Disinformation: It’s History
cigionline.org
cigionline.org
> It skewered what Achen and Bartels called the “folk theory of democracy.” By that, they meant the idea that voters support candidates who reflect the overall interests and goals of the citizenry. Instead, Achen and Bartels traced how other factors, such as group identities or national economic performance in the last six months before an election, mattered far more.
There will always be a cadre of technocrats vying for control because they think what it standing in their way is the freedom of others, which is circular reasoning in that the reason they are not in power is because people are not their subjects and slaves, and free people will not choose them or their policies. The only way they succeed is with deception and threats, and history is the story of what we have always had to do to dislodge them after tolerating the games that let the vampires in.
Are human institutions imperfect? Absolutely, but that's all we have. Is democracy perfectly responsive or unresponsive? Of course not. But the track record of democracies is orders of magnitude beyond any other form of government. Look at all the most free, most prosperous, most safe countries in the history of the world - all exist now, and all are advanced democracies.
> There will always be a cadre of technocrats vying for control ...
There will also always be a cadre of people who believe in and work to do good for their fellow citizens, 'in order to form a more perfect union'. There is bad and good in people; it's not so dark. There's both bad and good in both you and me, and we can choose among them.
> history is the story of what we have always had to do to dislodge them
That's a core piece of democracy: Voting them out rather than fighting a war works much better.
To be fair, what the USSR did between their revolution in 1917 and, oh, somewhere around 1975 was completely amazing. They took a fundamentally feudal, largely agragian society and turned it into an industrial world power. In terms of economic well-being, health, safety and possibility, for most USSR citizens it was a huge step forward.
I do not approve of the methods, and you could try to argue that they only succeeded at immense cost to both human lives and political freedom - I might not even disagree. But it is a reminder that sometimes massive changes can be pulled off by non-democratic government too. China over the last 35 years is likely a similar example.
Tens of millions died of starvation, more died in wars, more suffered brutal oppression, forced relocation, and had no freedom to live their lives or even speak their mind, not to mention widespread poverty. What was accomplished for those people?
We're not talking about 'methods', but outcomes. The outcome is all those people dying and suffering. You found a silver lining? Wow. Democracies provided much more prosperity (how about just a reliable food supply) without the nightmarish horrors. 'Much of my family died, ended up in brutal prisons, were forced to relocate, suffered brutal oppression - but it's all good because I have some material goods I didn't have 60 years ago.'
The former USSR is still well behind the democracies.
> you could try to argue that they only succeeded at immense cost to both human lives and political freedom - I might not even disagree
These are the justifications of people who want power over others, it's well-worn propaganda: - 'I am needed to solve the problem, and my self-serving sadism is necessary'. You have examples, worldwide, of countries doing more economically, without the horrors, through freedom. Government leaders, chosen by the people, who do things without killing their population or oppressing them. What a joke.
If these brutal dictators are so good for the population, why not hold elections? Who decides that they are good?
> China over the last 35 years is likely a similar example.
China did it through liberalization, economic and (until somewhat recently) political, starting under Deng Xiaoping.
And Taiwan and Hong Kong, which embraced true freedom, did far more.
The question is whether or not those aspects of the USSR's "development" were critical/integral to their industrialization and modernization or not.
If they were, then I think that makes the price of those changes in the USSR clearly too high.
If they were not, then they are terrible, terrible things, happening alongside something quite remarkable.
I don't know enough about the details of the USSR during that time period to know how integral they may have been.
I also don't know enough about the history of South Korea to know if their development is comparable to what happened in the USSR or not. My vague impression is that they were starting from a much better (non-Tsarist) place, but I could have that wrong.
> But history can help to disentangle the unprecedented from the historical.
That said, the author (or maybe an editor) could have avoided any argument by not using a contraction instead of trying to be punny.
The main thesis of CRT is that a major portion of US laws and institutions were created in the context of slave ownership and outright racism. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable, so they prefer to whitewash the history instead of addressing it and thinking of the ramifications.
A great example of this is HOAs. The original intent of HOAs was to keep PoC out of the neighborhoods.
This is a little bit of a tangent but I think it runs into the same root cause of Jan 6 and the current perceptions of it. If you are on the left you see it as an insurrection of try and stop or interrupt the democratic process. If you are on the right you see it as patriots trying to stop an unfair election and preserve the american way of life.
However, deep down, it really comes down to a more base and fundamental aspect of humans. We like to be part of our groups and organizations. That makes us blind or dismissive to faults of our group. Cognitive dissonance is one hell of a drug.
CRT battles the same problem. We don't like seeing historical "good guys" as having flaws.
edit: covered in the comments elsewhere, i see!
If it was all disinformation, you and I wouldn't know anything about it! It's just an easy (and obviously false) answer to say it's all disinformation. The challenge is how to handle the some bad inputs and output progress and good things for our neighbors. It's very doable; generations have accomplished a lot since we lived in caves; what are we doing for the next generation?
You know, I always thought this too, but the US Civil War history is a very good counter example.
Southerners had an outsized influence on civil war history in two ways that I know of.
One was the Lost Cause ideology [0].
The second was in writing about the war and its participants. For example, understating the number of troops Robert E. Lee had at decisive battles to make him look better.
The Lost Cause mythology is alive and well. While there’s a good deal of new scholarship looking at the historiography of the civil war.
[0] https://time.com/5013943/john-kelly-civil-war-textbooks/
The most prominent example is the American Civil War, where great effort was made to propagandize it as The Lost Cause. But other examples include German histories of World War I and Thucydides history of the Peloponnesian War.
The Onion made a joke out of it, but in a sense it really is an example that the history of rock was written by the losers.
https://www.theonion.com/history-of-rock-written-by-the-lose...
You should look into some of the things that were only able to pass Congress once the Southern states were no longer around to oppose them. The Pacific Railroad Acts are a big example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts
The winners of history are often too busy with enjoying the spoils of their victory and building up their newly won empire to have time to produce historical narrative, while the losers often have nothing better left to do in their exile/imprisonment or similar situation.
Human minds have a innate desire for virtue and truth, and since objectivity doesn't exist, it becomes difficult to admit that voters would end up create an alternative truth, or at least not at this scale.
I think it always came from the fact that truth doesn't really exist. Humans can really believe anything. There is no good and no evil.
In a way, nobody should have been surprised that Trump would get elected. I don't think "misinformation" really exists, it's just unsettled disagreements about what information and truth is. What happened in 2016 was an anomaly, but it was never impossible.
As a current example, in the United States the Republican party has been against vaccines. And have been telling their base to doubt them or not get them. Fox news has lead the way along with lots of other media channels.
But for some reason they changed this week and started claiming everyone needs a vaccine. So the complete opposite story. And no one batted an eye.
It is like living in 1984 to a degree. So weird.
Citation needed! Pretty sure you do not have an accurate bead on how "everyone" reacted.
My guess? When people read their trusted news source, and it disagrees with a previous assertion that they've bought into? "Ugh stupid opponents are infiltrating our news. No way I'm buying into this government bullshit trying to force vaccines on us!"
(But I hope that what you say is right - that conservative news is finally encouraging vaccines... and maybe in a few weeks/months their audience will subconsciously flip to "oh yeah vaccines are good. I've always been planning to get them but I needed some assurance they are safe, which we're finally getting just now.")
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/whats-behind-fox-new...
I don't know the reaction among Fox News' viewers. It'll be interesting to see if vaccination rates tick up markedly in red districts.
My suspicion is that it's some of each, and I'd bet that the numbers in red districts will rise some, but not a lot. Proportional to the ~2 million Fox News viewers, out of ~80 million people who voted Republican last time. Not that all Fox News viewers will rush out to be vaccinated, but that [say] 25% of them will and influence an equivalent number of non-viewers.
Pulling those numbers out of my ass, of course.
That's not the same as being anti-vax if the vaccine was allowed to follow the original timeframe for development and testing (which it eventually was).
That does not mean there is no objective truth.
It's not binary: While there's no source of truth and much uncertainty about what is true, it doesn't mean that there's no truth at all and that humans can believe anything. While there's uncertainty about good and evil, that doesn't mean there's none of either.
It's not simple, but we do have powerful abilities of critical thinking and judgment, and while they won't yield perfect results, they can be very effective. Compare how we live to how humans lived a century or centuries ago; our ancestors built a much more good world - with unprecedented freedom, prosperity, and safety - using the humans capabilities they had. We can do the same.