Disinformation and Fake News: Thinking about the Attack on Thinking
For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose. They know something nefarious occurred but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same.
Sarah Longwell [1]
FAKE NEWS
〰️
FAKE NEWS 〰️
By now, we are all familiar with the phenomenon of “fake news:” The Democrats stole the election; Trump won. There is a catastrophe at the border caused by the policy of the Democratic Party to admit anyone to the US who wants to come. Vaccines for covid contain microchips. Nothing in the rise of fake news makes it anything like a happy event. In part, this is because the most obvious use of fake news has been in service of the ends of a political party with a noxious program. This alone would make living in a world where fake news is the norm deeply disturbing. But, as troubling as that may be, it is not the most significant damage caused when fake news becomes a norm. A greater harm lies not in the falsifying of the public record, but in the more general loss of contact with reality that is the underlying goal of fake news.
Establishing the irreality of reality is significant in its own right. Faced with the relentless use of disinformation to mount an attack on our capacity to distinguish true from false, we can lose confidence in our ability to do so, we may even come to doubt the reality of the distinction. The prospect of losing connection to reality can provoke a level of anxiety we should not underestimate. Indeed, it would not be an overstatement to suggest that a mental capacity vital to our emotional survival has been put at risk.
If establishing the irreality of reality is its goal, we will be inclined to counter fake news with the assertion and reassertion of the truth. This is, I think, a worthwhile effort. But it should not be allowed to supplant another important task set for us by the disinformation campaign. This is the task of understanding what underlies the attack on our connection with reality. In Sarah Longwell’s language, we need to understand what is “felt” to be true about reality by those who are susceptible to fake news.
The truth that is felt but not articulated is not the truth about what is going on in the world around us, but about what is going on inside our heads. In other words, it is about hearing the message embedded in the emotional communication, which is never simply false. Taken as emotional communication, we can see in the attempt to establish the irreality of the real an attempt to share with us an all-too real state of mind prominent in those for whom the spreading of disinformation has become the norm.
The information conveyed by disinformation is what it feels like to lose contact with reality, especially the anxiety associated with being in that state. In other words, disinformation indicates, for those involved with it, the presence of a problem with reality. Unless we can gain a better understanding of the nature of this problem, we are unlikely to be able to fend off the effort to transfer the anxiety associated with it onto us and thereby make it universal.
One way to understand the origin of problems with reality is to consider what reality means in the earliest stages of human development. In those early stages, the idea of reality begins to take hold as the necessity that we recognize the existence of other people in our world, a necessity Freud refers to as the “Reality Principle.” Initially, then, reality is simply the presence of other people, which also means the presence of ourselves as other people, one among many (initially two). This presence of a world of other people is the target of the attack on reality.
It is important to bear in mind that, when we speak of the presence of other people, what we are referring to is not their physical presence but their claim to our attention and to the attention of those who, up to the point of our recognition of others, was our exclusive property. Put another way, the existence of other people refers to their existence separate from our need for them. Recognition of other persons means recognition of separate centers of need and agency. Now, satisfaction of our need is not the satisfaction of the only need, but of one among many needs that do not point in the same direction or work together for a unitary end. In other words, separate need means individualized need.
There may be nothing inevitable about separate existence understood in this way, nor do all groups and social systems organize themselves around processes rooted in the separation of persons and the reality principle linked to it. Or, if there is something inevitable about the reality principle, there can be significantly different degrees of separation sponsored by and allowed by social institutions and systems of relating. But, so far as what concerns us is the survival of democratic institutions, we have to be concerned with a particularly robust application of the reality principle. This is because the central concern of democratic institutions is individual self-determination as embedded most notably in a robust system of individual rights: the right to vote, the right to freedom of speech, the right to choose a marriage partner, the right to privacy, and so on.
Political parties dominated by the impulse to stymie deliberation do not offer their supporters programs designed to solve problems.
To these rights there is also attached a task: the task of deciding or choosing. As a result of the importance of individual rights in a democratic society, people living there have to make decisions. To make decisions requires entering into a process of deliberating about alternatives. So far as deliberation takes place, people make the decisions they make for reasons. And, so far as this is the case, exercising your right to decide where that applies requires entering into a process of thinking about likely consequences of your decision and setting them against your intent. This is also why political parties have typically announced the policies they would pursue were they to take office and why we speak of educated or knowledgeable voters. Deliberation about alternatives is the thought process the campaign of disinformation is meant to stymie. Political parties dominated by the impulse to stymie deliberation do not offer their supporters programs designed to solve problems. They do not invite them to think. They offer them “an attitude, a tribal pose.”
Thinking intervenes when what we do is not already prescribed for us because the response to external stimulus is not given and unalterable. The alternative—impulse-driven conduct—is suitable to a creature living in a world where only one response to stimulus is possible and there can be only one interpretation of experience so that there is nothing to think about. Creating space for thinking allows us to free ourselves, to a degree, from programmed patterns of behavior and to be, in that sense, creative in our lives. Impulse empowers the inevitable, thoughtful response enables the unexpected. The thoughtful response is evidence that an agent or “self” is present to interpret experience and act, or not act, in response to it.
The more intense the emotion expressed as impulse, the more difficult it will be to resist. This means that, for thinking to take place and self-directed conduct to be possible, there must be a capacity to moderate emotion. Those whose intent is to stifle thinking by mobilizing aggression against it do so by intensifying emotions as a way of empowering impulse and blocking the thinking process. Disinformation is all about the use of emotion to block thinking in order to assure that there can be no genuinely self-directed conduct.
So, it is this enactment of aggression against thinking that makes the world a dangerous place to be.
One way to understand the roots of the anti-democratic movement is to consider how it expresses a formative experience shared among its members involving an attack on the capacity for personal agency and the thought process characteristic of it. The resulting attachment of assault to personal agency or the presence of the self in relating instills the idea that safety only lies in using aggression internally to wall of the self from any presence in relating and the thought process characteristic of its presence from any influence over what we do. Mobilizing aggression against the self internally protects the world from it. And preventing access to thinking on the part of others can be considered an enactment, and a communication, of the need to assure we are protected from the danger self-directed action poses. So, it is this enactment of aggression against thinking that makes the world a dangerous place to be. What the disinformation campaign tells us about, then, is the dilemma in which those engaged in it find themselves: living in a word made dangerous by their own presence in it and their strategy to cope with it.
In communities where significant obstacles exist to any positive emotional investment in the presence of the self, we can expect aggression directed at the reality principle to play a large role. Where hatred of the self is too prominent a factor, disinformation and fake news will be empowered by it. Changes in the medium through which public communication takes place can determine the extent to which the power of disinformation and fake news can be restrained. But, where the capacity to engage a thinking process is blocked, once the genie of fake news has gotten out of its bottle, there may be little we can do to put it back in.
We can, therefore, expect to see anti-democratic forces doing what they can to make our world less safe by exacerbating rather than modifying existing threats and creating new ones where none existed before.
The more insecure the world we live in, the greater the dangers we experience there, the more intense our anxiety, the more powerful emotion will be in governing conduct and the weaker will be our capacity to organize thoughts and experiences through a thinking process. We can, therefore, expect to see anti-democratic forces doing what they can to make our world less safe by exacerbating rather than modifying existing threats and creating new ones where none existed before. Pandemics, wars, the consequences of global warming, and other threats are all too real as we look to the future. The more these threats turn into reality the more they empower the forces working against democratic institutions. And the more powerful the forces working against democracy, the more likely these threats will be realized.
[1] Longwell, Sarah, “Trump Supporters Explain Why They Believe the Big Lie,” The Atlantic, April 18, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/trump-voters-big-lie-stolen-election/629572/