The brilliant HBO/Sky drama Chernobyl tells the story of the world's worst nuclear accident. The accident was avoidable. It happened because previous dangerous events in reactors of similar design (including one of the other reactors at Chernobyl) were suppressed by the Orwellian Soviet government because they didn't want to admit their technology designs were flawed.
The first words spoken in the series are:
What is the cost of lies?
It is not that we will mistake them for the truth.
The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we will no longer recognise the truth at all.
The deaths, the huge cost, the vast radioactive contamination across Europe, the damage to Soviet credibility were all avoidable if people only had access to the truth.
And the key facts were suppressed because an Orwellian government embarrassed to admit flaws in its technology deliberately withheld it.
Plenty of other disasters occured in Soviet times because the government sought to hide the truth from the people who needed it.
Suppressing the truth is bad.
I'm worried that the United States and some other western countries are now facing a similar truth deficit that will lead to many similar disasters. But they have chosen a totally different way to suppress truth.
Let me explain why.
Orwell vs Huxley
Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, was published in 1985 and argued–before the existence of Facebook, Twitter, social media or the World Wide Web–that the media of the day had adopted the values of entertainment and had elevated keeping the audience's attention over telling them the truth. Needless to say, he thought this was dangerous in a society where knowing the truth was important when decisions have to be made.
He pointed out that many thinkers in the west had recognised the importance of truth in public discourse but were worried about the danger of Orwelian truth suppression, which they saw in communist and other totalitarian regimes. He thought they had missed the alternative model where truth is suppressed by swamping it with "soma", the model of Huxley's alternative dystopia, Brave New World. As Postman wrote:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This, remember, was well before the invention of the sort of social media that provides the equivalent of an intravenous feed of soma to the masses. Or, where an American President's Twitter feed might reasonably be described as centrifugal bumblepuppy.
Bullshit versus lies
The second key source relevant to the current crisis of truth is Henry Frankfurt, the author of the excoriating analysis On Bullshit. Though the book version was only published in 2005, the original argument was made in 1986 not long after Amusing Ourselves to Death.
In a core section he argues this (my highlighting):
Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
And later adds:
Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.
My reason for referencing Frankfurt is that bullshit seems to have become the main ingredient of the proliferating amount of soma in the current world. We are being swamped by an avalanche of distracting and entertaining bullshit on media that did not even exist when Postman and Frankfurt first made their arguments about the state of the world.
And the specific nature of bullshit is its power to castrate the truth.
So, to butcher the words from Chernobyl: "The real danger is that if we hear enough bullshit, then we will no longer recognise the truth at all."
Not an Orwellian Chernobyl but a Huxleyan one
America has no notable problem with free speech (though neither do many other western countries, even those, like the UK, who have no constitutional protection for it). Being able to say what you want is not the problem.
The truth will not be suppressed in the USA by Orwellian means. But it can be extinguished by too much bullshit if people lose their ability to recognise objective facts. This appears to be the state of a disturbing portion of the current US population. Trump has a lot to answer for.
Here is a trivial example to illustrate the point. I was engaged in some twitter banter and pointed out that Trump started his presidency with the lie that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama's. A Trump supporter claimed the photos were faked and provided a link to a CNN story where a photographer admitted some manipulation. But I read the link–supposedly refuting my point about the first big lie of the presidency–and what it actually claimed was that the official government photographers had cropped the photos to make Trump's crowds look bigger. Trump's claims are so powerful that believers will quote evidence that clearly refutes the claim in a belief that it validates the claim. Truly the ability to distinguish true from false has departed much discourse.
Whether we care about crowd size (or the size or body parts for that matter–hands, I'm talking about hands you filthy minded cynics) doesn't matter much. Who cares? But the same disregard for truth applied to public health is somewhat more worrying. Or to trust in democracy itself. All of which is a notable problem in the dying days of the Trump presidency.
Trump has elevated bullshit to a whole new and stunning level. In his early days he damned the mainstream media as "fake-news" when they refused to pander to his ego. He continued throughout his presidency to assert his own ego-driven world view against more objective analysis. His conversation with the Ukranian president was "perfect". Wearing masks as a public health measure was "a choice not a recommendation" and "I'm not going to be doing it". Miracle cures for covid were on the horizon (HCQ, injected bleach or "light"). The US response to the virus was "perfect" and no better job could have been done. He asserted his own intelligence agency's advice was wrong on Russian involvement in the 2016 election or in the major 2020 hack of many government and private systems, preferring Putin's judgement.
His supporters loved his bullshit.
Neutral public health advice was undermined during the pandemic. Instead of rational scientific assessments of options, he politicised everything. Belief in miracle cures like HCQ was no longer a matter of calm assessment of objective medical trials but a signifier of political allegiance (and many of his supporters then claimed the opposition had politicised it). Mask wearing became a signal of government oppression not a sensible public health precaution. Social distancing became a sign of effeminate fear and mass political rallies and White House events without it became a signifier of masculine strength not a reckless way to spread the virus (even after the party announcing the Coney Barrett supreme court nomination probably became a super spreader event infecting Trump himself and a disturbing proportion of the senior staff present at it).
His supporters still loved his bullshit.
Since the 2020 election his bullshit has got even more detached from reality. He claims he won by millions of votes (despite the certified counts showing him more than 7m behind). He claims he easily won the electoral college (despite the official count giving a result he described as a "landslide" when he won by the same margin in 2016). He continues to assert he won in 2020 despite losing every legal challenge everywhere. His legal team have made arguments so outrageous it is simply impossible to fathom how anyone took them seriously. In the Texas argument to the Supreme Court, for example, the one in a trillion chance of Biden winning in swing states assumed–when the statistical verbiage was stripped away–that voters voted as they did in 2016 and that batches of vote counts were perfect random samples from the voting population (a problem confounded when the statistician claimed there was no evidence this was not true in a response to legal challenges despite it being a clear and known consequence of counting votes by precinct and county where populations vary greatly). He claimed that voting machines had been hacked and had switched votes, despite verification by hand recounts of paper ballots that cannot be manipulated electronically. He sacked his own appointee responsible for scrutinising cyber-security for saying the election was secure. He lost his own–previously obsequiously loyal attorney general–for saying there was no evidence of fraud on a scale that could tip the result.
His supporters continued to trust him rather than, well, the objectively checkable facts. Worse, some intelligent political leaders decided to back his ludicrous claims (presumably out of the political calculation that pandering to his support would be good for them) despite knowing the claims were as strong as a wet sheet of toilet paper.
Fuck truth.
Truth matters and Chernobyl is what you get when you ignore it
This brings me back to the point of all this.
Trump, many of his voters, and far too many of his political backers seem to have no regard for the truth. They are not liars but–to use Frankfurt's definition–people who simply don't care about whether truth even exists. To use my modified quote from the Chernobyl TV series:
The real danger is that if we hear enough bullshit, then we will no longer recognise the truth at all.
Looking at the behaviour of many Trump-supporting voters and far too many political leaders it looks like the tsunami of bullshit has done its work and many no longer have any idea that there is such a thing as objective truth. As I write this a Trump-incited rally has invaded and disrupted the US Congress delaying the process of certifying the next president. And rapid opinion surveys suggest that nearly half of republicans think this is acceptable. Their conviction seems to be that a conspiracy robbed them of the true result (and, presumably that conspiracy now includes the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and the Vice President).
The USA has achieved the same situation as the pre-Chernobyl Soviet Union not by suppressing truth but by swamping it with bullshit. They have used soma rather than the "jackboot in the face" to do it. President Trump's tweets are the new centrifugal bumblepuppy. We are in the world of Huxley not Orwell.
The result will be the same. There will be a catastrophe caused because too many people can not perceive the drops of truth in the ocean of bullshit. It took the Soviet system half a century of truth suppression to have a disaster so public they couldn't hide it (though they had plenty of others beforehand some of which killed millions). How long will it take for the USA's alternative approach to have the same result? And how many other countries in the west will go down the same path?
