Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Five

 

Marie Snyder standing in a field. Image supplied by her, cropped by Bill Hulet

This is another article where I use a short conversation with Marie Snyder to raise a few issues that I think are tremendously important.

Cloudwalking Owl · Competition In School

I asked about competition because one of the least known of all open secrets is the fact that a surprising number of people who go to school to get specific skills that they can use to get a good job end up not working in their field of study. Take a look at the following graphic from the American Congressional Budget Office that shows where STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) graduates end up working.

Public Domain Image (click on it for a better quality version)

Yeah, that's right. More than three quarters of graduates from STEM programs don't end up working in their field. That means that all the hyper-anxiety and resulting competitiveness that builds up in children and parents is pretty much misplaced. 

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I became aware of this when I graduated with an undergraduate degree in 1981. The 1980s recession hit Ontario like a sledgehammer and it was tough finding a job. I went back to my home town---Woodstock---for Yule that year and the local beer hall was giving out free Turkey dinners. I went with a bunch of friends from high school. Of the bunch around the table, only two of us had jobs: myself (a philosophy grad) and one other guy who was a fine artist. Everyone else---who had all taken "serious" job-related courses---was out of work. This included people who had studied heavy-design diesel mechanics, engineering, etc, courses. As one person said "I never had any fun at all while at college and I still don't have a job!"

What I learned from this was something that should be obvious to everyone, but isn't. Training more people for a specific job doesn't create new positions for them to fill---it just increases the competition for those few jobs that already exist. This isn't to say that an education isn't important. As one business owner once explained to me. It doesn't matter what the field was, the fact someone was self-motivated to the point where they dragged themselves out of bed to go to lectures, was able to get essays and reports done on time, and, who did enough studying to pass the exams---shows that a kid has the bare minimum necessary to do lots of jobs. (The person I'm referring to ran a landscaping company but still tried to hire grads for the above reasons. He has a degree too.)

That means that any sort of post-secondary diploma is fast becoming the "base line" that gets people past the "first sort" of job applications. As Marie says, post-secondary fills the same function that having a high school diploma did when we were young. 

Having said that, I think that probably the most important job skill that any young person can learn at any time is how to be "entrepreneurial". And, paradoxically, this seems to require exactly the opposite attitude from people who are trying to fashion themselves into a vocational "key" in the hope that they will fit into a specific employment "lock" when they graduate. That's because there really isn't any way for anyone to accurately predict what the world will look like when they get their degree or diploma. 

Let me give you another example. 

I had a friend once who had sought to get a really good trades job so he'd studied a very "cutting edge" technology at the college level. It gave him the ability to work numerically-controlled, precision machine tools. When he got the credentials he got a job---at the only factory in the province that actually used the machines he was trained on. It was owned by the Armed Forces and made weapons. He was making good money, but unfortunately he became a pacifist and was more and more upset about making things designed to kill people. But he knew he couldn't get a good job anywhere else. This meant that even though the game plan had "worked" for him, it didn't allow him the flexibility necessary to make a living in tune with his evolving belief system. (Luckily, he had married a teacher and the two of them decided it made sense for him to quit his job and stay at home to raise their two young daughters.)  

This is an example of the problem with training for one particular type of skilled job. It "locks you in" to that particular field and if it goes through significant changes, you end up being like a sailor in port with no ships to sail on.

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The problem with treating university as the "first rung" on the job searching ladder is that not everyone has it in them to go to college or university. If we forced these institutions to take everyone who applies, the result would a degradation of the entire system because it would mean that the administration would have to put more and more resources into remedial help instead of rewarding excellence.

This leads back to that important truth hiding in plain sight that I mentioned before. A country cannot educate itself into full employment. If it were possible, then Canada would have attained zero unemployment long ago. That's because we have the highest percentage of college and university grads of any country in the world. According to the 2016 census:

In 2016, more than half (54.0%) of Canadians aged 25 to 64 had either college or university qualifications, up from 48.3% in 2006. Canada continues to rank first among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in the proportion of college and university graduates.

This is why Snyder raises the issue of a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI). In a world where automation is getting rid of those lower tier jobs that used to provide employment for the kids who dropped out of school or only had a high school diploma, it offers a "safety net". It also helps people who have some sort of entrepreneurial idea. 

We already have something of a limited GAI in the form of the federal Canada Child Benefit (CCB), which ensures that each parent in Canada receives enough money to hopefully keep the entire family from falling into dire poverty. A few years back I hired a young man to trim some trees on my property. When we were working out the bill, he mentioned to me that the CCB had been absolutely crucial to him being able to get his business off the ground. If it hadn't been there, he said he thinks he'd have had to call it quits and get a job doing something else---just to provide for his young family. 

He was able to use the CCB because he had children. But if he hadn't, there wouldn't have been anything similar to help him "bridge the hard times" during his start up. That's where it would actually help add a few more points to the percentage of people gainfully employed. But having said that, it isn't a "magic bullet" that will eliminate all unemployment. Some people simply won't be able to "thrive" in our modern world. And automation is grinding away at the total number of jobs. Making our workforce even more highly educated simply won't put food on the table or pay the rent---that's why we need a GAI, among other things (like a rational housing policy).    

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This leads me to Snyder's last point in the above clip. There's a foundational fear among a lot of Canadians that is fuelling a competitive drive among parents, who then pass this on to their children. The idea is that if children don't "get to the head of the pack" early on, their chances of becoming successful in life will only diminish as they get older. This sort of general fearfulness is corrosive to society and discourages the solidarity that is essential to getting out of the collective hole that we are already in and digging deeper every day.

The problem is that there are "islands of stability" in the behaviour of groups. That is, certain behaviours can be self-perpetuating, and lack of trust can be one of them. If people don't trust themselves or others, they start to make decisions based on that lack of trust that only reinforces other people's lack of trust. This causes these others to do things that then reinforces the lack of trust in the first person. And as a result, things start to "lock up" in society. 

Economists understand this problem with regard to consumer demand. That's why governments all over the world have been showering borrowed money on their citizenry. This is because advisors have been telling them that if they don't do this the destruction of savings will traumatize consumers and keep them from spending even after they get their jobs back---just like the great depression convinced many of our grandparents and great grandparents to be very careful with money until the end of their lives. 

Unfortunately, there has been such a huge over-emphasis on individualism in our lifetimes that modern governments seem to have totally lost any idea that our nations need a collective sense of solidarity if we are going to be able to thrive as individuals. I suspect that a large part of this has come from two very different sources. First, during the 1960s there was a tremendous "cultural revolution" that came about because of people in my generation rebelling against the intense social conservatism that our parents manifested---probably because of their experiences in the Great Depression and World War II. More recently, the Neo-Liberal Consensus that emerged during the Reagan/Thatcher years has convinced an entire generation of politicians that the marketplace is the only decision-making body that should have any influence on human life.

Here's an excerpt from a World War Two army training video that shows how it is possible to make an excellent argument for the need to co-operate instead of compete if we are going to make any progress as a nation. I just wish that the people in Ottawa and Queen's Park had some similar inkling of how important this issue can be in a properly functioning society.

 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Twenty Five

In this instalment, Bookchin's training with Wayne gets more "down and dirty".

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Wayne had his feet upon the table and was looking at a monitor mounted to the wall on a flexible arm. He’d obviously been watching the interview.

“You did remarkably well. You didn’t lose your temper and you had a short, snappy answer to every loaded question. Not bad at all.”

“This wasn’t my first rodeo and Mir has been helping me with general content. He’s great at telling me what does and doesn’t work. What do you think I could have done better?”

Wayne looked thoughtful for a while before he answered. “There are a lot of things you could have done worse. But better? I don’t think that is a question you should be asking.”

“It is true people can do things wrong when they get interviewed. But one of the things that is very commonly done wrong is to think that there is a solution to every problem. In fact, I like to get people to think about the difference between a problem and a dilemma. As I use those two words, a problem is something that you can fix if you just find the right response. In contrast, a dilemma has no solution at all. You can’t fix a dilemma---all you can do is see it as a test of character.”

“A lot of people get bad advice saying they must avoid making a mistake. The problem is they try so hard they end up just repeating talking points, which makes them sound like robots. At best, they look like they are incapable of thinking for themselves. At worst, they look like they have something to hide. If you do this while on the set of people trying to destroy you, they will eat you alive.”

“So no. I don’t think you could have done better. Moreover, I would advise you to not try to do better. Just be yourself. Have confidence in the fact that the Old Ones chose you for a reason---you are the best person for the job you are in.”

“But having said all of that, I do want to do a little coaching. You adapted well to the generic cable news event in our simulation. Tomorrow I want to run you through a specific combative interview with an actor who is primed to act like Tylon Talon.”

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Overnight Mikhi searched for You Tube clips of Talon. He didn’t like what he saw. Talon didn’t seem to be very thoughtful or open to new ideas. In fact, it didn’t seem that he was terribly interested in the truth of anything he was talking about. Mainly, it seemed that all he was about was winning.

He was a thin, very intense-looking young man with short hair. He spoke in a “burst transmission” way---short, very fast sentences interspaced with short moments of silence. Mikhi thought that this was part of his debating style. He tried to race past points that people might take issue with if he gave them more time to think. He also liked to use “loaded language”. He never allowed someone to make a broad statement about something he disagreed with and instead instantly went after them to talk about specifics. In general, he always talked so fast that the other person was always trying to play verbal “catch up” after the fact. If someone resolutely refused to play his game, he would quickly figure out some excuse to shut the situation down. If he was being interviewed on another person’s show, he sometimes even took off his mike and left the stage in a huff. If he was doing the interviewing, he got his producers to cut the mike and moved to a commercial after which a clip of something else would be cued up and ready to go---with no mention of the previous guest.

Tylon didn’t converse with people---he fought them to the death. And if it looked like someone else might get the upper hand, he instantly shut the fight down.

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The next day when Mikhi showed up at Wayne’s studio he was put through the same routine as before. But this time when he was led into the studio he sat across from an actor who was dressed like Tylon Talon and was doing his best to mimic his mannerisms. Bookchin had to admit, he was doing a pretty good job.

This actor introduced Mikhi and then went directly to a short clip of the Climate Trials where Wilson Gillespie was talking about the way the oil industry had campaigned to get evangelical Christians to see environmentalism as anti-religious. The clip was edited to ensure the audience didn’t hear any of the evidence. That made it look like Gillespie was just making an accusation without any accompanying evidence. When the clip abruptly stopped, the actor playing Talon immediately threw a statement/question at Bookchin like a machine gun spewing bullets.

“What does the environment movement seek to gain from attacking Christianity?”

“Don’t confuse a small number of evangelical church leaders who chose to get in bed with big oil with the entirety of Christianity. I’m not a Christian myself, but I’ve spent a lot of time studying the Bible and reading theology. I don’t particularly agree with all of Christ’s teachings---but I will admit that if most people decided to actually follow them, the world would be a better place. The problem is a great many of the church leaders that Gillespie is talking about don’t seem to do this.”

“So, you think you know more about the world than the Son of God? Isn’t that something of an arrogant statement?”

“I don’t remember any place in the Gospels where Jesus specifically talks about climate change or the importance of the oil industry to the American economy---so I tend to see this as a ‘render onto Caesar, Caesar’s due’ sort of thing. Frankly, I don’t think that I’m the arrogant one in this particular instance. I won’t go so far as to compare these particular church leaders to shepherds that turn out to be ‘ravening wolves’, but I do think that a case could be made---.”

The actor drew a blank stare, then quickly went back on the offensive. This time he raced through a shopping list of quick questions---leaving Mikhi no time to answer. “What about the scientists who said that we were entering an ice age?”, “What about the fact that transitioning off of fossil fuels will destroy the economy?”, “What about the fact that the vast majority of CO2 comes from China and India?”, “What about the fact that many leading scientists say that climate change comes from sun spots instead of anything people do?”, “What about the fact that it requires more fossil fuels to make solar panels and wind turbines than they save during their short lifespans?”, “What about the fact that outside of a small number of elite people, no one can afford to buy an electric car?”

It was Mikhi’s term to draw a blank stare. “That’s an impressive list of half truths and out-and-out falsehoods. Let me guess, the show’s almost over and I now have no time to answer any of these---right?”

Actually, his response only got to “That’s an impressive list---” before his mike was cut. The producers were working with a five second delay on the broadcast, which meant that they had time to edit out embarrassing responses and shut down the camera in time for the actor to then launch into a monologue where he said “Well, there you have it. Our religious freedoms and economic prosperity are being held hostage by a radical environmentalist who doesn’t really care about how many people get put out of work.”

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Is Politics a "Game"?

I recently heard a podcast where a veteran pollster was interviewing a political strategist for one of the main parties. One of the things that made me grind my teeth was when one of them referred to politics as "a game". It's not the first time I've heard that, but right now I have precious little patience left for this attitude. The reason is pretty simple and easily explained. As I understand it, a "game" is something that people play for "fun" or "amusement". Unfortunately, for many people the consequences of politics are anything but "fun" or "amusing"---instead, the results are often matters of life or death. 

I've felt this way for a large part of my life. Another recent experience that triggered me was watching Mitch McConnell justifying his actions during Trump's second impeachment trial. Here's a short, edited clip from You Tube that illustrates what I'm talking about.

Mitch McConnell is probably one of the worst examples I can think of someone who treats every political issue as a game to be played and won irrespective of how it impacts on the lives of ordinary people. As Nancy Pelosi explains in the above clip, when leader of the Senate majority he stopped the trial of President Trump before Biden had been sworn in as his successor---then after the inauguration said he couldn't cast a guilty vote because Trump was out of office. That's pretty much a text-book example of "political gamesmanship". 

When watching this I couldn't forget that Trump and the Republicans whipped naive supporters into a frenzy by suggesting that the Democrats had stolen the presidential election. And as a result, five people died in the attack on the capital. Three of them appear to have simply been people who had really bad health conditions and the excitement of being involved in a riot "pushed them over the edge". But two of them appear to have been violently killed: Brian Sicknick and Ashli Babbit. 

Look into both of their faces. These are people who died because of political games.

Officer Sicknick died from a stroke after being sprayed with an "unknown chemical substance". Ashli Babbit died after she was shot dead by a police officer while she tried to climb through a broken window to let in a horde of people screaming for the blood of the Vice-President and other members of Congress. Oddly enough, both of them had a couple things in common. There were both Air Force veterans and Trump supporters.

Here's the thing that we all have to remember when faced by situations like this. Human beings generally labour under the illusion that we are all smart and informed enough to make good decisions. But the fact of the matter is we are all the products of our up-bringing, the accidents of our work life, the class we were born into, the education we may or may not have received, and, so forth. All of us are vulnerable---admittedly to a greater or lesser degree---to being whipped into a frenzy by people telling us lies.

If any of my readers doubt this, consider the following question "How many people do you know who don't follow the same religion as their parents?" Sure, you probably know some folks who either joined another tradition or gave up the whole thing altogether. Possibly you did too. But what do you think is the percentage of people in the general population have consciously made this sort of change? I would suggest that the majority of people just continue on whatever path their parents set out for them and haven't the given the subject much thought at all. Is this evidence in support of reasoned individual decision-making, or, the influence of random environmental factors? 

Religion is just an easy example to point out. Much the same thing could be said for a lot of other, less clearly-defined issues---political worldview, aesthetics, how you make a living, etc. The fact of the matter is that even the most well-informed, thoughtful people can get talked into supporting stupid crap. 

I first thought about this when I was a teenager and I learned a bit about a friend's personal history. His family had come from Germany and were very complicit in the Holocaust. His dad had been a Storm Trooper and carried a flag at Nuremburg rallies. Two of his uncles had been SS members---and were executed as war criminals after the war. I also had friends who's parents had been in concentration camps. But we all got along well enough. What that told me was that the things that make people similar are inherently stronger than what keep us apart---but a lot of people are vulnerable to the games that politicians play to pit one group of people against another.

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Many years ago I once got into a conversation with a graduate student in political science. At that time I was very involved in building the Green Party---both in Guelph and across the country. I got into my spiel about how we need to take the environment seriously because the carrying capacity of the earth has been overshot. You could see that he was developing some interest in what I had to say, but he asked me a question that was new to me. It went something to the effect of "what statistical analysis do you have to support the idea that people would vote for such a party?" I responded with something like "it really doesn't matter how many people think like this---it's simply a truth that needs to be integrated into political decision-making. The point of political organizing is to educate the public so they can understand". At this point you could see the doors to his mind slam shut. He let me know that without some significant pre-existing public support of a particular point of view, political organizing is a complete and utter waste of time. 

What was he going on about? I know from reading history a great many initially unpopular ideas have become "conventional wisdom" and "public policy" only after years of public education and organizing. People argued for decades---if not hundreds of years---before slavery was outlawed. Tommy Douglas also had to spend years and years arguing for socialized medicine before it was created. (Doctors initially hated it so much that they went on strike---now they all love it.) 

It has taken decades to articulate, but I've lately come to the conclusion there are two different ways of doing politics. The first one is idealistic and it all boils down to describing a better future and educating voters about it so they will want to change the way society works. The second one is pragmatic and it boils down to figuring out some way to massage the status quo in order to get yourself some power. 

Lincoln Alexander, image c/o Toronto Public Library

Years ago I remember reading an article about Lincoln Alexander where he was asked why he stood for parliament as a member of the Conservative party instead of one of the others. If memory serves, his response was something to the effect of "there really isn't that much difference between the parties---I just chose the one with the best chance of getting me elected in that district and went for the nomination".

This isn't to say that being pragmatic is necessarily a bad thing. At its best, pragmatic politicians can be open to persuasion and will work with members of other parties if it suits their interests. (Alexander was willing to break ranks with the Conservative caucus at times and vote with the Liberals if he felt it was important---such as when he voted for the creation of hate speech legislation.) 

Unfortunately, at their best pragmatists don't tend to think about issues from a systemic point of view. For example, you won't get much deep thinking about the role of unlimited economic growth in the destruction of the planet's ecosystem from pragmatic politicians---even if they might be willing to vote for a carbon tax if it's popular enough with their base. 

At its worst, though, you get people like Mitch McConnell who will say or do whatever it takes to get into or stay in public office. The Republican party in the USA is filled with people like this---which is why most of it's caucus have totally debased themselves in their fawning loyalty to Donald Trump and are moving heaven-and-earth to limit many (mostly brown-skinned and/or urban) people's opportunity to vote. 

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Erin O'Toole, image c/o Wikimedia

This brings me to Erin O'Toole and the present-day Conservative Party of Canada. Recently the party held an on-line convention and O'Toole tried to pivot the party towards some sort of coherent and reasonable policy towards the Climate Emergency. Much to his chagrin, when he tried to get the delegates to admit that it is a "thing", it was voted down by 54 to 46%.

This was a real slap in the face of O'Toole because he believes that the only way that the Conservatives will ever form a government is if the Party starts to embrace more popular policy planks. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of Canadians want the government to deal with the Climate Emergency, and the Conservatives have positioned themselves as the party of deniers. Check out this 2019 graphic from The Conversation that illustrates how much support there is for action on the Climate Emergency. (Click on the image for a clearer version.)

So O'Toole has decided that after years of supporting a party that repeatedly campaigned against dealing with the Climate Emergency, it's time to "retool" and embrace the issue because it's obvious that they will never be able to win a majority without doing so. 

This is what pragmatic politicians would call "the Etch-A-Sketch maneuver". It's gets its name from the old-fashioned children's toy where you could draw a picture and erase it simply by shaking the screen. 

via GIPHY

The idea is that you can tell the members of your party any sort of silly nonsense to get elected leader or secure a local nomination on the assumption they will just "suck it up" when you do a 180 degree turn afterwards. It's one of the classic political games. The problem is, however, that the rubes sometimes actually start to believe the garbage you have been shovelling at them. Then you can't reset their belief system as easily as you can erase an Etch-A-Sketch. And because politicians like O'Toole don't "get" that a lot of grass-roots Conservatives actually believe the dangerous nonsense people like him have been peddling for years, they get stuck with "bozo eruptions" and "insurrections" like the vote by delegates denying the Climate Emergency.

O'Toole's failure to lead his party out of climate denial and the violent attack on the US Congress show the problem with treating politics like a game. It tends to give control of the party to the most ruthless and duplicitous members of the political class (ie: Donald Trump and Stephen Harper). And the games that these particular type of politicians play tends to whip up the most gullible members of the population into a frenzy that means that they become at best impossible to reason with and at worst violent.

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People become fixated on the short term and winning elections. But the fact of the matter is that you can be enormously successful at changing your society without being a "winner" at the game of politics. If you doubt me, consider the biography of Stephan Dion. He was the leader of the Liberal Party, but he wasn't elected Prime Minister. So he's a loser, right? 

Not really. He was a university professor in Montreal who was brought to the attention of Prime Minister Chretien by his wife, Aline. The Liberal leader was so impressed that he talked Dion into running in a safe riding whereupon he was appointed the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. At that point he became the Liberal point man for unravelling the separatist movement in Quebec. He did this very efficiently through a public education campaign plus "The Clarity Act", which suggested to ordinary voters in "la Belle Province" they were being profoundly misled by separatist politicians. This was tremendously successful and basically took the air out of the tires of the movement to leave Confederation. 

So chalk up ending the Quebec separatist movement to Stephan Dion. 

After this success Dion was elected leader of the Liberals. At which point he started working on the other big issue that concerned him: climate change. He worked at the Paris Climate agreement negotiations. He also helped create an entire government platform based upon the use of carbon pricing mechanisms (ie: carbon taxes) that would encourage both individuals and businesses to slowly wean themselves off fossil fuels. 

In contrast, the Conservatives under Harper built their brand around fighting against any programs that would actually deal with the Climate Emergency. They were especially antagonistic towards carbon pricing and attacked Dion as a weakling who wasn't "good enough" to be the leader of Canada. 

In the above Conservative campaign advertisement Dion is framed as a whiny, ineffectual, egg-head who just "isn't worth the risk". 

But look now at the current political situation. The overwhelming majority of Canadians now believe that the Climate Emergency is real, and, we have carbon pricing across the country. In contrast, Stephen Harper's "realistic and pragmatic" policy of building Canada's economy on exporting tar sands oil has turned out to be yet another failed Albertan "get rich quick" scheme. 

Here's the big takeaway that I want to leave in people's minds. It is possible to be really successful during elections and end-up having no real legacy for future generations. I suspect that Steven Harper will prove to be one of these people. It's also possible to be considered a total failure in polices---like Stephan Dion---and yet have done an enormous amount of good for ordinary citizens. And what separates the two can often be the way they viewed what they were doing. Is politics a game played by pragmatists? Or is it public service done by idealists?

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Twenty Four

In this instalment Mikhail gets some prep time for his first interview on "Wingnut TV".

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Wayne called Mikhi into his office the next day. “I’ve booked you for an interview with Tylon Talon at the Raposa News service next week. We need to do some work before then.”

“Raposa News? Never heard of it.”

“That’s right. I want you to get your feet wet with someone most people haven’t heard of. If you do well, the Elders can always promote clips of it through our AI spoofer. If you bomb, we can simply make it ‘die’. If you do very well, we’ll get you on something a little more popular. Creating a media campaign isn’t just about accessibility, it’s also about tempo. I want to build you up slowly so the lame-stream boys and girls really want you on their show. That will give me more leverage to negotiate the terms of the interview. You don’t want to be someone that they can crush like a steamroller or simply cut off the feed if things don’t go the way they want.”

“Oh. OK. What’s the prep work?”

“I’ve brought in some people to run you through a fake interview so I can coach you about how to answer questions. We’re also going to teach you some ‘self-defence’ techniques that will allow you to fight back if the interview turns into a brawl.”

“The Raposa News network is an ‘up-and-comer’ in the conservative media landscape and Tylon Talon will see this interview as a way of ‘getting noticed’. To that end, he’ll probably go ‘flat out’ to score a direct hit on you. He knows that he’s got a lot more to gain than to lose, so he’s going to take real risks. He’ll have the support of his news director and production staff because both they and the channel are in the same boat. If they can get noticed by the conservative establishment they have an opportunity to get on board the ‘wingnut welfare’ gravy train---and they want that.”

“What’s ‘wingnut welfare’?”

“When a pundit gets enough visibility in the conservative media circuit they have a job for life as long as they continue to tow the party line. That’s because a group of extremely wealthy donors have created a loosely-affiliated group of well-funded fake think tanks, newspapers, pseudo-academic journals, etc, where not only is it more important to say the right things than to have any evidence, it’s also more important than actually making a profit or selling subscriptions. Part of this is a function of extreme wealth stratification which means that a small number of super-rich individuals have as much discretionary money at their fingertips as many small or middle-sized countries. A bunch of these people work together to use their wealth to influence public discourse.”

“Let me give you an example of how ridiculous things have gotten. If you want to get your book on a best-seller’s list, there are companies out there that for a fee plus expenses will organize a campaign where they will buy thousands of copies of your book in ways that aren’t obvious to put you on the map as a ‘serious’ author. This is such a big problem that the New York Times has a set of secret rules it uses to generate their best-sellers’ list and they keep changing them in order to keep one step ahead of these scam artists.”

“Another thing to consider is some very large news sources haven’t made a profit in years and years---yet they still chug along putting out conservative spin. That’s because their publishers are so obscenely wealthy that they can afford to keep an unpopular money-pit afloat simply because it gives them a platform to spew their own private ideological nonsense.”

“I could go on, but the point is that there is an entire ‘alternative reality’ news system and if anyone gets a profile on it, they can be pretty much guaranteed a very highly-paid, not terribly demanding job---as long as they continue to make the same talking points as everyone else.”

“It’s insidious because it not only creates a tremendous number of idiotic spokespeople, it twists even more ‘wannabes’ who parrot their talking points on the hope that they too can get on the wingnut welfare tenure track.”

“We need to prepare you to survive in that arena. So if you could walk into the back room I’ll introduce you to my actors and they’ll get you ready for the nasty world of conservative spin---.”

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These weekend literary supplements are supposed to be "fiction", but just about everything I put in them has some basis in fact. I've read that people tend to remember information put in story form more than in essay style---which is why I've started experimenting with this format. If you think that this is worthwhile and can afford it, why not support my efforts by subscribing? It's easy to do with Patreon and Pay Pal. 

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Wayne showed Mikhi a back door which they walked through. They entered a room with a sofa aimed at a big screen tv. There was a coffee urn, some bottled water, soft drinks, cans of beer, little plastic bottles of hard liquor, and, some candy. “Please be seated”, someone will come and get you in a few minutes. Watch the tv, it’s a live feed from the studio and will let you know what’s broadcast before you come on the show.”

He sat down and tried to relax. Then a woman came in and told him to come with her to get ready for the interview. Once they got into her little work room, she put him up on a high stool, wrapped a sheet around him to protect his clothing, then she primped and sprayed his hair, then applied some makeup on his face to cut down on camera glare. Then she got him to take off his jacket, she hung a wireless battery and transmitter pack off his belt in back, ran a wire under his shirt and up his spine, over his collar, to the front where she clipped the attached microphone to his first shirt button. He put his jacket back on and she took him back to the “green room” to wait. She told him not to sit on the sofa but rather a stool that was back in the corner.

“The sofa is actually there so people will relax in them and rumple their clothes. The real ‘pros’ always sit on that stool, which is why it’s there. Also, don’t drink any of the coffee. Sometimes it’s got extra caffeine added to it to make people jumpy or give them the urge to use a toilet. This gives the interviewer a bit of an edge. I hope I don’t have to warn you to not touch the booze. You might be tempted to have a beer or a shot to calm your jumpy nerves, but believe me, it won’t help. Also, it’s really important to watch that tv set. It will help you understand how they are setting up your interview---what clips they show first, what pre-commercial comments they make---even the advertisements can set a tone.”

“What we’re doing here is trying to let you know exactly what you are in for, and getting you to live it works much better than just telling you.”

She left. He carried the stool out of the corner and sat on it watching the tv. It made for fascinating viewing.

There was a clip of out-of-work oil workers standing with signs proclaiming things like ‘climate change is a crock’ followed by another one of a complex graph with a voice-over by someone saying it proved beyond a doubt that if there was any change, it was insignificant and probably caused by sunspot activity instead of whatever humans were doing. Then the show’s host came on and said he had a guest, the “infamous” Mikhail Bookchin who was the host of the “so-called” Climate Trials. Then they cut to three short commercial spots. The first was for some sketchy guy with a pony tail who whipped out a roll of money and said that he was offering “cash money” for people’s “old gold”. The next ad suggested that people buy a “100% efficient electric space heater that was “hand built out of real American hardwood by Amish craftsmen”. The final one talked about a miracle weight loss pill that cleared the build-up of fecal matter that gathered in people’s lower intestine “like drywall compound”.

At that point a producer came in with a clipboard and a headset and walked Mikhi over to the studio. They did a quick sound check, and then the host turned from camera one to camera two, which allowed him to be on-air while facing his guest. He got right to the point with his first question.

“So what do you have against the oil industry and the hard-working people who make their living from it?”

“Not much, but I do want everyone---including these ‘hard-working people’---to avoid suffering from runaway climate change. That would cause huge problems for everyone---especially people who are on the bottom rungs of our economy.”

“You say that, but aren’t you in favour of putting everyone who works in the fossil fuel sector out of work?”

“Well, I’d like them to find other jobs that don’t damage the planet. And I’d like them to get those jobs now rather than later when we are fighting tooth and nail to deal with more and more extreme weather, major flooding on our coastlines, runaway forest fires, and so on. The thing is those jobs are doomed no matter what we do. The point is to try to transition people away from them while we still have some leeway in the economy instead of just dumping them down the toilet when we are in the midst of a climate-induced state of emergency.”

The host turned back to camera one and did a quick segue to the commercials: “When we come back, I’ll have a short clip from a different point-of-view and see what our guest has to say about that”.

Two producers dashed onto the set. They dusted both of them with a powder puff to hide the sweat that was peeking through the makeup because of the heat from the spot lights. The one doing Mikhi suggested that he look at the monitor over the host’s head so he could see what the clip was that the station was showing before they went back on air. The host, who knew what was coming, had a quick conversation with his producer but Mikhi couldn’t figure out what they were saying.

The ads were for a brand of adult diaper, a pill that offered a cure for erectile dysfunction, and, an alarm that people could wear around their necks---it had an actor making a plaintive call of “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” By now Mikhi had figured-out the demographic this show served.

Then the clip came on.

A young man in a nice suit with hair in one of those heavily-sculpted confections that looks vaguely like a rooster’s comb was saying “the climate change freak-out is a perfect encapsulation of the liberal movement”. He went on to spell out a self-serving “theory” of social change that suggested a class of political opportunists were using people’s naive concern about a fake environmental problem to push a socialist agenda. He went on to say that environmentalists were invariably “water-melons”: green on the outside, but red in the middle.

He cited “proofs” declaring when you hear someone talking about the icecaps melting they will soon transition to talking about taxing the rich, getting people to use public transit instead of personal automobiles, living in apartments instead of owning their own home in the suburbs, socialized---which is just another word for rationed---healthcare, and so on. He said they are using environmentalism as a Trojan horse for destroying the basic economic freedoms that made our nation the envy of the world.

The light on the camera that was facing Mikhi went on and the host went straight to the question. “You saw Ira Kapori suggest that environmentalism is being used to push a socialist agenda. How do you respond to that?”

“I suppose it depends on how you define ‘socialism’. But in general large-scale problems tend to call for government solutions. There have been economists who have come up with market-based mechanisms that would incorporate environmental considerations into “the bottom line”. And a lot of business people and even some conservative political parties have in the past expressed support for things like carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems. Unfortunately, their support has been like a mirage---the closer society gets to actually using them, the more support for them among conservatives goes away.”

“But why would any conservative support a tax grab?”

“Because it isn’t. If the government taxed air, businesses would start researching how to breath water. That’s the point, not the revenue raised but the change in behaviour. In fact, a lot of carbon tax systems are designed to be revenue neutral---for every dollar raised through carbon pricing, a dollar in taxes will be cut from some other source---like income.”

“Encouraging businesses to cut their fossil fuel bill almost invariably increases productivity. That’s because we are taxing something we don’t want---waste---instead of something we do want---profit.”

“So you’re saying that the government should pick winners and losers instead of the market----. We all know how well that works.”

“Not individual businesses---but entire sectors of the economy, yes. And we don’t ‘all know how well that works’. The government controlled the economy this way during WWII and it did things like produce one liberty ship a day for years. More recently, the government---through the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)---invented email as a way of being able to send messages even if the national telecommunications network was damaged. Not only that, but a huge number of important technological innovations have come from government contracts with universities. Actually, it’s total nonsense to say that the government is incapable of picking ‘winners’---they do it all the time.”

At this point one of the producers started making the “wind it up” sign with her hands. The light went off on the camera facing Mikhi and one of the other producers looked at him and made a sign to say his mike had been cut. The host had the last word: “Well, I think we all know now where you are coming from. I just hope that some of our freedoms still remain if your Brave New Green World comes into existence. Such a shame if we gave up all our freedom for a fake problem pushed by a bunch of egg heads who never had to work a day in their lives---”.

At that point, Mikhi got hustled off the set, his microphone was removed, and, he was unceremoniously led to the door back to Wayne’s office.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Four

I had intended to include more than one audio clip in this post, but once I started unpacking some of the issues we discussed, things expanded pretty quickly. Never mind, whatever I don't deal with this week will come up in future articles.

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Before I dig into it, I'd like to add my usual plea for support. I put a fair amount of work into this blog, so if you can afford it, why not buy a subscription? It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.

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Cloudwalking Owl · Conservative Versus Liberal Bias

The bit about Bob Altemeyer and "a conservative point of view" opens up a bit of a nest of complex, inter-related issues so I'm going to take some time explaining what we were talking about. 

Altemeyer is famous for his research into a specific type of politics. He was a professor in Manitoba who convinced a lot of politicians and supporters in both Canada and the US to fill out surveys. The results suggest that there is a specific type of human being---what he calls the "authoritarian personality" who make up significant subset of the population. They consist of two groups of people who were made for each other: a lot of people who want someone to tell them what to think and do, and, a much smaller group that want to do the telling. (You can download a free book about this phenomenon here.) The evidence that he found shows that this sort of person tends to support right-wing political parties in Canada (the Conservatives) and the USA (the Republicans). In contrast, the other people in both countries---who I will just label "liberals"---support one of the other parties. (Please remember that this is a statistical generalization---there will be examples of other personality types in all parties.)

I mentioned that people routinely ask why universities can't have a "conservative point of view" expressed more often in classes. The problem seems to be that authoritarians and liberals have very different ways of processing information---and that gets back to my question about "judging each issue on its own merits".

Let's consider a recent example that illustrates what I'm talking about. When the Supreme Court ruled in favour of gay marriage there were a lot of plaintive cries that the sky was falling. If memory serves, our local MP broke with government policy and voted against the bill that legalized it and a local official refused to officiate at same sex marriages and lost her job. I also remember hearing politicians say "the biggest issue facing Canada right now is same-sex marriage". Now it's a great, big "nothing burger". How come?

At the time I personally looked at the issue. I found out that there are several different elements to the issue: practical, ecclesiastic, and, moral. 

The first thing to understand is that there are a whole list of practical benefits that accrue from being married.

• pension survivor benefits, drug and dental plans, etc
• legal issues: hospital visitation rights, adoption, immigration sponsorship, etc
  

I realized that part of this was about something as prosaic as whether or not your life partner could get her teeth fixed. This seemed to me a really good, practical reason to allow same-sex marriage. (Although it can be argued that the real solution would be to change all of these things so they aren't based upon marriage. This could include extending OHIP to include drug and dental---but that would involve a much bigger battle.)

Secondly, several religious organizations said they were being discriminated against when the government said it wanted to legalize same sex marriages. No one was saying that Roman Catholic priests would be forced to perform gay marriages, so it was hard to understand what exactly they were upset about. If any religious group was being interfered with, it was the Unitarians who did want to perform gay marriages but who were forbidden by law. I came to the conclusion that various Christian groups were upset because they were losing some undue influence on society. Loss of privilege often seems like discrimination to people who have had it all of their lives. Not being a Christian, however, that argument didn't put butter on any of my parsnips---.

Finally, if you believe that being gay is "immoral" then you think that supporting it in any way shape or form is also doing something evil. This is the foundational issue, IMHO, because if people think that gay marriage is "sin" (to quote the Pope), then having the state support it is also "sin". When I looked into this issue, however, I saw lots of research that said being gay isn't a "choice"---it's instinctual. Moreover, when biologists look into the behaviour of other animals they found that lots of other species seem to manifest gay sub-populations. So in actual fact, contrary to popular opinion, being gay is actually totally "natural". (And, being a Daoist, being "natural" does put some dairy lipids on my favourite root veggies.)

I know that many Christians believe that all sex is sinful and that our instinct for it is actually the promptings of Satan. But, frankly, I think all of that is errant nonsense and I don't think that our legal system should have anything at all to do with it.

What I was doing in the above is dealing with the issue of gay marriage "on its own merits". As near as I can tell, authoritarians looked at the issue very differently. Their response was to look towards their traditions and the authority figures in their lives. Then they came to the conclusion that gays are "outsiders" and "weird"---and as such should not be "encouraged". 

According to Altemeyer's understanding, therefore, the reason why the uproar over gay marriage dissipated was because during the kerfuffle over gay rights a lot of closeted gays to came out to their families and friends. And when that happened, opposition to same-sex marriage deflated like a soufflé during an earthquake. According to the authoritarian hypothesis this was because most of the people opposed to the law were folks who believed that gays were "outsiders" that they believed were "weirdos". But when they found out that their beloved aunt Sally was a lesbian and that guy they really respected at work was gay, they realized that homosexuals are "real people" just like them. And because they knew "good people" who said that the law was about getting the people they love on their dental plan instead of destroying Christendom, the "penny dropped" that same-sex marriage was a good thing instead of a plot by the anti-Christ.    

I've made such a fuss about the authoritarian hypothesis because understanding it is so important to making sense of what Snyder is saying about "liberalism is just true". I think it's important to really understand what is going on here. The point is that thinking critically about what we do and do not know isn't something that can be incidentally polluted with "liberal bias", thinking critically is what being "liberal" is all about. If you doubt this, consider the following definition that I got from just typing "definition of liberal" in Duckduckgo:

Favoring reform, open to new ideas, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; not bound by traditional thinking; broad-minded. synonym: broad-minded.

Now look at the following mission statements from two Canadian universities. First the University of Guelph:

The University of Guelph is a research-intensive, learner-centred university. Its core value is the pursuit of truth. Its aim is to serve society and to enhance the quality of life through scholarship. Both in its research and in its teaching programs, the University is committed to a global perspective.

Now the one for Ambrose University, a "Christian university" in Alberta:

Ambrose University prepares men and women for wise, joyful and redemptive engagement in the church, society and the created order through excellent Christian post-secondary education.

As you can see, Guelph University is committed to finding the "Truth" and broadening student's understanding according to a "global perspective". In contrast, Ambrose University "prepares" students for "engagement" with "the church, society and the created order". What this ultimately means is that the Guelph school is saying that students need to follow the facts where ever they lead, while the Albertan one is saying that the point of education is get young men and women integrated into the existing religious and social framework. These are two very different goals.

Another piece of evidence that points towards the way authoritarians understand the world comes from a Texas Republican policy plank that seems to specifically oppose their school boards from running the sort of program that Snyder teaches.

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Again, from the authoritarian point of view, education shouldn't be about teaching children how to make up their own minds based on evidence or reason, it should instead be about reinforcing and solidifying the existing belief systems of the community and parents.

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Just in case someone is wondering about the various factual statements that Snyder makes in the rest of the above clip, here's a graph that cites one of the most controversial ones. It does a good job of showing how much the US tax system has changed in the last hundred years or so. (Click on the image to get a clearer version.)

From VisualizingEconomics.com . Public Domain image registered under the CopyLeft Agreement.

As you can see from the above, during the time when the American economy boomed the most, it also had---by far and away---the highest tax rates in its history.

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I can back Snyder up about poor people not wanting society to help folks like them because they hope to eventually be wealthy themselves. I can remember presenting a policy plank to a party convention over 30 years ago. I was arguing for a Guaranteed Annual Income plus a maximum allowable income. (Something that the USA pretty much had under the Eisenhower administration.) Only one person in the group didn't support it, and he was very poor. As he explained it, "I have an idea about how to make much more energy efficient windows. If my patent takes off and I become a millionaire, I don't want to have to pay excessive taxes on my wealth."

This is the same sort of idea that is expressed in the Ronald Wright quote:

"John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

Snyder raises Charles Taylor's use of the concept "social imaginaries" to label this phenomenon. I haven't read any of his work, but from what I could see on-line, this seems very similar to the old Marxist idea of "False Consciousness". This does an excellent job of explaining that weird spiritual experience I mentioned to her. The conversation between my older sibling and our drover from about 50 years ago is a classic case of false consciousness. Both of them had so bought into the "system" that they didn't understand how it was rigged to ensure that people with manure on their boots handing over money to people who never have any on their shoes.  

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I've done a lot of "unpacking" in the above. But I think it was important to work out the nuances of what Snyder and I were talking about in the clip that began this post. Anyway, that should be enough for this week. Until my next post, please take care of yourself. Wear a mask, keep your distance, and, when you can, register for vaccination (I have). 

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Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency! 

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Twenty Three

In this instalment Wayne helps Mikhi learn a little more about the Web, Social Media, and, how it fits into modern religious trends---.

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Wayne sent Mikhi a list of You Tube links with the strong recommendation he force himself to watch at least some of them. Mikhi started with one from a fellow in Missouri that he choose because it was only only 45 minutes long. Most went on for around an hour and a half---but a few were even longer.

The first image was a middle-aged man who was wearing a t-shirt and a ball cap put on backwards. He had a water bottle with some coloured fluid in it that he repeatedly sipped during the entire video. The first 4 minutes consisted of him repeatedly announcing that he had a “great show tonight” while a country and Western song blasted over his voice. Eventually the music ended. Then the narrator went on and on for another five minutes about how he is just an “ordinary guy” who wants the same as “everyone else”---mainly a job that would last long enough to pay off the mortgage on his house. He also announced that he cared just as deeply about nature as anyone, but he’d seen a video of a professor who argued that there was no such thing as climate change. He just wanted to make sure all points of view had been considered before the government did anything that would threaten the “rural way of life”. Then for the next ten minutes he complained about how “one-sided” and “slick” the Climate Trials had been, and why there hadn’t been any “ordinary folks” involved with them, “just so-called intellectuals who’d obviously never worked at tough, physical job in their entire life”. (Mikhi thought to himself “If only. Then maybe my joints wouldn’t hurt so much when I get up in the morning”.) Then the blabfest went on another particularly tedious 20 minutes where he read out loud a letter his local representative in Congress had sent him in response to a question he’d had about the latest carbon tax proposal. This ended with at least 5 minutes of uninterrupted blather that actually said nothing at all, but was peppered with phrases like “when the shit hits the fan” people will finally “find out where the truth really lies”.

At the end of this Mikhi was so bored he thought he would prefer to pound nails into his skull over watching another one of these tedious rants. Then his analytic mind kicked in. He was surprised to realize that he couldn’t really find anything that even remotely looked like an argument in the video. Instead, a bunch of random assertions were jumbled together with a lot of emotional statements about how “ordinary people” were upset with what the “elites” were doing to them. Bookchin looked at the number of views on the channel. Astonishingly, it had already received 10,000 views since it was posted last Thursday.

He contrasted that with his news blog that he’d toiled at for over five years. He’d been happy to get 1500 views a month. It dealt with hard news of local interest, though. That meant that he’d had to spend hours almost every day researching, doing interviews, attending events, taking pictures, etc. Of course the Climate Trials had had billions of hits already---but it had the support of the Elders, and they had tremendous resources to bring to bear. This guy had obviously just pulled this video out of his ass, and yet he had wildly out-performed Bookchin’s labour of love. And from the long list of video links that Wayne sent him, it appeared that there were hundreds---if not thousands---of channels just like the one he’d just forced himself to watch.

Just what the Hell is happening on line?

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The next video Mikhi watched was about creatures called “reptoids” from the star system Alpha Draconis who have infiltrated the earth using their advanced technology to impersonate human beings. This particular example purported to be of a “Draconian” who was in the security detail at a speech given by President Obama in Israel. The man in question was especially thin and seemed to have some illness that had effectively rendered him hairless. These features plus the poor quality of the extremely magnified screen capture and a trick of the shadows created a strange image that an active imagination could interpret as showing “reptilian” features.

An extremely emotionless and flat (Mikhi was half-wondering if the narration was machine-generated) voice-over suggested that this person was a Lizard man who was having problems with his high-tech camouflage.

Mikhail had a hard time understanding this and the other videos he’d seen, so he emailed Wayne and asked him what he thought was going on.

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I was listening to a post on Canadaland today where a story about Ryerson University's journalism program came up. Jesse Brown suggested that the future of the trade isn't going to be working for a large corporation like Torstar but rather little "mom and pop" news outlets---like Convenience stores. Well, this is Bill's "Kwiky Mart" of news. Help yourself, but if you can please subscribe so we can afford to get the roof fixed and the windows washed. It's easy to do through Pay Pal and Patreon.  

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He got one of those explanatory essays that the Elders sometimes sent him to explain complex subjects.

In order to understand the explosion of conspiracy theories people need to acquaint themselves with several key concepts and how they are interacting in the current world. The first one is religious faith and it’s decline and replacement by epistemological nihilism.

The Abrahamic religions---Judaism, Christianity, and, Islam---are somewhat unique in human civilization. That’s because they are spiritual systems based upon a historical revelation instead of on-going personal inspiration (such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Shamanism, Stoicism, science, etc.) This means that belief in an actual historical event, such as the revelation of Allah to Mohamed, is absolutely core to the entire religious system. But that requires individuals to believe, as an actual historical fact, the angel Gabriel met an individual named Mohamed and revealed the divine truth to him which he wrote down in the Koran. This is different from other worldviews, which suggest that there are universal human experiences that every human being can experience if they followed certain mental practices and which provide important insights into how best to live. Because individual members of the Abrahamic religions have no personal access to base their belief upon, they must take the word of historical figures on faith instead. Most other paths, in contrast, suggest that someone needs to find the truth for themselves. This makes the “leap of faith” a peculiarly Western religious concept.

Modern history has been steadily “whittling away” at the “reasonableness” of this demand. Science has undermined the idea there is such a thing as a Supreme Being who directly intervenes in the life of the world. At the same time, human society has advanced beyond the point where it makes sense for people to submit to a higher authority instead of collectively deciding the best way to live. Saying “God did it”, and, “do it because God says so” is easier to accept if people know almost nothing about the world around them and everything else in your life is done “because the local aristocrat says so”.

Religion protects itself from the corrosive effects of scientific discovery and the expansion of human rights by creating a thought process that it calls faith. At its essence, this is a learned behaviour that involves using one’s willpower to short-circuit their ability to critically exam and discard fallacious reasoning. It’s important to realize that we aren’t just talking about things like virgin births, life after death, or, miracles. There are also the ideas that people shouldn’t vaccinate their children, should actively discriminate against women or gays, and, support specific political parties that treat immigrants and poor badly.

This whole worldview is only sustainable if individual parishioners are forbidden to use their own moral intuition. If they did, it might suggest that the behaviours promoted by their denomination are not congruent with the wishes of a just and/or loving deity. Religious faith isn’t just a particular idea that an individual holds onto, it is an on-going battle against a human being’s natural tendency to use reason, evidence, and, their own understanding of right and wrong to make sense of the world around him.

Unfortunately for the Abrahamic religions, religious faith (at least in the modern, industrially-developed parts of the world) is in decline. The fastest growing religious affiliation in the United States, Canada, Europe, and, most technologically-advanced parts of Asia is the “none” category. That is, no religious affiliation at all. And contrary to what you might have heard, the category of religious believers known as “conservative evangelicals” are in the steepest decline of all.

This last point is masked by the fact that when church bodies fill out census forms they only add new members of the congregation and never subtract ones who have left. Add this to the fact that evangelicals tend to have the highest numbers of “church shoppers” going from congregation to congregation, and you end up with the illusion of very large, fast growing denominations. The fact is the demographics skew heavily towards the elderly and many churches only keep themselves financially afloat because of legacies left by dying---and never to be replaced---parishioners.

Unfortunately, this religious faith is not being universally replaced by enlightened rationalism. Instead, in a small but still significant number of cases the void is filled by epistemological nihilism. That’s the idea that there really isn’t any such thing as truth at all, so there’s no sense even trying to think rationally about issues. Of course, almost no one will articulate this viewpoint in such stark terms. (Indeed, being able to do so would require a depth of insight that might render the individual incapable of actually being an epistemological nihilist.) Instead, they find themselves attracted to subcultures where no attempt is made to converse rationally. What they like about these subcultures is specifically the thing that most rational human beings would find most repellent: the fact that emotional statements (usually negative) get repeated over and over again without any attempt to justify them using real evidence or a rational argument.

It’s important to understand the relationship between communities of “faith” and epistemological nihilists. They don’t map onto each other exactly, but they have enough in common that historically the strong influence that the former exerted on society hid the existence of the latter. That is to say, conservative religious faith communities were attractive to epistemological nihilists because they often held the same point of view (anti-vaxer, racist, misogynistic, distrust of experts, etc) but held them under control within their geographic or ecclesiastic community. And religious communities are to a lesser extent epistemological nihilists themselves insofar as they discourage members from using rational or ethical analysis to scrutinize the articles of faith that the community is based upon.

It might be useful to compare religious ritual to something like Twitter in order to understand the above point. Religious congregations self-select, just like Twitter feeds. This ensures that people have diminished exposure to different points of view, which encourages “group think”. A congregation controls the structure of conversation in ways that limits opportunities to expand people’s personal insight. For example, when have you ever seen a priest or pastor ask the congregation if they have any questions after giving a sermon? Similarly, religious ritual is designed specifically to encourage the emotions while discouraging self-analysis. In the same vein, Twitter limits intelligent discussion through the extreme shortness of tweets. It also encourages appeals to emotions by allowing videos, graphic images, and, GIFs (which presumably would use more bandwidth than longer tweets). Just like in churches where “smells and bells” bypass the rational mind, during a pandemic a GIF of a medical mask on a woman morphing into a burka emotionally suggests that public health measures are part of conspiracy to impose Islam on the Western world without having to provide any evidence supporting such an outlandish claim.

It bears asking whether or not social media did any of this on purpose. I suspect not, but it should be remembered that social media’s goal has never been that of fostering genuine human connections. Instead, it has always been about raising money through the advertising industry. And advertising has never been about rational discourse. Instead, it uses emotional appeal. It’s important to understand this relationship if a casual observer wants to understand why it is social media is so opposed to any changes that would foster rational discourse instead of discouraging it.

This is where social media and the way the artificial intelligence programs filter people into “bubbles” of like-minded individuals comes into play. The folks I am talking about aren’t seeking rational arguments to tell them what they should believe. Instead, these individuals already know what they believe and don’t have any interest at all in having these beliefs challenged. They want to find other, like-minded individuals where they they can all bask in some semblance of agreement.

It’s important to understand the appeal. In every geographic community there exist a very small portion of the population who---for one reason or another---believe in very unpopular ideas. They can be out-and-out racists, homophobes, women haters, extreme libertarians, anti-vaxxers, etc. These are the people who used to put photocopied sheets of paper espousing racist slogans under the wiper blades of cars in parking lots and spray-painted swastikas on the walls of synagogues. Then they were annoying but generally harmless. But they have found each other on the Internet and created an artificial simulation of solidarity through social media. This is the first place they’ve been in most of their lives where they can be open and honest about what they think without having to “pipe down” because the majority of people think they are idiots.

It’s also important to understand the limitations of this community. These people actually don’t have that much in common. The people frothing at the mouth over chem trails don’t believe that the Rothschild’s planned the 9/11 attacks. And the ones who want to incite a race war have very little in common with the people who believe that vaccinations allow Bill Gates to plant tracking devices. This means that their “conversations” have to adhere to very strict, unspoken rules. If people were to stray from them, cognitive dissonance would build up and people would have to confront the fact that they have almost nothing in common. This would destroy the tentative “pseudo-community” that social media has created for them. And this would put them back into the sort of social isolation that they suffer in their geographic communities---which for most of them would be extremely frustrating.

This new community---and the unspoken rules that allow it to thrive---have caused them to develop their own idiosyncratic ways of structuring communications. For example, when someone who believes in climate change decides to buy an electric car or insulates their home in order to lower their personal carbon emissions, this isn’t “leading by example” but rather “virtue signalling”. When someone suggests that making racist or homophobic statements insults people of colour or gays, this isn’t being “polite to other people” but rather “attacking free speech”. And when poor or marginalized people get some assistance from the government, this isn’t “helping people who are disadvantaged”, it’s “jumping ahead in line”.

Within these groups there are smaller cliques who believe that there are advantages in “playing” the majority. White nationalists hang around groups that get together to make fun of “normies” and toss out vaguely racist lines once in a while. If they get called to task by the majority, they can just say that they were being “ironic” and suggest that people “can’t get a joke”. By doing so, they are trying to “normalize” racist statements and find the odd person that might be interested in more overt messages and can be channelled to their main messaging system. Lonely young men look at boards that are part of the “pick-up artist” community and the same process finds the most distressed and channels them towards “Incel” groups. “Skeptic” groups attract youth who feel that “politically correct” notions about Islamophobia and “white privilege” are putting them behind the eight-ball are a fertile ground to find the odd individual who is willing to take the next step towards conservative populism and white nationalism.

Add all these people together and all you have is a tiny fraction of the public, but unfortunately they are still capable of creating a great deal of havoc in society. That’s because the emerging global village is so huge that even a tiny fraction of the public is big enough to support a substantial financial and cultural infrastructure. Once you get on-line and within an extremist discussion forum, you are surrounded by many like-minded individuals. And these people have no qualms at all about “egging on” each other.

Moreover, each individual on social media is a total cipher. Outside of a geographic community where someone “carries their past history on their shoulder”, or even in a face-to-face meeting where you have the opportunity to check out someone’s non-verbal signals, communications that happen only through written media on places like Twitter, Face Book, or, Gab share only what the individual chooses. That’s how a twelve year old boy in Estonia managed to become the leader of one of the largest American on-line Neo-Nazi organizations three years ago. Before he was “outed” member of this group committed several murders and were the targets of a huge FBI manhunt, yet it was directed by a child living in another country!

Many people have dismissed most of this activity as harmless idiocy. But the fact of the matter is that there are consequences. A mass murderer in New Zealand who live-streamed his rampage is found to have been inspired by another killer in Quebec who posted a written manifesto. A young misogynist in California videotaped himself preparing to murder six young women and another in Toronto pays homage to him on 4Chan before he drove down a sidewalk and killed another 26 women. A Norwegian who spent a couple years avidly reading American white nationalist forums decided to bring bombs and weapons to a left-wing political party youth camp and murdered a whole generation of politically-active teens.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!