Why is this? How did we end up here, and where is “here,” anyway? Our Ship of State is unmoored, drifting who knows where, and there is no captain steering this human life boat. We are taking on the bitter waters of anger and derision. We’re sinking and the shortwave radio’s Voice of America is nothing but static. I am feeling very uneasy about a rescue, and I am not alone in my desperation.
The current issue of Der Spiegel features an article entitled, “Where Did America Go Wrong?” It’s written by a correspondent who just returned to Germany after five years in the U.S. He writes:
America knows it is sick. It is showing all the symptoms. There are doubts about the legitimacy of elections, and confidence in political institutions has crumbled. The media have abandoned or lost their role as impartial observers. The country's predominantly white police force continues to deploy misguided violence against a disillusioned and outraged Black population. There are armed militias on the streets and it's become almost impossible to voice an opinion without getting overwhelmed by hateful comments on social media. To top it all off is … a society that has been battered by a pandemic that can only be contained by way of solidarity.
And yet, where is that solidarity? Where is our trust in and respect for each other? I’m not seeing it. Take COVID-19 vaccines, two of which are 95% effective and have no reported serious side effects. According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, 70-75% of Americans must be vaccinated to get the country back to normality. Yet the New York Post reports more than half of New York City firefighters said in a union poll that they won't get a COVID vaccination when it becomes available to first responders.
David Brooks, a moderate conservative commentator, isn’t seeing solidarity either. Brooks describes our time as “The Age of Precarity.” Writing in a piece in The Atlantic, he attributes our lack of solidarity and national insecurity to an erosion of social trust:
Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common good. When people in a church lose faith or trust in God, the church collapses. When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.
This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America became a more untrustworthy society. It is an account of how, under the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still. We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust. We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop.
Brooks argues this loss of social trust is due to the failure of institutions over the past 40 or 50 years to address people’s emerging insecurities, of which he cites three.
First up is financial insecurity:
By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth. As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.
Next is emotional insecurity:
Americans today experience more instability than at any period in recent memory—fewer children growing up in married two-parent households, more single-parent households, more depression, and higher suicide rates.
Finally, social insecurity:
In the age of social media our “sociometers”—the antennae we use to measure how other people are seeing us—are up and on high alert all the time. Am I liked? Am I affirmed? Why do I feel invisible? We see ourselves in how we think others see us. Their snarkiness turns into my self-doubt, their criticism into my shame, their obliviousness into my humiliation….In this world, nothing seems safe; everything feels like chaos.
…the bullshitter, however, … is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose… .It is just this lack of connection with the truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit.
The master
bullshitter of our time is outgoing President Trump, who insists that the 2020
presidential election—but, curiously not the congressional or state elections—was
marred by massive fraud, and that if only “legal” votes had been counted, he
would have won, massively. In fact, just
yesterday in Georgia, he asserted in his "Stop the Steal" rally that he did win. I put his insistence in the category of
bullshit rather than lies, because the president doesn’t care if his statement
is true or false. Like the classic bullshitter,
he says it to suit his purpose. And what
is that purpose? 
The object of this particular bullshit is his new leadership PAC, which has raised more than $207 million and counting from gullible donors who are under the mistaken impression that their donations will go to his legal defense fund. In truth, this PAC establishes a slush fund that has little or nothing to do with legal challenges to the election, 39 of which suits have been thrown out of court. Rather, it has everything to do with paying off his more than $431 million in personally guaranteed bank debts and funding his gaudy post-presidential lifestyle. But that’s just my opinion.
Silence can also destroy the truth. As reported in Axios,
The Washington Post surveyed all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate on Thursday and Friday:
Only 25 would acknowledge Joe Biden is president-elect.
222 — 90% of Republicans in Congress — wouldn't say.
Reps. Paul Gosar (Ariz.) and Mo Brooks (Ala.) say President Trump won.
Like bullshit and silence, lies contribute to truth insecurity. When lies about the existence and severity of COVID-19 were promulgated by major media outlets and public figures, they proved deadly. Consider the lethal effects of virus disinformation noted in this article from The New Yorker:
When it comes to COVID-19, the apparent result of the combined disinformation campaign of Trump and Fox News has been devastating. A working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research in May analyzed anonymous location data from millions of cell phones to show that residents of Zip Codes with higher Fox News viewership were less likely to follow stay-at-home orders. Another study, by economists at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, suggested a disparity in health outcomes between areas where Fox News viewers primarily tuned in to Tucker Carlson, who, among Fox hosts, spoke early and with relative urgency about the danger of COVID-19, and places where viewers preferred Sean Hannity [below], who spent weeks downplaying its severity. The economists found that, in March, viewership of Hannity over Carlson, in the locales they studied, was associated with a thirty-two-per-cent increase in infections, and a twenty-three-per-cent increase in COVID-19-related deaths.
By 1918, the U.S. had entered the war and the Allies were badly beating Germany on the battlefield. The top German military commanders, realizing they couldn’t win the war, admitted their imminent defeat to the Kaiser in a secret meeting and persuaded him to abdicate and negotiate an armistice. However, to save face with a population ravaged by hunger and unemployment and facing international humiliation, a myth was born: Germany didn’t really lose the war on the battlefield; rather, it lost the war at home. The domestic enemies were the Socialists, the Bolsheviks, the political party then in power, and especially the Jews. These were the back-stabbers who had agitated against the war and defeated the military campaign, forcing a political surrender. From the op ed:
The startling aspect about the Dolchstosslegende is this: It did not grow weaker after 1918 but stronger. In the face of humiliation and unable or unwilling to cope with the truth, many Germans embarked on a disastrous self-delusion: The nation had been betrayed, but its honor and greatness could never be lost.
[The myth] was also at the heart of Nazi propaganda, and instrumental in justifying violence against opponents. The key to Hitler’s success was that, by 1933, a considerable part of the German electorate had put the ideas embodied in the myth — honor, greatness, national pride — above democracy.
Without a basic consensus built on a shared reality, society split into groups of ardent, uncompromising partisans. And in an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, the notion that dissenters were threats to the nation steadily took hold.
Absurdities are another truth-destabilizer, and QAnon offers a timely example. Much has been written lately about this phenomenon. If you’re not up to speed on Q, this New York Times article offers a good overview. Some critics of the movement like Dan Hon, an alternative reality game (ARG) designer, liken QAnon to an ARG and offer compelling insights into its appeal and why Q’s exhortation to go down the rabbit hole and “Do The Research!” is so seductive:
Put more clearly: you’re in a dead-end job (if you even have one, in our pandemic times). The job prospects in your area aren’t even that great to begin with. You’re socially isolated. Until recently, most things were closed anyway. Government, at all levels, isn’t doing much to help you, and even if it has promised to help you, none of that help has actually arrived. Bills keep coming, because nobody’s helping you out with rent.
But you could be a winner at this game.
You could discover that new piece of evidence, that connection no-one else has seen before.
You could throw it out onto a forum or Twitter or Facebook and get the rush of social approval.
You get to lose yourself in it because it keeps going, and going, and going. And as you’re doing this and reading and researching, every piece you learn works together to explain the world to you, and explain why the world’s been so shitty to you. There’s actual TV that agrees with it! Everything else? That’s lies. It is as if the story, the hook, the teaser and trailer were evolutionarily selected for disadvantaged and dispossessed people in fear.
Research shows that openness to conspiracy theories comes from causes like low socio-economic status, feeling unsafe due to a lack of agency and control in your environment, and low or negative social connections….
I think the best way to fight QAnon, at its roots, is with a robust social safety net program. This not-a-game is being played out of fear, out of a lack of safety, and it’s meeting peoples’ needs in a collectively, societally destructive way.
Destruction of social trust was the goal of Russian “active measures,” a tool used to sow disharmony and doubt in the 2016 and 2020 elections, thereby adding greatly to truth insecurity. The election interference measures were judged to have been “active,” because by playing on people’s financial, emotional, and social insecurities, they caused people receptive to those measures to change their behavior. They either didn’t vote or they didn’t trust the vote. From The New Yorker:
In an encyclopedic and readable history of the subject, “Active Measures,” Thomas Rid, a political scientist and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, explains that “what made an active measure active was . . . whether it resonated with emotions, with collectively held views in the targeted community, and whether it managed to exacerbate existing tensions.” To “activate” anything, it had to hit at preëxisting tendencies and pathologies in society: disaffection, inequality, prejudice, aggression.
Nina Jankowitz, author of “How to Lose the Information War,” believes our democracy will fail unless we hear and respond to our national SOS. From The New Yorker:
The real solution lies in crafting a society and a politics that are more responsive, credible, and just. Achieving that goal might require listening to those who are susceptible to disinformation, rather than mocking them and writing them off. “Although the resultant views may be repugnant to the beholder,” Jankowicz argues, “their origins are legitimate and deserve to be considered.”
I have to agree. We cannot continue to be a country of strident, selfish individualists who scream for freedom (“You can’t tell ME to wear a mask!”) while acting free-dumb. We have to stop shouting at each other in black and white terms and start hearing the shades of gray in our conversations. If we don't, we're lost. But I don’t know if we can open our hearts and minds to craft a truly democratic society and politics at this time, under these circumstances. There is too much precarity, too much propaganda, too much fear, too much hate, too much anger.
I know there are millions of good-hearted people in America who
want nothing better than to sail back to a safe harbor, but unless they trust in each
other, their communities, and their government, they will remain passengers on a rudderless Ship of State. Without trust, a shared factual universe, and open-hearted good will, there can be no consensus on a common purpose. And without a common purpose, there will be no social safety net. At best, we
will continue to drift away from the shores of democracy. At worst, we will slip below the
surface of the roiling black waters, leaving no trace of our once great Ship of State. 
Keep it real! And do as the Germans do. Wear your damn mask!
Marilyn
Excellent!!!
ReplyDeleteThanks! Not a fun one to write or to read.
Deleteanother good one, Marilyn!
ReplyDeleteLoved this in particular:
Silence is complicity, as Elie Wiesel, Albert Einstein, and Dr. Martin Luther King have each reminded us. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Here, the victim is truth and erosion of social trust is the result.
You must be living the stress, too, with Brexit at the edge of the white cliffs of Dover.
Delete