If You Can't Convince Them, Confuse Them..
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So said Harry S. Truman, 33rd president of the USA. I went googling for famous quotations about the word “confusion” to headline my weekly article. Most of the ones I found seemed to regard confusion as a positive thing: that injecting it or displaying it would help bring stability or demonstrate honesty. But this quote was just what I was looking for: it said what I was after, and was short enough also to put up top. (Note to Ed.: I chose 2 periods rather than 0, 1 or 3, just to emphasize the, well, you know, the confusion).
In My Humble Opinion, confusion, the bad kind which leads to messiness and chaos, and potentially fatal, escalating misunderstanding, is one of the defining characteristics of our age or moment. I see it or its more useful cousins in many spheres; areas as disparate as mathematics (surely not! Non-Euclidean geometries, anyone? Some Gödel on the side?) and physics (Heisenberg) to ethics, philosophy, religion (of course) and more. Fake news in all its varieties, from single tweets to hours-long documentaries, is one of the most troubling to me. Seems the more information we have access to, the less sure we are of almost everything. Try to ban an absolute for anything, though, and I’ll simply reply, “Absolutely?” like I did in my last week’s article. I can’t live without absolutes, and nor do I think can anyone, really, deep down, no matter how relativistic they claim to be. Not when you push them to the wall.
All this is prompted by the initial interview with a suddenly famous “persecuted expert” which forms part of a whole, well-produced documentary about how The Virus is a plot: not by the Chinese, but by the Americans, all for $$$, of course. My sense of skepticism, growing these last few years, kicked in. I googled both the online show on which she was featured (fake news) and then her Wikipedia entry, and realized that here was something dangerous but so well packaged that it’s going viral, as people re-post it and ask each other what they think, but which has also quickly been banned by both Facebook and YouTube. Fortunately, there have been a number of excellent articles contra, not only to serve as debunking sources but also giving ideas about how to respond when one’s friends ask for advice or claim that the thing is legit.
I could say nothing, or wait it out, “falling back on my faith” as I mentioned a week ago… but then I’d feel guilty of being a passive bystander when something bad is being done, instead of jumping in, even when it might well be costly. (I won’t throw my life away, but I can give it away if I feel the need and utility, if push comes to ultimate shove!) When someone I really care about gets fooled and does what they think is right, re-posting false information which could have disastrous consequences for untold numbers of people, should I not respond? Even if I expect my efforts to be utterly wasted and, possibly, UnFriending of me to result? Better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all, right? I do believe so.
Well, why couldn’t all the debunking articles themselves be fake news, and the new documentary the truth?! Indeed! Am I allowed to say I went with my gut feeling, my instincts or intuitions, all those “cold fuzzies,” to coin a phrase, and chose what to believe? The evidence is certainly most impressively stacked against her, I’ll say that. Hey, out of X statements contradicting each other, there are only two possibilities in a rational world. Either they’re all false, or only one of them is true. I really believe this.
The thing was slickly enough put together that it indeed resembles the documentaries it imitates. Who would spend so much obvious talent to make something fake? And WHY? Some people just love anarchy, or do they actually believe what they’re trying to spread? There are also enough points of contention that simply to track down and correct all those errant peskies would take… more time and energy than most of us are willing to commit. But we can read what others have already worked hard to gather and present; that’s what mass media is for.
The last victim of deception is… itself, believing its own lies. This, I believe is at the heart of real evil. A deep philosophical question, certainly debatable. The floor is open.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with nearly 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
By Tony Hanmer