[The Man]

Here’s a particularly big one. It’s about four months old now but most of it is still relevant.

Your comment seems largely like a rhetorical rant and this thread is really moldy already, so I’m not entirely sure how much detail you were expecting as a response, but I kind of just used your comment as a prompt to start writing, and it went much further than I was expecting (i.e., 4,750+ words). This seems to be a trend for my responses lately (it’s happened at least three times in about a week), so I think I can officially declare my writer’s block dead. And good fucking riddance.

(I’m contemplating also posting this downstairs, since I think otherwise a lot of people will miss it, but then again, doing that might also annoy people who’ve already seen it, so I might not. Dear other jackals, please give me sage advice to decide for certain.)

In any case, I think one answer is that at least 1/3 of the country has locked itself into filter bubbles (look this up for further info if you aren’t familiar with it, but essentially it is a media infrastructure that results in a person’s preconceived notions never being challenged. I’d like to provide links, but I don’t want to go into link prison). This was always a potential problem, but it’s worsened substantially as a result of first the right-wing puke funnel and secondly the Internet. (To be clear, the Internet has offered plenty of benefits to humanity, too, and on balance I’m not sure I’d be willing to conclude it’s been a net positive to humanity or a net negative; it’s honestly changed things so much that I still don’t think we’ve come close to evaluating all the effects it’s had on us. It’s certainly reduced the amount of book-length reading I do, for example, but I doubt that means I’m actually absorbing less information, and I couldn’t possibly evaluate what that means for my perceptions of the world. Now expand that to billions of people online and you see the problem.)

The central problem creating the filter bubble is has several causes, and I think I’ll start at the biological level, as our perceptions and our memory are amongst the most basic causes. Simply put, both our perception and our memory are far more imperfect than most people generally realise. The human brain, simply in order to make sense of the world, filters out information it perceives as unimportant. This is necessary purely for us to concentrate – as one banal example, we wouldn’t be able to pick out a voice in a conversation in a crowded bar or restaurant if the brain wasn’t capable of filtering out background noise. On the whole, this is a necessary survival tool and it’s beneficial that we’re capable of doing it.

But a major downside is that we’re not actually conscious at a biological level that it occurs. Most people don’t even know this on an intellectual level, much less, for lack of a better term, feel it on an emotional one. (These words are crude, and perhaps there are better terms for them that I haven’t considered yet, but I consider it necessary to distinguish between a fact we have intellectual knowledge of and a fundamental understanding of the world to which we have deep emotional connections.) And this has deep implications for the way people comprehend reality: essentially, people are no more aware of their unconscious biases than a fish is of water.

This might be something of a digression, but for about six months I’ve been dealing with a mental illness that severely damages my perceptions of reality. It’s not that, for the most part, I don’t perceive reality accurately. I’m just… disconnected from it most of the time. It’s as though things aren’t happening to me; they’re happening to someone else. I don’t feel like a person most of the time; I feel like an actor performing my lines or, perhaps more to the point, a character in a novel (probably a poorly written, over-the-top Philip K. Dick pastiche). My recent memories feel distant, as though they were implanted from someone else’s memories. There’s a veil separating me from reality. And so on.

At the same time, though, this isn’t a psychosis; I maintain intact reality testing. I’m fully capable of understanding intellectually that I’m not actually a character in a bad PKD pastiche. But knowing this and feeling it are two separate matters. My symptoms aren’t actually as consistently bad now as they were a couple of month ago; I think a medication change has helped somewhat in this regard (the new one attempts to target anxiety rather than depression), and I think I’ve gotten better at coping with my symptoms as well.

So, returning to the difference between knowing and feeling: Most people don’t even know that they aren’t perceiving reality accurately (i.e., they don’t know what they don’t know), much less feel (or understand, if you prefer) the ways that their perceptions may be unreliable.

As a result, we (as a species) understand the world based on narratives we’ve constructed for ourselves based on unreliable perceptions. So in short, those perceptions are self-reinforcing. We subconsciously discard information we instinctively regard as irrelevant because we’ve already trained our subconscious to discard it as irrelevant. And I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet, which is our memory. Our internal narratives are based on our memories, and this is where things really get fun.

There’s this common conception in American popular culture that there’s nothing more reliable than the testimony of an eyewitness. This is actually horrifically wrong – in fact, eyewitness testimony is probably one of the least reliable forms of evidence a court will accept (not the absolute least, to be clear; some horrifying kinds of pseudoscience that ill-informed judges have admitted are probably worse. Probably). The primary reason the FBI has its agents write down memos about conversations they have with people they think might be liars lying isn’t that they have a deep love of written records in and of themselves. People think of the human memory as essentially permanent, as something that crystallises into form like a diamond. But it’s actually the exact opposite; it’s a stream (or, if you prefer a sillier metaphor, Silly Putty). It is continually evolving and very malleable.

The simple fact is that the act of thinking about a memory changes the memory itself. This means that eyewitness testimony is, rather than being ironclad evidence, highly subject to tampering. (And really, that commonly used adjective, ironclad, is itself questionable. It might help to recall that iron, when sufficiently heated, is in fact highly malleable.) So it’s not just that we’ve constructed narratives for ourselves based on imperfect perceptions; and it’s not even just that what we perceive is affected by our previous perceptions. It’s that what we even remember is actually affected by how we’ve perceived what we remember in the past.

If you’ve read my comments here, at LG&M, or elsewhere for a long enough period of time, you might notice that I usually hedge my words when speaking of things that occurred to me a long time ago. I’m not using weasel words here (I value precision and dislike weasel words); I just don’t consider my memories as reliable as most other people consider theirs. Even, or especially, memories that had deep formative meaning to me. In fact, the memories I have the strongest emotional connection to are usually the ones I trust the least, because I’ve probably spent the most time thinking about them – and thus, I’ve changed them the most from their original forms. I haven’t kept a diary for most of my adult life (a decision I’m coming somewhat to regret), so I’m unwilling to attach perfect certainty to any formative events I don’t have specific records of (photographs, emails, message board posts, whatever).

I’m still sorting out the implications of what these observations mean even for my own life. I’ve seen most of them made independently before, but to be honest, I haven’t yet seen an academic study or writing that really, to me, did justice to their implications when combined. But I already laid out what I consider the primary implication above, which I shall now reiterate: people are no more aware of their subconscious biases than a fish is of water.

However, even if the majority of people lack awareness of how deep-seated their biases are, or how much they’ve allowed their personal narratives about the world to affect their thinking, there is still a large gulf in the amount of control people allow these narratives and biases to control their lives. It’s a banal observation that politics in America are divided because of a fundamental difference in philosophical views about the world, but an often underappreciated contributor to this is that one of those worldviews fundamentally rejects empiricism and the scientific method, while the other does not.

This is not to say that liberals and the left are consistently good about science (they are just consistently much better than Republicans, which is so low a bar it might as well be a floor tile), but it has had clear effects on American politics regardless. A lot of people have probably forgotten this already because it happened two thousand years ago in 2016, but there was a news story indicating that the Macedonian teenagers who were writing literal fake news stories quickly abandoned the idea of trying to pitch them to Democratic-leaning audiences, because those audiences largely rejected them. This is not to say that there haven’t been any leftish groups who have swallowed false narratives (as one flagrant example, the entire Bern It Down contingent), but the proportion of liberals and leftists who were willing to swallow such nonsense was much lower than the proportion of reactionaries, fascists, and other Republicans. (With rare exceptions, several of whom I enumerate below, they don’t deserve the label of conservative, which is a topic I may address further in another comment, though I’m sure I’ve already delved into it before, too.) Say something like 10-20% of the leftists and liberals were willing to fall for such stories, or even click on them; by contrast, the numbers were probably upwards of 50-60% for the Republicans. (Hedging my language because I haven’t seen the exact story in awhile.)

As far as I can ascertain, this is because the Democratic side has not abandoned the idea that there is such a thing as objective reality, and that we have tools to ascertain it. We accept that science and its conclusions have value, and because of this, our side seems likelier to employ its methodology. If nothing else, we’re likely to consider a source and evaluate how reliable it seems. As I will explicate later, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’re any good at evaluating this, but on the whole, we’re at least still in the habit of trying. This is in direct contrast to Republicans.

I’ve spent decades studying political science by now, and I have to confess that many aspects of the Republican mindset still confound me. But I at least have a vague understanding of the psychological processes that underpin it, and an awful lot of what we’re seeing (what the esteemed Charles P. Pierce memorably refers to as the prion disease that began when the party ate the monkey brains under Reagan) stems from the Republican Party’s rejection of the scientific method – and indeed, seemingly, even any acknowledgement that there is any sort of thing as objective reality. A thing that may have really gone down the rabbit hole, even though it was widely mocked for several years, is Karl Rove’s declaration in the mid-2000s that “we create our own reality” and mocked the “reality-based community”. Many would find it tempting to reduce this (and Democrats’ subsequent self-adoption of the latter term) to pat sloganeering by opposing political parties, but it genuinely represents a fundamental philosophical difference between the political parties. Democrats accept reality, and try to centre their worldview around it. Republicans are completely disdainful of it.

It’s tempting to call the Republican Party nihilists, and indeed I have done so at times, but nihilism is at least a serious attempt to grapple with one of the fundamental human dilemmas – namely, what humans are to do if there truly is no intrinsic meaning to life, the universe, or everything. (They’re wrong, of course, as the meaning is clearly 42, but we still don’t know what the question is; the results of this are for all intents and purposes identical.) I don’t often agree with many conclusions of many philosophers who are commonly called nihilists (though, while we’re on the subject, Nietzsche wasn’t a nihilist, nor was he an antisemite – indeed, if anything, Nietzsche actually liked the Jewish people more than he seemed to care for the bulk of humanity), but at least they are making serious attempts to contribute to humanity.

The popular definition of nihilism, as memorably stated in The Big Lebowski, is “We believe in nothink, Lebowski! Nothink!” (Also queue “at least it’s an ethos clip here; I’m avoiding links so I won’t put it in myself.) Republicans, however, cannot be fairly described as lacking beliefs. They may lack any fixed principles other than the three I commonly enumerate (Cleek’s Law, IGMFY, and accuse opponents of all one’s own failings), but they certainly believe, with all their might, in what they are doing, even if their belief ultimately becomes cyclical and centres back to the righteousness of their own cause. Put another way, my reading of the Republican Party cycles back to 1984:

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

This, however, doesn’t provide a perfectly satisfying explanation to me, because it only explains the actions of their politicians. Perhaps the authoritarian followers get a vicarious thrill in believing that the leopards won’t eventually eat their faces too, but I gained a much deeper understanding with a piece that ran in Scientific American shortly after the election.

The explanation rests in a poorly understood phenomenon known as blue lies. We all know and understand white lies: they’re lies to spare another’s feelings. We might even say they’re benignly intended (if not always benign in outcome). Children usually start telling these around age seven. Black lies are also easy to understand; they’re lies to benefit the self without concern for others, and children start telling these at a much younger age, possibly three or four.

Blue lies are in some ways a combination of these. They’re lies to benefit an in-group at the expense of an out-group. This isn’t a commonly seen idea in popular culture, and to be fair it’s definitely more complicated than the other two categories of lies. Reflecting this, children don’t start telling them until age ten. We actually see these in plenty of places where it’s not really thought about much, though – espionage, for instance. They’re the only explanation that makes sense of the lies told by Trump and his followers (or for that matter, other authoritarian movements elsewhere in the country), and I think the reason they’ve started showing up in our politics is because twenty-five years of right-wing hate media has convinced the Republican base that Democrats are an existential threat to the country.

So as a result, they don’t even really care whether what they’re being told – or what they’re saying – is true. You can give as much evidence and reasoning as you care that Donald Trump has no intention of ever giving people “the best health care”, but they won’t care – first, because it’s a liberal telling them this, but also secondly, because if it’s necessary for lies to be told to stave off what they perceive as an existential threat, they’re willing to accept those lies.

And that is why, on my most pessimistic days, I despair of the fundamental divide ever being bridged. (And of course, since every accusation is a confession, the Republicans actually arean existential threat to the country, but with one exception which I explain in my next paragraph, I don’t endorse lying in response to their lies – that would just create an arms race of lies that I see everyone ultimately losing.) However, it’s not hopeless – it’s just that we probably aren’t going to be the direct cause of any of these people changing their minds.

There are two remedies that seem to work. One is, if you have the capability, cutting off an elderly relative’s exposure to Fox News, Breitbart, Infowars, et al. “No, I’m sorry, Grandpa, I don’t know why the cable box won’t pick up Hannity anymore.” This is somewhat deceptive, but people who have successfully been able to accomplish it have reported that in many cases it miraculously undoes the paranoia that has been induced by constant exposure to the right-wing puke funnel. Ultimately, even though it’s deceptive, I’m not willing to frown on it very hard, because by and large, the people who subsist on this diet are miserable. They’re mostly imbibing a steady diet of paranoia and fear. This country is, gun violence aside, amongst the safest it’s ever been, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to the Wingnut Wurlitzer. While it might be deceptive to deprive them of access to those media sources, I can see an extremely persuasive argument that it’s substantially less deceptive than those media sources are.

The other solution isn’t, unfortunately, something we are capable of doing ourselves. But people caught in a filter bubble of blue lies may be willing to listen to arguments they perceive as coming from a member of their in-group. So if I say the Muslim travel ban is an attack on the Constitution, no one in the Republican base is likely to give a shit. I’m an agnostic, queer anarchist of Jewish descent who hasn’t been to a religious service in probably more than ten years and wouldn’t piss on most Republican politicians if they were on fire (especially since Trump would enjoy it. Allegedly). But if someone like Glenn Beck says this (and Beck has actually been surprisingly generous to refugees – for instance, he raised some $2 million for undocumented Central American immigrants a few years ago), he might actually convince members of the Republican base.

This is why I’ve been more willing than many other people to give cookies to conservatives like Jen Rubin, Max Boot, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Glenn Beck, John Schindler, Tom Nichols, and others who have been willing to break from Republican Party orthodoxy at times, no matter what heinous acts they may have in the past. That doesn’t mean those acts should be forgotten or forgiven. But at the same time, their current criticism of the party has real value above and beyond the traditional value that any criticism of iniquity has – honestly, it probably has more value in some ways than our criticism does. In many cases, it feels like a lot of our criticisms, as insightful as they are, are simply preaching to the choir.

This is already way longer than I was planning – I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve been typing for two hours now, and it’s several thousand words by now – so I’ll just add a few other observations that I didn’t link into my argument. (If I were writing this from an outline, or even substantially revising it, I would try to dovetail these logically into the above explanation, but I think they’re still comprehensible in this form.)

One of these is the observation that people – and this goes regardless of one’s political orientation – are very bad at evaluating the credentials of people they’ve concluded are experts, particularly in fields they don’t have intimate knowledge of themselves. If you’ve concluded someone is an expert in statistics, but your own knowledge of the discipline is undergraduate level, then it may take a major black swan event – say, assigning a 95%+ probability to an outcome that fails to materialise – to convince you that your conclusion may have been wrong. And that’s merely for expertise; being able to conclude someone is malicious or lying may be even more difficult. This is, in fact, the most widely accepted explanation for the results of the Milgram experiment.

This, honestly, explains a lot of 2016 that remains otherwise inexplicable to me. While much of Pravda on the Hudson’s conduct since the election leads me to suspect that Republicans may have kompromat on significant figures within the newspaper, the entire U.S. media covered the entire election as though Clinton were already the president. I felt long before November 9 that this was grossly irresponsible behaviour, but in hindsight, I don’t think I have sufficient evidence to conclude that the entire media actually wanted Trump to win. I think many of them probably just thought it wasn’t possible. (Hanlon’s Razor.)

And where would they get that conclusion? Well – the many poll aggregators that assigned upwards of 90% probability to a Clinton victory, mostly. I am by no means an expert on statistics, and to be clear, I myself was affected by this. I thought the 98% predictions of Clinton victories were absurd and possibly even irresponsible, but I still thought there was an outside chance at best of Trump winning. I think most reporters, lacking detailed backgrounds in statistics, just looked at convincing-sounding arguments from statistics sites and ultimately went with what the balance of them were saying – thus concluding “there’s no way he’ll really win, right? The American people couldn’t possibly be that stupid.”

This also is the most parsimonious explanation I can find for Comey. To be clear, if there’s any justice, his absurd interference with the election will go down with the ignominy it deserves; hopefully he’ll be remembered for his self-righteous indifference to norms and blithe unawareness of how his actions eleven days before an election could affect its outcome. But that’s what seems like the more likely outcome to me than that he actually wanted Trump to win. Given that he persisted in investigating Trump’s connections to Russia long after the election, to the extent that Trump fired him exactly because of that, I find it implausible to consider him a Trump partisan. It’s more likely that, like our media morans, he concluded that his actions couldn’t swing the election to Trump.

So here we return to the problem of people being unable to evaluate expertise in fields they don’t understand. It didn’t help at all that the only statistical analyst that actually got the 2016 election right, Nate Silver, completely whiffed the primary. Silver’s model consistently and egregiously underestimated Trump’s chances of winning the primary, and thus a common reaction to his stories about the general, particularly given his status as an outlier next to the other aggregators, was that he was simply overcompensating for getting the primary wrong. But in retrospect, we can see that this was wrong. (To Silver’s credit, he’s generally been pretty willing to admit when he’s fucked up. Most of us should probably have assigned more importance to that in 2016.)

A lot of people just look at the numbers and say “Silver got it wrong, too; he assigned only a 30% chance (or whatever the number was) to a Trump victory”. But that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics. First of all, a 3 out of 10 chance will come up 3 out of 10 times you run a given scenario. Silver had higher odds than any of the other major aggregators. On a superficial level, that makes him less wrong than the others.

But that’s not actually the important part. The important part was that, before the election, Silver was outlining as a plausible scenario exactly the set of dominoes that ultimately fell to cost Clinton the election. He didn’t merely present the possibility that Clinton could lose; he predicted, with significant prescience, exactly which states wound up being decisive. Moreover, none of the other major aggregators seem to have identified these weaknesses, and if they did, they certainly weren’t raising the alarm in advance of the election to the extent that he was.

Unfortunately, the left – and I fully include myself in this grouping – largely tuned out Silver, partially because we overstated the importance of his failures in the primary, but probably more because he wasn’t comforting us. Ultimately, while we’re a lot more accepting of empiricism than the right is, this doesn’t mean we actually practise it very well.

I have only one further point I feel necessary to cover in this case study, which is my biggest complaint with 90%+ probabilities. It’s something akin to physics’ bystander effect: The act of observing a phenomenon changes the phenomenon being observed. This is true in physics and also, it seems, in politics. (And I’m back to talking about everyone here again, not just the political left.) Precisely because Clinton was perceived as inevitable, she consistently received more negative coverage than Trump, who was consistently perceived as a joke, and figures in significant positions of authority made decisions that affected the election, thinking that Clinton’s victory was a foregone conclusion.

I haven’t worked out all the implications of everything I’ve written here, and this is in large part an abstract of a much longer (currently just under 70,000 words) writing I’ve been working on off and on since March of last year. There are major themes of this writing that I didn’t even get to here, most importantly how people typically assume others share their preferences, perceptions, and methods of self-expression instead of recognising how widely all these factors vary between individuals – and, consequentially, how this ignorance contributes to political and social oppression, without even requiring any conscious intent on the part of those perpetuating it. All of this actually relates directly to all of ruemara’s original rant, and if I hadn’t already written a short novel (again, MS Word is telling me this is over 4,750 words), I’d summarise my analysis of this tendency in depth, too, but I think I’ve probably already surpassed the amount that any one person is likely to absorb in any one sitting, so I’ll hold it off for some other time. (I will almost certainly get to it at some point, though. This is a particularly personal issue for me since, as a person on the autism spectrum, my perception and methods of expression often vary tremendously from the average person’s, despite my best attempts to mirror their body language, and even if I tell them that, most of them continue to underestimate how decisive a factor it is; as a result, I am continually being misunderstood in nonverbal communication. And that’s not even the only way this causes me problems.)

In any case, while many of the ideas I’ve outlined above are things I’ve seen discussed at various places through the Internet, I’ve also gone through some implications I’m not used to seeing discussed either in print or online. This doesn’t mean they never are, but it does mean that, to the best of my awareness, they’re not firmly in the popular consciousness. I’m not trying to seem like a know-it-all or anything – if anything, I hope I’ve emphasised how coming to a truly accurate understanding of the world requires a constant questioning of one’s own perceptions, biases, and assumptions – but I at least hope this essay might’ve raised consideration of factors people haven’t otherwise considered.