My friend Interrobang just sent me a clip on greenhouse effect "sceptics" that got me thinking.
I'm starting to suspect that disinformation in the modern world has a consistent life cycle.
First it gets a free ride. Not only because, being fraud, it is designed to not be visible for what it is, but because our sort hold ourselves to a higher standard and, even having seen it, take the time to make sure that we haven't misunderstood and then yet more time to gather our arguments.
Then we silly rational people discover it and waste time trying to combat it with dry, unappealing reason nuggets propagated to a resistant public. Resistant, if nothing else, because modern disinformation is very effectively engineered to be something FUN to believe.
Then the disinformation campaign marginalizes, discredits, and otherwise undermines their opponents, usually with almost complete success. It can't possibly matter what we say. After all, we're just "hippies" and "commies" and "feminazis". Or even (gawd forbid) liberals.
And ONLY THEN do those fighting the disinformation start to fight fire with fire, using reason that has been a little more effectively dressed up in emotion, as the disinformation camp has been doing all along. Jon Stewart and his fellow public voices come to mind. But even then we tend to mostly just mock the messenger or the surrounding circumstances, leaving us far below parity since by then the lie spreaders have had ages to mock and undermine us. What we don't do is offer any equally compelling thing to take the place of what we're trying to take away.
So even then we almost never do any better than retaking some small part of their gains. Even then, we usually only get traction once the effects of the disinformation can be easily linked to unpleasant and recently worsening parts of people's lives with a cause and effect interval measured in weeks or less.
Remind me, please; how many people take up smoking a year?
We need to get better at this.
The only thing that occurs to me at the moment is one bit of in-your-faceness that I think we could stand to see more of.
It's time that we started asking:
Are you brave enough to face the truth?
Are you brave enough to admit that greenhouse effects will kill us if we don't act or are you such a wuss that you're just going to hide under your bed and expect people like me to do all the work?
Are you man enough to admit that sexism is a huge part of how corporations mess with us, a key tool (pun intended) in how they sell us crap like Hummers and the Iraq war?
Do you have the guts to face facts? To admit that our nation's infrastructure is disintegrating and that we not only need to do without much of the money in our pockets, we also need to change how we do things and live with massive shutdowns and reroutings while we build saner replacements?
Are you brave enough to admit that plenty of disabled people can do your job just fine and that you've been keeping them out largely because their difference makes you uncomfortable?
Do you have the stones to look yourself in the eye and admit that you don't really need most of what you own? That, in fact, much of what you spend your money on you don't even like all that much once the advertising-caused associations are taken away? Why did you pay forty dollars for a sweatshirt again? For a logo silkscreened on the front? Do you have the strength of will to admit that you've been turned into a delusional sucker and used like a crack whore?
We need to work harder to give the average person emotional hooks to believe the truth. Because they sure as hell have them to stay deluded.
-Rustin