You're Going to Miss Reality When It's Gone

On the one hand...on the other hand...

UPDATE: 11/18/2023:

Others are noticing that reality is fast disappearing. The estimable James Howard Kunstler, for instance:

A nation can only take so much corruption, crime, and unreality. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” said Karl Rove, veteran blobster and advisor to George W. Bush, when he uttered those fateful words. Even political junkies forget the rest of what he said:

And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Old Karl was being too polite, you understand. What he meant to say is: We’re gonna lay trip after trip on you, all of you smart-asses watching the political scene until your over-mis-educated Ivy League brains turn into something that resembles a patty-melt so that you’re lost in a fog of incoherent blabbery, parroting whatever nonsense we proffer as we asset-strip what’s left of Western Civ.

What they call “the cognitive infrastructure” of we-the-people has been twisted, crinkled, folded, looped, and twiddled until it’s nearer a state of criticality than the ten-thousand rusted-out bridges on our county roads.

Note to blob: if you render the Internet useless, you will accelerate the trend to local autarky. Your diktats will be ignored as government-by-blob drowns in debt, chaos, and impotence. If necessary, we-the-people will return to the traditional printing press and report on what we can actually see and hear in the vicinity around us.

Pretty darned close to my own:

At this point, we will, as a nation, and even as humans, be officially cut adrift from our ever more tenuous apprehension of reality, and reduced to the status of 14th century peasants, unable to trust anything we can’t physically see and touch with our own unaided eyes and hands.

Or so it seems to me.

A few years back I changed the “About Me” disclaimer on my blog, Daily Pundit, to the following:

I am a freethinker who supports the American constitutional system of ordered liberty within the context of western civilization. My primary concern is to increase individual liberty as much as possible in the face of statist efforts to restrict it from both the right and the left. I seek the most liberty possible for the most number of people.

This statement marked a further step along the timeline of my changing ideological and philosophical approaches to the world from my youth as a New Leftist in the 1960s through a sort of exhausted apoliticism in the 1970s, to Randian Objectivism through the turn of the millennium, to a form of Conservatarianism and finally to Freethinking, defined as:

Freethought (sometimes spelled free thought)[1][2][3] is an epistemological viewpoint which holds that beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma, and should instead be reached by other methods such as logic, reason, and empirical observation. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a freethinker is "a person who forms their own ideas and opinions rather than accepting those of other people, especially in religious teaching." In some contemporary thought in particular, free thought is strongly tied with rejection of traditional social or religious belief systems.

Over the course of my nearly 80 years, I’ve learned the hard way that swallowing whole some prepackaged set of beliefs about reality leads to very few good ends, no matter who is peddling the brightly wrapped package, or what tantalizing gifts it seems to contain. Strangely, given that as a young man I read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, you’d think I might have absorbed the lesson without the school of hard knocks’ continuing refresher courses, but I didn’t. Perhaps I was just lazy. It was certainly easier to read the shiny pamphlets and pretend that I’d done my own due diligence as to their actual relationship to reality, and far too often that is exactly what I did. And then reality would rise up and take a chunk out of my ass, and the inevitable disaffection on my part would set in.

“The map is not the territory,” Alfred Korzybski’s greatest contribution to epistemology, is, or should be, the great caveat of our times. We live in a world, and particularly a culture, where map-purveyors are almost a dime a dozen, and many - most? - of their wares turn out to be of as much value as the pirate treasure maps hucksters used to peddle to suckers in the good old less sophisticated days. Simply because today’s maps arrive in much greater detail and at the speed of digital light doesn’t mean that they are any more faithful representatives of reality than the guides to Blackbeard’s treasure hole, nor are those who think otherwise any more sophisticated than the marks of yesteryear.

In fact, I can now make the case that how we discover what is real when dealing with things we cannot personally see, touch, and otherwise experience with our personal senses is being deliberately falsified by forces whose interests are anything but benign.

In many ways, this is nothing new. Scholars cite a huge monument built by Darius the Great around 500 B.C. that extolled his martial prowess in three different languages as being an early example of propaganda, a particular method of promulgating information that may be at odds with reality:

propaganda

1. information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view

Propaganda, per se, is generally the province of leaders and governments advancing political agendas, either to build up leaders, or knock down threats to leaders and leadership. If, as Clausewitz said, “War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means,” then the primary of those “other means” must be propaganda, specifically war propaganda, which often plays the role of instigator, handmaiden, and apologist from start to finish of any military conflict.

Beyond political propaganda, however, are other forms. Cultural propaganda is not necessarily political in nature, although, since politics, like everything else, is downstream from culture, it may affect politics (and is, in fact, often directly designed to do so). This sort was especially rife during the 1960s, either supporting or attacking various cultural “revolutions” occurring during that period - the sexual revolution, the feminist revolution, the anti-racism revolution, the War on Poverty, and so on. This was a time when a brand new way of promulgating propaganda - said by many to be the most important since the invention of the printing press - hove onto the scene, buoyed by the Baby Boomers, America’s first “television generation.”

Television, with its combination of aural and visual channels, proved the most effective means of mass persuasion created up to that time, with its one-two-three combination punch of completeness - “get the big picture” - immediacy - “watch Channel 1 for News Now!” and pervasiveness - “reach your target via television! There’s one in every American living room!” exhorted advertising companies who designed content and campaigns for the new medium.

And, of course, there was commercial propaganda/persuasion because, in the end, you will always find cold, hard cash at the bottom of every woodpile. Advertising - the packaging and sale of products, whether goods, services, people, or causes - became, and remains by far the most important venue for persuasion of all kinds.

Whether you call it propaganda, or persuasion, or advertising, its effectiveness depends on its ability to convince its targets that what it is claiming comports with reality. Which means that those on the receiving end, in order to decide the truth of that claim, will need to be able to perceive reality, and then rationally decide whether that matches up to the reality they are being urged to accept.

In other words, the message must pass the “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?” barrier.

In times past, reality was comparatively easier to discern. If the TV weatherman informed you it was raining in your location, you could look out a window and see the sun shining and no rain in sight, and discount the report as false.

But this only applied to claims about your immediate physical vicinity. For anything outside your immediate ken, you had to rely on information from other sources - the Internet (Google), modern legacy media (television, radio, newspapers and magazines), perhaps even a telephone (call up cousin Ted, who is on the scene, and ask him about it).

Prior to that, information relevant and timely enough to be useful in any practical sense was virtually impossible to come by. You might find some account chiseled on the walls of a great temple years, or decades after the fact, but what good would that be in trying to ascertain a current state of reality?

Of course, in less contemporary times, mankind assumed that much of the physical reality of the world was simply beyond its apprehension, and proceeded accordingly, which usually meant that such inaccessible realities were mostly ignored. In the modern world, when ICBM transit times are figured in minutes, and what happens half-way across the world this morning can affect significant aspects of your daily lives by the afternoon, we no longer have that luxury.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that our times demand of us ever more knowledgeable, rational efforts to make reality-based decisions about ourselves, our country, and our future, our amazing technological advances make it harder, not easier, to do this.

Let’s start with one of the more obvious issues: information overload. It’s often said that problems arise when somebody “can’t see the forest for the trees,” that is, becomes so involved in petty details of an issue that the overall issue itself gets lost in the crowd.

Unfortunately, the Internet is a firehose of trees, and the forest, that is, the Internet itself, is simply too vast for any one individual, no matter how diligent, to encompass. That’s why search engines became so popular, and so necessary. It’s also why search engines can be a single point of failure for anybody trying to suss out the reality of something.

At which point enters censorship in its role as an enemy of both reality and rationality. The human mind is a computer as subject to the errors of Garbage In Garbage Out as any other. Garbage means “bad data.” Lies are an extremely pernicious form of bad data. There are two sorts of lies: Lies of omission, and lies of commission. Censorship is primarily a lie of omission. It omits information about the real world that your rational mind needs in order to make good decisions about the real world, primarily by erasing this knowledge from your awareness. Search engines are a particular target of, and platform of choice for, those who wish to shape your rational understanding of reality via the Internet.

Google, for instance, which dominates search, deliberately downgrades or disappears links to datapoints that contradict the narratives it supports. This is the lie-by-omission strategy. Wikipedia, on the other hand, prints outright falsehoods which it backs with its status as the Internet’s premier reference source.

The net results of these, as well as thousands of others, is to wall you off from an unhindered view of reality, and force you to make decisions based on inadequate information.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Below lies another stratum consisting of technologically enhanced, (or crippled, take your pick) persuasion. This includes deceptively edited videos and audio resources, as well as data carefully tailored to psychologically achieve the results desired by the tailors. Every major government agency, as well as many corporations, have unpublicized shops dedicated to these dark arts.

But we are all about to encounter the ultimate in reality-bending: the products of AI and outright fakery. This is the combination that will give us videos and other digital technologies indistinguishable from the real thing of politicians, opinion leaders, government officials, and other icons of culture saying and doing things they never said or did. You will view battles, great crimes, greater triumphs, and none of them ever occurred, or even existed. And you won’t be able to tell they are fake.

At this point, we will, as a nation, and even as humans, be officially cut adrift from our ever more tenuous apprehension of reality, and reduced to the status of 14th century peasants, unable to trust anything we can’t physically see and touch with our own unaided eyes and hands. For a century and half we have depended on technological enhancements to know a greater world than our own immediate environment. We are on the cusp of losing all that to even more pervasive technological enhancements. Our reality is about to become virtual, and our only illumination will be the gaslight.