than just one guy - seems pretty systemic, if you ask me.

https://www.axios.com/monmouth-poll-trump-approval-a05b8144-...

(But, yes, all political parties lie to some extent - some are just more brazen and outlandish than others)

Right, some (the DNC) will pay a foreign entity to craft a totally made up conspiracy theory about Russia collusion and then leverage the FBI, the CIA and all major news outlets to propagandize that bullshit while keeping a straight face.

At the same time they'll spike a story for three years on a prolific pedophile (Epstein) that implicates Bill Clinton, to protect their own.

All parties lie, but the DNC and their allies in the media...well they really take the cake.

What is the evidence that lies and the believing of lies are increasing?

See current article on HN about Facebook leaks.

Lying at scale without consequences seems to be becoming more prevalent. The inventor of that is generally considered to be Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. He used radio and film technology, which were new at the time, plus large rallies, to present a consistent but bogus view of reality.

After WWII, that sort of thing had such a bad reputation that it was not used much until after the WWII generation died off.

Lying at scale? Humans have had organized religion for millennia. You don't need radio, you just have to have an organization of priests to keep the fires burning in the temple and tell people about Jupiter when they visit. Even if you only count directly political lies, we have records of ancient historians expressing their doubts about various stories. I mean, come on, is the claim that the high water mark of truth and public knowledge was the Middle Ages?

Organized religion doesn't scale fast. Growth is measured over centuries.

The impact of radio was huge. For the first time, entire populations of large areas could hear their leaders. For better or worse.

I’m not sure there is any way to show that, you’d need historical data to compare to.

I think a lot of people expected that scientific advances and evidence would prove to be so convincing and powerful that superstition, irrational clinging to false beliefs and the use of misinformation would fall away and lose their power. That doesn’t seem to be happening, and so this feels like a regression even if it’s just the same old trash piling up for the same old reasons.

By reasoning of this article, we all ‘think’ we know what the answer is and it usually comes in the form of a one paragraph response that grossly simplifies how complex human beings and the world is. You use ‘I think’ to start your paragraph but, what’s more likely - according to what this article is saying - is that ‘you feel’ that what you say is correct and it is to a significant degree influenced by your emotions. Now you may come back and say, you don’t know me and I am a rational persona and use sound reasoning and carful research to come to my conclusion. However, the economist article states precisely that all people action on emotion rationalize this by pointing to how they use reason and sound judgement.

I am not trying to attack anyone here, I am guilty of this as much as anyone. But when you really evaluate your beliefs, including the one states above, can you confidently state that it is pure reason unaltered by emotion?

And I think this is the core, we must recognize that all of us are hard wired to behave like this. And maybe the best that we can do is try to recognize it often enough and then consciously counteract it.

I don’t have the answer here and it is beyond my expertise but I think anything complicated such as ‘why and how are humans hardwired to act on emotion instead of reason’ and ‘how is this knowledge being abused’, has more than one underlying cause that you alluded to.

You may be right and we may prefer lies exactly for the reasons you stated, but what evidence is there for that and how did you come to that conclusion? Or is it based on your ‘gut feeling’ or ‘intuition’ based on your world outlook.

Everything we learn has some inherent flaws due to the fact that it passes through the brain’s limited capacity to deal with biases and separate reason from emotion.

So, while I think my response is terribly insightful and impressive. In my limited capacity, I know that I will no doubt be humbled by responses of others which will point out my own errors in my reasoning.

Have you tried applying the logic of that idea to the idea itself? Seems to suggest that the rise of lies might not be so tidily explainable.

In general, I'm wary of ideas that are self-referentially unstable in the above way.

/2cents

This is the power and appeal of virtually every conspiracy theory.

I'm not sure people are really fooled by lies that much, rather they see them for what they are, a tool to persuade for something they emotionally connect to.

It's easy to despair at the apparent lack of rationality of my fellow human beings and their ability to be manipulated at the emotional level by people who don't have their interests at heart.

However aren't people who aren't emotionally controllable the definition of psychopaths?

So perhaps rather than focus on pointing of the lies and demanding a fact based debate, we should embrace the emotional and simple label people as liars and have the courage to talk about the real emotional issues.

Take - 'Build the wall' - clearly a not a great practical solution - but to treat it as such is to misunderstand that's it's a simplified slogan that covers a large raft of underlying issues - worries about immigrant, job security, crime, drugs, culture, racism etc.

In fact by criticizing the wall as a practical solution you are implicitly agreeing with the underlying agenda - that there is a solution needed. If you do indeed agree with the underlying agenda and only disagree on the solution then you need your own slogan 'Dig a trench' or 'Shoot on sight' , if you don't then you need something like 'Welcome in', 'Together we are stronger' etc.

In the UK - arguing 'Get Brexit Done' is silly as it's just the start of a long set of negotiations. However if you focus on that - you are effectively again implicitly agreeing that it needs to be done, just arguing on a technicality.

May I recommend this talk on the neuroscience of language and thought by George Lakoff?

https://youtu.be/JJP-rkilz40?t=280

And also this one on political language, morals and metaphors?

It will change how you listen to political speech, and especially political speech targeting people with different political orientation -- which can often sound nonsensical, but is actually carefully constructed to activate their metaphors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM

Basically, the ideas of enlightenment (we are rational beings) are not true.

A couple of slides from the first lecture:

Myth:

Reason is conscious, you know what you think.

Science:

Reason is mostly unconscious, estimates are about 98% unconscious.

Conscious thinking is linear. Brain circuitry is massively parallel.

Myth:

Ideas are made meaningful via their direct connections to the external world.

Meaning is a matter of truth conditions.

Science:

Ideas are made meaningful via the brain's connections to the body and our embodied experience.

Myth:

Emotion gets in the way of rationality.

Science:

Emotion is necessary for rationality.

My pet theory is that democracy is more tolerable because it alternates between incompetent people fast enough to keep people's hopes alive.

That's exactly what the US system is supposed to to. Continuous, rapid cycling between small improvements and slightly smaller regressions.

As the Federal bureaucracy grows and as elected politicians stay in office longer the regressions become more severe though.

If it gets bad enough you end up with a massive centralized apparatus which inevitably implodes and takes out the nation it governed with it.

As seen in China every 100-200 years throughout it's history, as seen in the USSR, Rome, etc.

Lots of small sadnesses are always better than one or two big ones (which is the central premise of Nassim Taleb's books)

Nassim Taleb believes dictatorships are better than democracies because "Lots of small sadnesses are always better than one or two big ones"?

A dictatorship gives one person the ability to cause a singular big sadness.

So they're no good. He touts the extreme federalism of Switzerland. Small, local governments which can only affect and are only responsible for their immediate constituent

Concentration of power => concentration of fail points => fragile to catastrophic events.

Distribution of power => distribution of fail points => majority of system will survive catastrophes.

Or, in VC speak:

single investment in single start-up => fund will not survive a failure.

Many small investments in many start-ups => 75% fail, 10% break even, 10% make 2-3x, 5% return 10x

Very cool and interesting. I'm sure you could apply to tech as well. I.e. Micro services vs Monolithic services.

Thank you for clearing that up.

I have a similar theory, the right and the left each get to alternate so we stay sort of in the middle.

Which is the exact reason the system is setup like it is. The federal government is only supposed to take action when it can get two ideological parties to agree on something.

The theory being that if the two sides can find common ground, it's actually a good idea.

Seems like a real world implementation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

I'm not sure that's a great thing, but you're never going to find a consensus that's both palatable to a majority and the right thing to do (of course, "right thing" being what I'm arbitrarily deciding is "right" based on my own values).

What's the compromise between pro-slavery and anti-slavery? Thank god argument to moderation wasn't the solution here.

There are two checks against the agreed upon "right thing",the national executive who has to agree with the consensus, and (thanks John Marshall), a system of (theoretically) impartial courts which can decide if the "right thing" is actually allowed according to the rules of the game (Constitution).

The slavery compromise was exactly that. First the 3/5th agreement, then the Missouri compromise, then finally, when one side got all of the power (which is what the system is supposed to mitigate the chances of) a shooting war.

Lincoln likely wouldn't have gone quite so agro on slavery if not for succession.

And there likely wouldn't have been a United States if there hadn't been any compromises on slavery. The two sides would have split at the outset, and either 1) neither would have been able to amass enough influence on the continent and they'd have been reabsorbed by a European power 2) after a hundred years of independent growth and simmering hatred, the two nation's would have had a war even more disastrous than the American civil war.

Moderate political solutions are (1) very frustrating and (2) much more effective in practice than they have any right to be. Often both sides of a political argument are wrong about the nature of reality and a solution where the major concerns of both sides are addressed is pretty good.

And the important thing is often that decisions don't happen in isolation. A moderate middle ground solution that fails often lends a lot of weight to the next round of negotiations when people decide what to try after compromise solution #1 fails.

The moderate solution failing probably isn't going to be as catastrophic as a unilateral solution from either of the opposite ideological camps.

The system survives long enough to make it to the next round of negotiations

It's not great, but it sucks the least.

Which, given that the US Constitution of "minimize the damage one person / group can do" is the longest standing constitution currently, I think it's one of the better solutions.

This has no historical basis. The system was designed to preserve control of government in the hands of the elite cadre who led the rebellion, whose ideological differences were quite small in world historical terms. It’s meant to reconcile these differences, but is in no way broadly inclusive to political interests outside this narrow circumscription. Concessions have been won to further democratize the system, but these were largely accomplished outside its terrain in things like the Civil War, labor struggle, suffrage and civil rights movements.

At least in the US, I think you’re mistaking controlled opposition in the form of a pseudo-left Democratic Party for things alternating. Post 1970s, the ideological continuity between the two parties (austerity for the people, largesse for the military, corporations, and ruling class) is quite obvious, but obfuscated in public discourse through various culture wars.

Yeah, the US’ Democratic Party would be the conservative right wing party in many other countries.

That is counterfactual.

Since the 1970s, military spending has decreased as a percentage of government spending and as a percent of GDP, while "for the people" spending - social security, healthcare, etc. - have risen dramatically in both measures.

See http://metrocosm.com/history-of-us-taxes/ and scroll down to the spending breakdown.

Pure spending numbers are a little misleading.

One reason is that spending is often dictated by need. Military spending, for example, is hugely influenced by the current political environment so a reduction in military spending from the levels of the 40s-80s is not really a "for the people" change as it is more a "we don't need to fight the Axis/Soviets anymore" change. Similarly spending on social security and healthcare is something that is hugely impacted by the age of the population.

The second big factor is revenue generation. "For the people" spending might not be a huge benefit to the middle and lower classes if that program is funded by revenue from the middle and lower classes. If you only look at that spending chart you do see a dramatic increase in social security spending, but there is also a large increase in the social security revenue side that helps pay for it.

So your position is that post 1970s increases in government transfer payments are "not a huge benefit to the middle and lower classes" and represent "austerity", and that major reductions in spending are "largesse for the military".

Interesting.

I don't agree with OPs entire point and certainly wouldn't use such extreme language, but I also don't think you can dispute that point while only looking at spending like you did in your response.

Spending trends were sufficient to refute the OPs assertion.

To go deeper, take spending (here's another link - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-t... basically 65% of federal spending is now for social welfare, rising from about 5% of GDP in 1970 to 15% of GDP in 2016) and add in who pays the majority of taxes (the top 20% pay almost 70% of taxes https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/who-pays-taxes).

The progressivity (rate of upper income taxes vs lower income taxes) has also increased in the time period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Average_US_Federal_Tax_Ra...

So the upper classes pay more taxes in both rates and absolute dollars, those rates have increased, and the social welfare programs are the largest and increasingly largest categories of spending.

See also the growth in income of the various quintiles after taxes and transfers, and the trends over these decades: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55413#section2

To credibly assert "Post 1970s...austerity for the people, largesse for the military, corporations, and ruling class", you'll need to provide some strong opposing facts.

To reiterate and clarify the point from my original comment, you need to ask why and to what effect spending is done. The population of the US is much older and much unhealthier today than it was in 1970 and healthcare is more expensive. So increased spending on healthcare doesn't necessarily prove an increase in commitment to serve the people and can instead simply be a result of rising costs.

Also that Wikipedia link you included conveniently doesn't start until the very late 70s just after the top rate saw a huge drop from the levels established in the post-depression era.

Lastly you need to factor in growing income inequality in these numbers. It is possible for the top tax bracket to collectively pay both a higher share of taxes in both percentage and absolute dollars while each individual person in that tax bracket sees their tax rate decrease.

If I used to give 5% of income and now I give 15% of income, my commitment has increased, even if the need has also increased. 5% GDP to 15% GDP shows a pretty dramatic increase in commitment, especially with the economic growth in that time frame.

OP asserted "Post 1970s", so starting in the late 1970s is the appropriate starting point (quibbling?).

The progressivity rate link above was tax rate, not percentage of taxes paid.

Let's say I paid $500 per month in rent a decade ago and today I pay $1500 in rent. What does that say about the quality of my home today compared to the quality of my home a decade ago? It says nothing because there are countless other details being ignored in that equation.

OP's point was that a change was made during the 1970s. You therefore need to look at the period before the 1970s and compare it to after the 1970s. You were just looking at the time period after the largest change in the top marginal tax rate was already made. Here[1] is the top marginal tax rate during a larger time frame.

[1] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Marginal_...

Can you clarify which statements in the parent you're asserting are counter-factual?

The parent seems to assert:

1. the parties function as controlled opposition

2. the Democratic Party is pseudo-left

3. after the 1970s, the two parties have had ideological continuity

4. one example of this ideological continuity includes some (preference for? belief in? rhetorical advocation of?) austerity* "for the people"

5. another example of this ideological continuity includes largesse (i.e., generosity) "for the military, corporations, and ruling class"

6. the ideological continuity is obvious, but obfuscated in public discourse through various culture wars

* I'm not clear on what definition(s) of austerity the parent has in mind here. This could be the general pol/econ definition, but the direct contrast with largesse makes me wonder if the more general "severity" definition is also important.

It didn't work well enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_(Colombia)

Or keep them busy fighting over the captain while the competent rest of the ship stay the course :D

Definitely how I felt in pre-Macron France, where the presidents were just telling idiots impossible dreams why the whole country was managed prudently.

Maybe this time I am the idiot in the demographic targeted by the president, so I feel hopeful again ahaha

Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. The fight for power (aka. resources) it inescapable and the only thing that democracy did, was to change the field that this fight is fought on. Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes.

The only two benefits of democracy to "the people" are: (1) the fact that they have now become the weapons .. and if they are smart, they can use that power to influence which actions of the warring factions are needed for their supremacy so that they are more inline with the interests of the people. (2) the entry requirements and risks to become one of the factions are much lower which can help with (1)

The only problem is that the warring factions know this and will do everything they can to conceal the reality of the situation so that the people do not exercise the power that they have. And they have been very successful at it. The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief.

> The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief.

If the alternative is swords and bullets, I would think most people prefer democracy. It’s the worst system, except for all the others attempted so far.

It's not the alternative, democratic countries also rule by force in the end. The governments wouldn't work if they didn't have guns, prisons and nice interrogation methods in their toolset.

With democratic country everyone has some minimal effect on how those tools of violence are used, unlike in dictatorships or monarchies. So I think also it is a better system.

> Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. > (...) >Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes.

Leaving rebuttal of your other points aside, can you see how that is not the same thing at all? It's like claiming "a plane is nothing more than a system which can move through the air the same way a boat can move through water. That's it". The two lead to very different consequences!

>The fight for power (aka. resources) it inescapable and the only thing that democracy did, was to change the field that this fight is fought on.

It also opened up the field for consent on all sides. There is not way to wage a war in such a way that all sides win, a way to fight in a way where noone gets hurt. Democracies with minority protections (aka one of the ways we differentiate democracy from mob rule) make true win-wins possible.

> The only problem is that the warring factions know this and will do everything they can to conceal the reality of the situation so that the people do not exercise the power that they have. > The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief.

The first sentence describes the removal of democracy. The second claims that this is evidence for democracy not always being good for the people. Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people

> Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people

I don't understand why people here see democratic system as a replacement for ruling by a force. Democratic countries also rule by force in the end. Democratic countries also need polices, guns, armies, prisons, tax inspectors, prosecutors etc. Those same institutions are also the tools for dictatorships, they are just governed in a different way.

(I also think democracy is good, but however in the end both democracies and dictatorships rely on violence to be effective. I think that's quite basic lesson on how society works.)

Dictatorships rely solely on force. Democracies mostly rely on a common agreement to follow a social contract. There’s not nearly enough police in the US to quell a rebellion of the people if they lost faith in Democracy.

Isn't it true though, there's not nearly enough police in any country to quell a rebellion of the people? This is how dictators get overthrown.

There might just be enough police and military to quell any feasible rebellion, seeing as pretty much every country is divided along ideological lines.

MAGA types would, for instance, would never participate in a syndicalist general strike.

> Dictatorships rely solely on force.

Not necessarily. Some dictatorships do enjoy genuine support. (Obviously they make it easier for themselves it by controlling the media etc.)

> There’s not nearly enough police in the US to quell a rebellion of the people if they lost faith in Democracy.

By the same token it's also possible to topple a dictatorship. At some point even your security forces will say "no". A good example would be the failure of "Plan X" in East Germany, when Stasi agents boycotted the orders, since they realized the cause was lost anyway.

If you've never seen it, this is a good watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

The relevant word isn’t “force” it’s “consent”.

All forms of government to some extent or another have to maintain a monopoly on legal violence and use force.

The distinction with democracy is that the government secures and maintains the consent of those being governed.

There are plenty of people who don't consent on a daily basis. The actions range from peaceful protests to traitorous acts. How does a democracy deal with them? Force.

Also much of the consent is, as Chomsky would put it, manufactured.

Don't invoke Chomsky for this nonsense.

> What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like something, you know, your wages are going down, you blame the government. Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't read the Fortune 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so let's get mad at the government.

-- Noam Chomsky

I'll invoke him if he's relevant.

It is possible for both the government and the private sector to be corrupted, especially if the latter exerts corrupting pressure on the former.

> I'll invoke him if he's relevant.

No, you're trying to speak for him. Consent to, say, physical assault being illegal, is a whole different ball game than manufactured consent to the Vietnam War, and all that is entailed in this wishy-washy stuff about "consent" in this context. Not to mention "democracy reacting by force to protest" -- as opposed to what, exactly? Non-democracies? Companies? People clicking buttons on HN? Nobody bothers to say, making it all an exercise in throwing shade at the one means of self-defense we have left.

> The neoliberal era of the last generation is dedicated, in principle, to destroying the only means we have to defend ourselves from destruction. It's not called that, what it's called is shifting decision-making from public institutions, which at least in principle are under public influence, to private institutions which are immune from public control, in principle. That's called "shifting to the market", it's under the rhetoric of freedom, but it just means servitude. It means servitude to unaccountable private institutions.

-- Noam Chomsky

> It is possible for both the government and the private sector to be corrupted

Obviously, but the private sector isn't "corrupt" when it's a tyranny, that's the best it can hope to be. The government is responsibility of the citizens in a democracy, not something purely external they get to just complain about.

Get off your high horse. Chomsky speaks for himself. We interpret his words differently.

I still don't see the obvious difference between consenting to "typical" law enforcement (read: "physical assault being illegal") and consenting to imperialistic wars all over the globe. In both cases the government employs its monopoly on legal violence and is empowered to do so by our consent.

Of course the distinction between reasonable law enforcement and horrible wars of aggression is obvious, but when the exact same mechanism used to manufacture consent for the latter is also used to manufacture consent for the systematic oppression of racial minorities through law enforcement, it absolutely is not.

> Obviously, but the private sector isn't "corrupt" when it's a tyranny, that's the best it can hope to be.

Is the officially accepted purpose of a private enterprise specifically and exclusively to create wealth for its owners, or have we just resigned ourselves to that reality? Isn't this supposed to be the most effective mode of production?

Yes, but you don't have to "manufacture" consent to, say, assault being illegal in anyone but sociopaths. That's the differnce. It's like saying "discussing in good faith and bashing our skulls in are actually both chemical and physical processs, I fail to see the obvious difference".

> Is the officially accepted purpose of a private enterprise specifically and exclusively to create wealth for its owners, or have we just resigned ourselves to that reality? Isn't this supposed to be the most effective mode of production?

Maybe you did, but then make the argument.

Going back to what spawned this discussion.

> There are plenty of people who don't consent on a daily basis. The actions range from peaceful protests to traitorous acts. How does a democracy deal with them? Force.

Let's say for the sake of argument that I am an American citizen and that I do not consent to the tear gassing and pepper spraying of college aged young adults, nor do I consent to Chelsea Manning being jailed and Snowden being in exile. Does that make me a sociopath? I'm only scratching the surface here.

In any case, I recall saying that "much" of the consent was manufactured and not "all" of it.

So? It's still force in alignment with the majority. That is better than force in alignment with one central power that may or may not have public interest.

It's less rule by consent and more rule by mob. Just because 50.5% of people vote for something I disagree with, doesn't mean I suddenly consent to it being law. I still don't have a choice and must unconsentually comply, otherwise "men with monopoly on legal violence" come and kill me or take me to prison. The only other choices are 1. convince the 1% (literally millions) of people to change their mind and get that vote to 49.5%, or 2. find a different place to live.

You forget the second amendment remedy. The USA was founded by destroying the agents of the state that taxed and oppressed the people.

Those founders would be considered terrorists today.

That's the theory. However, just see what happens in most democracies if you, or a larger group of people, try to revoke your consent to be governed.

The jackboots come down just as hard.

How is that consent measured?

I was born in a Democracy. Democracy was forced upon me. I never gave my consent.

Note: I'm not talking about whether Democracy is good or bad, just about my "consent".

edit: fixed typo

I'm not sure what the parent meant by consent, but you are in fact allowed to leave and resign your citizenship. So you aren't forced into the constitution.

This is an example of Hobson's choice[0]. It is not really a choice.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice

In this case you also have the right to vote and get equal representation. I'm not saying it's an amazing position to be in, but I can't think of any way to make things more consensual on all sides.

In practical sense, voting in a democratic republic is simply choosing, very infrequently, between a set of pre-defined parties. Only the natural supporters of the most popular party are given real agency. Any other viewpoint is discarded by design.

That a candidate is elected, doesn't mean they have anything close to 50% real support in the population. They just need to embody the one set of decisions that the largest homogeneous group of people agree with. That could very easily be a low single digit percentage of the population.

Smaller scope, heterogeneous governments with protected passageways in-between them would be a way to make things more consensual. If people can chose between multiple governments while still staying in similar climate and language-speaking areas, then you could say they really "chose to live in their country".

The agency situation for the average democratic republic citizen is not great right now. Exercising the negative side of consent requires huge sacrifices that many rationally can't make.

The rich live pretty good lives in most places and only leave for greater opportunity.

The poor have few places to go and no resources to go anywhere.

You gave your consent at democratic election, so now you have your representatives in government.

In democracy, your country is your property, so you were given your share of your country at your birth, with corresponding benefits and obligations.

In despotism, country, including citizens, is owned by despot, so citizens inherit obligations only.

>You gave your consent at democratic election

No, you voted at the democratic election. There is no question on the ballot asking whether or not you consent to be ruled by the resulting government.

Think about how many differences between those two abstract interpretations of citizenship manifest in real life.

Differences are astonishing. It's Ok for a despotic country to murder their property, or property of some other country when net effect is positive for them. For them, it's like a plantation: if we cut some trees, or cut grass, then net yield from field will increase, so lets do it. If you are good plant and in good place, you will be left. If not, you will be cut.

For example, it's Ok for Russian Federation to kill their own or foreign people (e.g. British citizens), or start a war just to increase their profit from their natural gas.

Are you positive western democratic republics don't murder and/or start wars for profit ? Last I heard the USA's army and secret services were pretty active.

What's different about their armies and ours ? I mean when was the last time citizens of a democratic republic gave their input on what assassination to carry out or war to wage ?

There is definitely a point about overt, extreme abuse against their own citizens being mostly prevented by representative democracy. But nothing about general consent or agency.

A lot of differences:

- No eternal leaders. - Freedom of expression - Separation of powers that limit each other

Apart from "No eternal leaders", I don't think these are specifically attributable to representative democracy.

>No eternal leaders.

Oh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monarchy_referendums

>Freedom of expression

Oh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Haverbeck

If you don't consent to democracy, you implicitly consent to non-democracy. That means you consent to being ruled without your consent. And that's what you got.

> I was born in a Democracy. Democracy was forced upon me. I never gave my consent.

You were born without your consent too, therein lies the rub.

There is no consent. There is not even a choice.

Even in anarchy, humans form groups because it's better than being alone. Every group has rules. Members can choose to follow them and enjoy the benefits or leave the group and lose the benefits.

Governments don't follow this logic. Nobody consciously decides that they want to be governed, they just happen to be born on a particular territory. Most people can't just reject the laws and leave, and those that can are really just choosing between other governments. They can't simply create another country with their own laws and invite people over.

The social contract isn't really a contract, it's an imposition.

> I don't understand why people here see democratic system as a replacement for ruling by a force.

I would hazard a guess that a lot of us, that see it this way, are from culture backgrounds that still have historical recollection of "not democracy".

The definition of state is it's monopolisation of violence. But the difference is if it uses violence to keep the specific section of the ruling elite in power ... or just to keep the state (i.e. the entirety of the ruling elite) in power.

Dr. stone here

I'll preface this with my bias. I'm a bit of an anti-authoritarian moral reductionist, an anarchist of the unhyphenated sort. I believe that you can express all moral statements that convey meaning solely in terms of the imposition of will, that the imposition of will for any reason other than to resist a greater imposition is the only immoral act, and that any framework which attempts to ascribe moral meaning to reality must either reduce to this or invalidates itself by contradiction.

I find the post you're responding to be an amusingly phrased and more reasonable interpretation of democracy than most, and will with the remainder of my post attempt a proportionate defense from the imposition of will you intend in representing your self-interest as moral truth.

> can you see how that is not the same thing at all?

I believe this phrasing is unnecessarily dismissive of the viewpoint you are responding to. A micro-imposition, if you will.

> [Democracy] also opened up the field for consent on all sides

Democracy does not transform or create consent, consent existed in the same form prior to democracy. If you do not resist an imposition of will, you consent. There is one point of the original post I will disagree with: the vote does not impose on the governed in democracy, the people with "swords/bullets" who find that vote to be an agreeable imposition and resistance to be a disagreeable imposition do. Voting may often be an adequate proxy for the use of violence to coerce, but it is nothing other than a statement of one's willingness to use violence or see violence be used for coercion towards a specific end.

> Democracies with minority protections (aka one of the ways we differentiate democracy from mob rule) make true win-wins possible

I disagree. Democracy enables aspects of reality to be classified by criteria which do not convey moral meaning, and for those classifications to become parameters in the function that allocates violence for the purpose of coercion. The closest approximation of a "true win-win" within the constraints dictated by reality is when all parties minimize their imposition. Voting in regards to which arbitrary classification of reality shall be imposed on in the interest of some other arbitrary classification is a statement of violent intent which is so far detached from moral meaning it amounts to a random walk in that metric space.

> There is not way to wage a war in such a way that all sides win, a way to fight in a way where noone gets hurt.

It is not possible to exist in such a way that all things which do exist or could possibly exist win. Physical reality is inherently adversarial: conservation of energy suggests that a quanta of energy released by one process can only and will only be consumed by exactly one process. One may strive to maximize the entropy of reality, to allow the largest number of contending states to be occupied, and this is moral. Democracy, again, moves with no discernible direction in relation to moral meaning.

> The first sentence describes the removal of democracy. The second claims that this is evidence for democracy not always being good for the people. Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people

Democracy is exactly ruling by force. Resist the imposition of the will of the majority, or something which is fraudulently misrepresented as the will of the majority unopposed, and you will be coerced by violence. The only thing that is inherently good for the people is for every individual person to minimize their imposition to that which is necessary to survive and seek truth, and only then if that does not require a greater imposition than they would resist. Anything more is an immoral act of self-service.

> A micro-imposition, if you will.

No sir, I certainly will not.

> If you do not resist an imposition of will, you consent.

Thousands of victims of date-rape drugs say you're wrong.

I believe in this case it's reasonable to interpret the past imposition as a statement of future intent and resist by proportional means. Discontinue consumption of substances offered to you by someone who has previously intoxicated you without your consent. Use violence as necessary to resist being coerced into consumption in proportion to the degree being intoxicated and used for gratification inhibits your survival and pursuit of objective truth.

> If you do not resist an imposition of will, you consent.

> Discontinue consumption of substances offered to you by someone who has previously intoxicated you without your consent.

So you agree there wasn't consent the first time. Sounds like refuting yourself to me.

I do not assert the dichotomy.

If the option to resist the imposition is not presented, the question of consent has not been called.

The act occurs without consent but also without dissent.

When likely future intent is made known by past actions, the question of consent has been called and may be answered.

You raise an interesting challenge and it is a scenario I haven't considered before. I am happy to discuss it and any other issues you find with my morality, but I would prefer if we could please agree that language is an approximation of meaning, attempt to seek clarity before semantic assertions, and that I be allowed to speak for myself.

Okay, speak for yourself. Do you stand by the statement "If you do not resist an imposition of will, you consent," or do you wish to revise it?

I'm sorry, I'm really trying to understand your critique, but to me most of it just seems like a strawman, which leads me to believe I've not communicated my point all that well.

I've been in politics for close to 10 years - didn't get far, but far enough to accrued a lot of cynicism about humans and our organisational system.

>an you see how that is not the same thing at all?

My position is that a democratic system simply provides a proxy platform for the normal political struggle and it's only real effect is that less(no) people die when powers shift.

Most of everything else is propaganda as a weapon within this proxy war. As a result, my opinion is, that the only reason democracies do better economically is because it provides a safer, more stable, more reliable environment for more people to take risks and acquire extra resources they would otherwise be unable to.

> It also opened up the field for consent on all sides. There is not way to wage a war in such a way that all sides win, a way to fight in a way where noone gets hurt. Democracies with minority protections (aka one of the ways we differentiate democracy from mob rule) make true win-wins possible.

You will probably not be surprised if I state that in my opinion no one in power gives a sit about consent. Or about win-wins. Everyone within a democratic system is trying to win at the expanse of everyone else. But because participating in the struggle is safer and easier more groups do .. which leads to somewhat better results ... but only as long as there ARE more groups active. My critique is that we've become complaisant and are participating in the struggle less and less ... with predictable results.

> The first sentence describes the removal of democracy.

Only if you define democracy as anything more than I do. If that sentence is the removal of democracy ... than just about every democratic system is experiencing "removal".

> Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people.

I agree and have said so myself. But my point is that democracy is good for people because people don't die AND nothing more. The problem is that people somehow believe that democracy will also, by it's very nature, provide social services, healthcare etc.

Getting a vote instead of a bullet to the head seems like a pretty significant upgrade to me.

If that's the argument it comes down to for electoral governments, I'd say that's quite sad.

It may be sad, but it's still a very, very important difference.

Yeah, it is. But when you have that and start talking healthcare ... you should not relay on the system of democracy. But far too many people do.

Resources? The real fight is now for people's minds.

We already have orders of magnitude more resources than 100 years ago and almost everyone can benefit from them.

Hello, conflict theory sociologist here.

What? Absolutely agree that we have a ton more resources than previously. However, as has always been the case, they're not equitably distributed. Plenty of people are removed from resources they want or need.

Look at the US. We still have homeless people. We still have people dying of curable diseases. The fight for resources is real to plenty of people.

> Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes

This isn't quite true. People are killed over regional political struggles in democracies. The difference is one of scale, not of absolutes.

But the point stands - the people in power, in most cases, are replaced with minimal deaths.

"The only two benefits of democracy..."

In my opinion the one major benefit of democracy over all other forms is that a terrible leader can be voted away within 4 years. It's a political system with garbage collection :)

If terrible leaders could be voted away there would be no politicians in power.

If we go on a tangent and debate leadership, I agree that the current crop of leadership examples are pretty bleak around the world. What makes a good political leader? Are there examples in the past of objectively good leaders? Is it always at the expense of the neighbouring tribe and what happens when your hood is planet-scale?

Potentially even more important: a leader (terrible or otherwise) who loses power does not have to fear being murdered by his successor, and can hope to regain power. Thus, they have a much smaller incentive to use desparate (i.e. violent) methods to stay in power.

That's why the true test of a country's switch to democracy are not the first democratic elections, but the first democratic change of power.

If only it worked that way.

Under democracy you optimize for just a single metric - popularity. If leader is terrible and popular no garbage collection will occur.

Rise of populism is inherently built into nature of democracy itself.

I mean this is essentially how it works now but it didn't have to end up this way in the US. As-written we actually have a very nice electoral college where the people don't directly elect the president but instead choose someone (hopefully?) qualified to evaluate the candidates and vote on their behalf. And the states have the freedom to impose requirements on the elector nomination process so you get qualified people.

But a consequence of the states being able to independently decide how those electors are chosen lead to every state basically having a law that says that "you vote for the candidate instead of the elector, and the elector's don't actually matter and must follow the popular vote."

I really dislike the system as it exists now because the people directly electing 2/3 of the government in a checks and balances system kinda ruins the whole thing.

But we all know what happens with over-aggressive garbage collection: lost data, errors, cache misses, and lots of wasted cycles.

The term limit on the Presidency was a mistake.

It's not that easy to vote out a leader in some countries because the leaders control the state machinery. They present an illusion of free and fair elections but use their entrenched power to influence the vote through bribery, disenfranchisement by making people believe their vote doesn't count among other sinister tactics.

What if there aren't any terrible leaders per se, just that none of the leaders feel 'right'? What if the leaders that replace them in the next election cycle also lack voter confidence?

Historically, monarchy’s seem to be more stable and result in less open warfare (civil wars). The US did not even last 90 years before the first civil war. A rather large number of democracies have fallen and been replaced with dictatorship.

Democracies have other benefits, but stability does not seem to be one of them.

PS: I am ignoring assassinations and power struggles as we have lost 4 sitting US presidents without it being considered a civil war.

Many suffer silently under monarchy's. And democracies require an educated and relatively honest, or homogenous society to function. If people can't agree on fundamentals--even to disagree peacefully--then there's no hope.

> Historically, monarchy’s seem to be more stable and result in less open warfare.

How did you come to that conclusion? It seems like ahistorical nonsense to me.

Well the history of democracy is very short compared to monarchy. Let’s check back in on this in a few thousand years to see how both fare.

Plenty of research supports this, for example this trying to find why so many new democracies result in civil wars:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752195?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

By comparison England lasted from 886 to 1642 without open civil war. At the extreme Harappan civilization seems to have lasted 2,000 years without an open civil war or really any major wars.

Except for the Hundred Year War, the War of the Roses, and the many other smaller English civil wars.

But yes, if you exclude all the civil wars then England had no civil wars during that time period.

It’s a common terminology: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_succession#Terminolog...

Hundred Year War is hardly a civil war existing as it did between multiple countries.

Smaller conflicts like Buckingham's rebellion are excluded much the same ways as I ignored most of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rebellions_in_the_Un.... Along with a host of unmentioned smaller slave revolts.

The War of the Roses was is arguable if it’s a civil war. I and many others disagree (see above Wikipedia link).

You could make a good argument that the South was not a democracy and the civil war was an overthrow of their aristocracy; not a war between two Democracies.

Just look at the Constitutions of pre-civil war Southern states. https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/suppressedbooka0...

Interesting perspective. Some people arguable if the US is currently a democracy with for example the 4+ million people in DC and the territories effectively lacking the vote.

IMO, what defines a democracy is large segments of the population having a meaningful vote rather than requiring some ideal implementation.

>> The only problem is that the warring factions know this and will do everything they can to conceal the reality of the situation so that the people do not exercise the power that they have. And they have been very successful at it. The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief.

Democracy is neither evil nor good. It is just a popularity contest. Merit doesn't matter - only popularity does.

Surely you can see some causal relationship between the two though? On a “whole society” scale, how is merit defined? If you come up with some rigid concrete definition, someone else may disagree. So democracy stands for the proposition that the most reliable way to define merit is to trust the majority of people’s consensus. How else would you propose that merit be defined and evaluated, long term, on the scale of an entire society?

Counterpoint - rise of populism.

It is popular, but useless.

I do not have a better system, but i do not lie to myself that democracy is perfect.

I don't know to what extent this adversarial definition of democracy is true. Democracy literally means the power is with "the many" instead of "the few", and in recent centuries it reemerged due to the rise of the urban class who could no longer tolerate centralization of power. In ancient times, democracy was largely ensured by allotment, in our times it's almost exclusively through majority-election. The principle though remains similar.

> I don't know to what extent this adversarial definition of democracy is true.

I'm being more and more convinced of this because in my experience it is much better at explaining and predicting reality.

It's not pleasant and I didn't want to accept it. But here I am.

That's only internally though. When the "wrong" faction wins in south america, another "democracy" sends armed forces and supports a coup and a dictator to protect its financial interests.

>Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes.

Tell that to the family of a friend's friend that was ambushed and decapitated in the middle of the night by an opposing political party because they made statements denouncing a political party during elections in a Democratic country.

ETA:News story to clarify what I'm talking about.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/world/asia/philippines-ne...

TIL Philippines is a democratic country

> Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it.

Why stop at bullets, why don't you say aircraft carriers or something

> The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief.

Not just inherently good, but unquestionably good. It has so many flaws, yet it's goodness is assumed as unassailable.

The design of a Republic serves to address some of the most obvious flaws. The biggest issue I see with the way republics currently operate is that there isn't a clear mechanism for handling bandwidth and processing constraints.

When the US was founded for example, congressional apportionment was one representative per 57,169 people. Today it is 747,184. The problem here is that it becomes impossible for a representative to effectively represent the disparate interests of that many people and it's also difficult for the representative to adequate sampling the interests of that many people. There are bandwidth constraints between representatives and constituents and there are processing constraints with handling more constituents.

Having a mechanism to manage apportionment for better outcomes seems like one key overlooked feature. We should have far more representatives and we should have more senators per state. This would also create more processing power for those representatives to spend time refactoring and improving existing laws instead of merely serving as commit generators.

Today we discuss the power of the 1%, but that's nothing in comparison with the power of the 0.00016% (538/327.2 million).

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-populat...

But on the other hand, hereditary monarchy allows a smart person to be at power every once in a while.

And if you do hit on a good one, you'd get forty or fifty years out of them if you were lucky.

You'd just need some Bene Gesserit types keeping the bloodlines, so you don't end up with the grandsons of Victoria or Charles II of Spain.

I've always seen it as a matter of risk. You could have an absolute monarchy and end up with the smartest, most empathetic person in the world as your leader who would be a net-benefit to your society for years to come. You could also end up with a total asshole that you're stuck with until death do you part.

Democracy (or perhaps bureaucracy) just de-risks the chance that your government fails you through diversification of parties involved, similar to diversifying your investment portfolio. Given that human nature tends to lead people into the "asshole" column, I can understand why democracy would be the preferable of the two approaches.

While this is true, the thing that doesn't change is that it is business that makes most of the decisions. They back both sides and threaten to not support a candidate for reelection if they don't get their quid pro quo. I feel like we actually live in a plutocracy.

The most convenient part for the the ruling class is that we have been tricked into thinking it is about red vs blue or left vs right. People talk about politics in a very "us vs them" vernacular. In the meantime, the corporate interests rob the middle class blind. It is a game of misdirection and self interest.

The only way to ever really solve it is a more representative and distributed democracy model. This kind of setup also forces a lot of the money out of politics. Alas, the rulers have no appetite for giving up the corruption they have worked oh so hard for.

In that vein I often think of democracy of an escape valve chimera. You get to scream on paper for a while until the next overload.

I'd deeply love an analysis about the effectiveness of voting / political systems in relation to goals/results. We would probably choke on the accountability issue right away.

An excellent primer on modes of Government, how they arise, and how this perpetuate is this CGP Grey video, Rules for Rulers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Democracy comes in different flavors. There is even a kind without career politician. Checkit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

I would love for sortition to come into vogue in the US. Not sure where it would fit but it seems like it aligns incentives better.

That actually made me chuckle.

It does seem that the election cycle is comprised of 1) promises, 2) elected based on promises, 3) failure to achieve promises, 4) kicked out of office because the other candidate is promising us stuff we want and we believe he will deliver.

Isn't there an implied undercurrent with all this that genpop are idiots? I personally am not saying this, but if people say that "money buys elections", what do they mean exactly? They do not mean that massive election fraud exists, nor that people are being directly paid for their votes - there is no evidence of that. Everyone agrees that people are fairly voting based on their wants. What they are implying though is that the slovenly masses are non-discerning dummies incapable of critical thought that can be convinced to believe whatever drivel you are able to purchase with money. Is that not the underlying premise of such statements?

If we accept those premises, is it advisable to allow the populace to vote on our lives and property?

Sort of, I guess. But it’s also the idea that most people receive a lot of information passively as a result of whatever ads are shown to them on tv, YouTube, Facebook, etc - so all that money goes to the volume of propaganda pushed out promoting one result or another. Important concepts often have nuance, and that means some good and some bad, and if you’re on one side or the other you can tell the part of the story you wish to become the narrative.

Sure, you could appeal to guilt about thinking less of others. But the politicians raising tons of money and spending it on ads seem to think it works, condescension be damned.

I'm not familiar with the research, but I'd rather not write off a theory because it makes me feel bad.

So... I’m skeptical of the claims that we automatically believe what we hear. Especially when they use Milgram as support.

The Milgram experiment is problematic, yes. It's the most narrative-friendly, but there's an enormous body of work on this question, and it seems largely to point in that direction. (Google Scholar claims 819,000 results for "confirmation bias".)

But confirmation bias is very different than believing everything you hear automatically (by default).

Indeed, confirmation bias might be summarized as "hearing what you believe" - very nearly the opposite.

You're right.

I get only 5 hits for "default to truth" -- which is so few that I think there must be a better keyword to search for.

http://archive.is/MXk4C

There is an excellent SMBC comic on politics: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-08-21. Transcribing the headings (not the complete dialogs):

1. If you have a self-consistent view, you're going to have problems.

2. In a self-consistent framework, you have infinite regression problems.

3. If you want your group to hold together, you need an ideology that doesn't make any sense.

4. Once you have a nonsensical platform, the group members can define the group however they want. Goals may change. The organization persists.

And well, it is the best description of any mainstream, organized religion. It is not about beliefs, as many may think: it is about group identity and loyalty. (Think about crusades, or violence against LGBT people, vs "turn the other cheek" and "love your neighbor".)

Of course, one needs to pay the lip service to a professed ideology - but then it is about loyalty not necessarily - beliefs.

That's a really top-notch comic. Thanks for sharing.

Totally agree. I used to know a hardcore catholic and spend a lot of time around other hardcore catholics and I was amazed at how nearly anything could be back-rationalized and absorbed into the philosophical framework with ease. It's as if the framework itself is designed to neutralize counterarguments. And not because it is based in reality and there is evidence to back everything up, but rather because, as you mentioned, the logical framework is so self-consistent.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Agreed. As an atheist, I found that some of the smartest people around are religious.

"It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth"

Alexis de Tockeville (1805-1859)

Is it too much to ask the author to define his terms? The nature of truth is subject to an ongoing epistemological debate. The author's unspoken presumption is that fallible humans can even approach truth.

Is it not more honest in a way if a politician or a criminal accepts that he can not do truth justice, and proceeds with the sausage making? Like an actor winking into the camera, self-irony becomes an important part of political theatre.

Audiences decrying the paradoxical nature of time travel or other impossible sci-fi plot elements is declasse. This is how the bitter partisans of the chattering classes appear while harping on the inconsistencies of their opponent's presentation.

What else can we expect from Hollywood? An honest politician is a contradiction of terms. It is insulting to expect one's audience to suspend their disbelief for puritan phantasms like honesty in politics. Acknowledge us. Give the readers some credit, we're not all outrage junkies.

Really an honest politican is technically possible but only if and only if the inputs are guided to such via demands. A voter base which accepts the truth or honesty. It is just that it is expected and career suicide to be anti "anti-rhetoric" blunt with unsexy qualified stances and truths. Saying "I will agree to just about anything for farm subsidies because despite less than 10% of the population working in the agricultural sector because my voter base has made it their identity." would be something from a brutal satire.

In the US today the fraction of the population working in agriculture is about 0.6%[1]. Agriculture is one of the most mechanized and corporate industries we have.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture

It seems telling to this reader that TFA leaves unmentioned a very important aspect of lying in modern times: lying to oneself. Perhaps this was meant to be ironic. Seeing irony where none is intended is just about the only way I can stomach the output of the war media.

> Is it not more honest in a way if a politician or a criminal accepts that he can not do truth justice, and proceeds with the sausage making?

No. It's not better. That way lies Russia.

If you already believe all politicians are liars, how is it at all helpful for a politician to tell you something you already know -- that he or she is lying?

Postmodernism is poison. Don't give up on the truth.

Even if it were true that all politicians play loose with the truth, there is an enormous variety to the spectrum. Some dodge uncomfortable questions. Some make unrealistic promises. Some quote out of context. Some exaggerate their accomplishments. Some make things up out of thin air.

Some politicians take none of those steps. We tend not to reward them for it. But an enormous number of politicians will not take that last step.

"Postmodernism is poison"

If there is anything that postmodernism has taught us. It's that bite-sized "truths" like this can never encompass an actual truth or reveal any meaningful reality.

>No. It's not better. That way lies Russia.

Please don't misread my comment as a prescription towards a political end. It does not follow that I would endorse any politician, nor does it follow that I subscribe to "the ends justify the means".

>If you already believe all politicians are liars, how is it at all helpful for a politician to tell you something you already know -- that he or she is lying?

I take it as a courtesy when their spiel is over the top and theatrical. It is a small conciliation when they embrace the absurdity of their position and go overboard. The presumption of political truthiness is insulting to me as a viewer. I understand that they are in a position that requires them to lie and cheat. I empathize, but I don't support them or endorse the process.

>Don't give up on the truth.

In the context of politics, these 'truths' are often highly subjective and ideologically driven.

Consider the drug war and all of the studies which were funded/suppressed to justify prohibition. Yet today cannabis is regarded as a panacea by many.

Even in the material sciences knowledge is constantly revised. Yet so many are willing to stand on this false summit and beat their chests as if they have reached the apex of understanding. In the case of politics what follows is the coercive force of the state to achieve some ends suggested by their limited understanding.

No, I haven't given up on truth. I reject politics as a means to any end.

>Some politicians take none of those steps.

Again with "This time is different", I'll call this special pleading. Believing in politicians and expecting change is like loaning money to an addict.

My view is that this is a byproduct of a flaw in the way human attention works. we deal with events not the whole landscape of reality as such. well because thats what it takes to survive. Politicians & media have caught on to this so all they have to do is manage attention when an undesirable event happens. once the event is lost its very hard for us to go back and review it as daily life take over & the cycle repeats.

IMO the only realistic way around this is to have more eyeballs looking at it and have smaller pools of resources so there is less incentive to distort. both of these converge to the solution that we need smaller constituencies and a more EU like structure with a lot more representation per capita. Otherwise everything becomes a 51% attack & with this electoral college & Senate composition we'd be lucky if that.

Some people want to hear some message and are willing to close their eyes and throw all logic away. So are easy to con. All cults and hardcore trump fans come to mind.

"This article is full of lies" -> can someone list them?

The narrative I got from the 2016 election was that nobody particularly liked any of the candidates, but that Trump's messages on trade etc. were marginally better than Hillary's more-of-the-same platform. It's true that partisan Democrats and Republicans put little thought into their votes, but since they vote the same every election they're not really relevant to the outcome.

Obviously, otherwise capitalism couldn't exist.

Please don't do this here.

This article is behind a paywall.

It seems to work with javascript disabled.

Most paywalls are defeated by disabling cookies or javascript, or both. Cookies is enough for the economist.

On Firefox you can reopen it in container.

Why does that help?

because container creates separate env so that site doesn't recognize you as previous visitor.

More work but you can open devtools and delete the "pop over" div that blocks the page, and then set "overflow: scroll" on the second div after <div id="app"> :)

In FF just toggle the reader view and refresh. That worked for me.

If most people are hard-wired to be duped, why does it feel like only recently people are getting even more conspicuously duped by their political leaders (a la Trump and Johnson)? Presumably this effect should have had a more uniformly distributed effect throughout history.

Is it solely due to the weaponization of technology for this means? Or are there other reasons for “why now”?

It been happening all along, it's just a bit more mask off right now.

It always become more blatant as the contradictions of capitalism intensify and the status quo becomes untenable. You see the same in Western European propaganda from the 30s, particularly in the Weimar Republic.

Is it a pendulum then? When it’s less obvious is it still happening (and they just do a better job of hiding it from a more sensitive public) or is actual positive change happening?

There’s this saying that sunshine is the best disinfectant, but that somehow feels less true right now. It seems like you can be openly crooked in a democracy as long as you appeal to a sufficient majority for other reasons not related to your crookedness.

There is a kind of pendulum, the predictable and periodic failure of capitalism. Whenever a crisis happens, it's hard to sustain the fiction that capitalism is good for most of us. Some shift left, realising that billionaires are in control and can be defeated. Others shift right, mistakenly blaming those already oppressed (poor, immigrants, LGBT).

Sunshine is clearly not the best disinfectant, since we see fascist rhetoric and violence spreading. Repeating a lie enough can work, especially when people are already angry and desperate. And especially when it's merely an intensification of the same rhetoric that capitalism spreads anyway.

Put differently, after capitalism has shifted the Overton window to the right by enough, fascism becomes more generally acceptable.

It's not increased, we're just more aware of deceptions.

Up until 100 years ago, you could go town to town scamming people and there'd be little cross town communication. Each town would know it had been duped, but you wouldn't know about other towns.

1) Accessibility

2) There's always been some measure of manipulation by political leaders in order to achieve certain goals. Obvious examples are the US in drumming up support for WW2 or the Vietnam war or ... well, any war, really. I don't think anything has really fundamentally changed since the "good old days", except people have realized that they can subvert democracy by just telling people what they want to hear. We have decades of history where you can say something and then do something else entirely, and this is just the natural extension of that. Political leaders, businesses, etc. have realized that there are no consequences for being bad actors, only benefits. Even if they are found out, they can influence the news in ways to make it blow over in a day, or they can tie up courts for years and years if it ever does go there (rare).

All I see is an inexorable march which started decades ago, and it's not going to stop here.

>1) Accessibility

This doesn't get mentioned as often as it should. I have read almost no critical analysis of the fact that cheap smartphones coupled with relatively cheap mobile Internet have brought the political discourse to lots and lots of more people, who otherwise most certainly would have switched the TV channel when the politics were on or who didn't read the politics section in the newspapers (if they used to read newspapers at all).

In other words, Facebook and Twitter by themselves would have meant nothing without the cheap Android phones.

> Or are there other reasons for “why now”?

Now because it's only been a short time since people could decide anything. Or at least were told that they could. How long since real parliamentary democracy, where say half of people who can currently vote were allowed to do so?

And in that time, the major outlets were few and gated by a journalistic system where you had to at least say something sensible and be judged by what some might call an elite, but others would call educated common sense.

Recently that status quo has fallen apart, and it's become clear that you don't need to have a message that is in any way cognizant of history, science, or any other established facts. The crazies at Speaker's Corner are now able to broadcast with a similar reach as people who've actually considered what to say.

Technology does indeed have a lot to do with this state of affairs, and is also alluded to in the article. That one nutter who says the world is flat online now causes others with the same inclinations to gain in confidence. Likewise with any number of ideas that would have quietly died.

I don't agree. 'Yellow journalism' has been around for almost 150 years. The major differentiator was who had the money to print, and an audience to read.

It would be nice to think that a news organisation's respectability would translate into a greater audience, but you only have to look at the Sun, Fox, et all to see that is not the case.

An interesting story is more appealing than one that is not, even if it is not true. And the cost of reporting false information is a small retraction printed weeks later on page 10.

The decline of news media profitability has led to the state of journalism today, which mainly consists of twitter gossip mongers, producing content not much better than the crazies at speakers corner (and often worse).

People can also be duped about their political leaders, not just by them.

It's much easier to tell that someone else has been duped if you haven't been duped the same way. Until recently the main dupers were playing for the same team, so it was harder to notice since there was no mainstream "other". Now they've split into separate teams, so now there is a mainstream "other" that people can easily notice.

> only recently

Internet is probably part of it. You couldn't spread so much BS so far/fast/cheap even 30 years ago.

I'm tempted to say that it's because of the change in epistemology. If there is no such thing as real truth, if truth claims are really assertions of power, then there's no point trying to figure out the truth. And, once you no longer are looking for the truth, any lie will do. Pick whichever one you like best.

Now, that's been going on for a while. I think it's been getting worse over time, as fewer and fewer people believe in actual truth.

And if you think that it's just Trump and Johnson - if you think the insanity is only on one side - you haven't been paying attention.

Democracy is ostensibly majority rule (don't nitpick). The majority of people are poor. Therefore, democracy is the rule of the poor (Aristotle). We do not live in a democracy.

If the poor were truly in charge, why would they choose to remain poor?

I think you're missing what the parent is saying: since the majority are poor, they plainly don't rule (since then they wouldn't remain poor). If democracy is defined as "majority rule," and we plainly see that the majority in the US do NOT rule, then the US is not a democracy.

Oh yes, I was agreeing.

If Party D promises free money to the poor and Party R does not, do you expect no poor people to vote for Party R? What if Party R has other things about it which appeal to the poor?

The poor have the opportunity to vote, and rule indirectly, and yet for many reasons often vote against their own best economic interests. Some of those reasons are good, and some are not.

See Gramsci's work on hegemony. Or (slightly easier) Tressel's "Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" which makes exactly the point about how the poor become convinced that it's better to give more things to the rich.

They aren't is the point. They would be if we lived in a democracy, and according to OP we don't.

You'd have to define "poor".

If you look at the progress of the poor in the US over the last 200 years, they're doing really, really well.

So well they can't afford homes, health care or even food? Despite working more than full time?

And cable TV and air conditioning?

"For example, in 2005, 63.7% of those living in poverty had cable or satellite television. In some cases the report even said that people currently living in poverty were actually better off than middle class people of the recent past. For example, in 2005, 78.3% of households living in poverty had air conditioning, whereas in 1970, 36.0% of all households had air conditioning." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#O...

So in 35 years, 78% of the poor had something that only 36% of households had previously.

Lacking access to necessary food/shelter/health care is "absolute poverty" (not the usually reported "relative poverty" rate https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/poverty-united-s...). And by that measure, including existing government and other benefits and transfer payments, the US poverty rate is near zero. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/09/17/americas...

I'm not saying we can't do better, but we should also realize how far we've come.

I don't know, some of these things can be attributed to the falling cost of technology and culture. Air conditioners are seen as necessary, instead of a luxury. It may never have even occurred to some people that they should prioritize affording money for one. Poor people could probably afford smartphones too when they first came out, but they only became common when everyone had one, and costs came down. Personally, I don't think quality of life is measured by air conditioning and cable TV either.

Yes - real cost (cost in hours worked) of necessities, and even former luxuries, has declined dramatically, and standard of living for the poor has increased dramatically. That's the point.

If you go to Mexico, you'll see people living in much hotter conditions without air conditioning (but they still have satellite TV).

Cable TV and air conditioning show the shifting standard of living that represents "poor" in the united states, and illustrate that a large percentage of "poor" definitely have the necessities (shelter in particular), as opposed to the "absolute poverty" who lack basic necessities of food/shelter/access to health care.

Quality of life is a different question, and very difficult to measure.

Most poor people have better amenities and work conditions. Probably even in the areas you mentioned. Basically, this is similar to the whole question of whether you'd be better off as a king in the middle ages, or an average joe now; or the idea that relatively speaking everything is better than ever.

You can fool 1000 persons one time. You can fool 1 person 1000 times. But you can't fool 1000 persons 1000 times.

Some people will know what I'm talking about :), the rest can just downvote this.

Don't let the world not understand your comment ;-)

It is a reference to La cité de la peur, a French parodic movie by "Les Nuls". Yes, the title of this post also made me think about it too. I wonder if good translations in other languages exist, but it seems pretty hard to do.

I'm probably missing the point since I don't know the movie, but isn't "You can fool some people some times, but you can't fool all the people all the time", which the article title is riffing on, more or less it?

What people like (or strongly dislike, for that matter) about this movie is that it is filled with bad puns (and plain base humor at times), absurd situations and absurd characters. The scenario would not even matter.

This quote, "You can fool 1000 times 1000 persons, hum, no, you can fool 1 time 1000 persons, but you cannot fool 1000 times 1000 persons. No, you can fool 1 time 1000 persons but you cannot fool 1000 times 1 person. No…", is a cult citation of this movie, said by a seemingly clueless character who can't manage to speak his sentence for the whole time of the movie, and who is, by the way, fooled all the time.

La Cité de la Peur, released in 1994, still gets referenced regularly, pretty much like Asterix : Mission Cléopatre, released in 2001, by people who like this kind of humor. Kind of impressive 25 (resp. 18) years later.

How am I even writing a comment on La Cité de la Peur today on HN? Have I woken up in a parallel universe or something?

Yes, that is a well known phrase and what the Economist is alluding to here.

from quote investigator

In conclusion, Jacques Abbadie should be credited with the interesting precursor statement in French. QI believes based on current evidence that Abraham Lincoln probably did not employ this well-known adage.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/11/cannot-fool/

As Doge said, "much pretentious".

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