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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