Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

Update - I stumbled over a quote that gave me a chill. Here it is :

Sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realised how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts had become what Hitler and Goebbels said they were.


- William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

It fits today's situation all too well.


******

it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.

Jonathan Swift, 1710

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W B Yeats, 1919

**

Trump will not be back! I myself am a very accurate political predictor – I said Trump could never ever win the election in 2016 and in the same year I said that the UK would never ever vote for Brexit in the referendum – so whatever I think will happen you can guarantee the opposite will. Therefore because I think Trump will definitely run again in 2024 that means he won’t!

This little book is very helpful in trying to wrap your poor throbbing head around all our manic and social political chaos, in which the two opposing sides deny each others’ grasp on reality whilst many alt-right jokesters cackle that there is no such thing as reality anyway. J G Ballard told us this was gonna happen way back in the 1960s. He wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised.

GOOGLE MAPS AS A METAPHOR

I found out that if you look at Google maps in India or China you will see something different than if you look at them in Pakistan or Taiwan. The way Google gets round the tricky issue of territorial disputes is to show each country the border it wants to see. So in Pakistan Google maps shows all of Kashmir to be inside Pakistan, and in India Kashmir is all Indian. Simple! Avoids so much hassle! Give people the reality they want.

BUT….I MISS REALITY

Trump constantly accused the press & tv which he called the main-stream media (implication: controlled by the deep state to keep the sheeple pacified) of broadcasting fake news. At the same time he referred to a terrorist attack in Sweden that didn’t happen and his counsellor referred to another fictitious event called the Bowling Green Massacre, and none of that mattered. You could fact-check these people all day long (and people did) and to the voters it didn’t matter. It was just mood music. Whilst Democrats jumped around exposing his untruths he knew that most voters didn’t care if something was factually correct or not. If it sounded right to them, then it happened. Or it didn’t. Whatever.

Likewise in Britain when Boris used to go round making up nonexistent ridiculous rules imposed by the EU on hapless British citizens he understood the same thing, it didn’t matter if it was true or not.

Occasionally you get a backwards somersault happening : in the recent Alex Jones trial he had said the Sandy Hook shooting was fake news and had never happened and he had to admit in court that it did. Of course he said that he never said it didn’t happen, he was just posing some alternative facts, asking some questions, presenting some independent research or some such bullshit. Maybe he didn’t say any such thing but it really doesn’t matter if he did or not, he might have. That’s good enough for me. I can do it too.

HOW DEEP IS THE DEEP STATE ANYWAY?

We now have the strange spectacle of many American citizens despising and distrusting their own government (and clinging fiercely to the second amendment in order, I suppose, to be able to defend their homes when the deep state sends in the army to kill all patriots like them. But don’t these patriots actually venerate the armed forces, those defenders of the state? Yes they do! There doesn’t seem to be any…logic…here….) Trump himself was at war with the FBI if I recall correctly. Has Trump ever said how he grappled with the deep state when he became president? Oh wait – the deep state fixed the election and got rid of him. Of course. That’s the story. Better remember that, Donald. They did it once and they’ll do it again!

EVIDENCE

We’re always told to check facts and don’t believe anyone until you have and so forth but that’s a counsel of perfection. If you ever read any stuff about the JFK assassination you will know what rabbit holes look like. The arcane intricacies of the Single Bullet Theory, to take just one example : you have experts over here with their 40 minute youtube videos, and experts over there with their entire books. If you’re not prepared to devote months to figuring out if that one bullet could have done all that damage then maybe you’re not allowed an opinion. After that we can begin consideration of the Zapruder film, frame by frame. There goes another six months. This explains partly why people are happy to believe stuff if it feels right. No one has the time for the details, except the true cranks.

DEMOCRACY

Steve Bannon : Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.

HANNAH ARENDT

Michiko Kakutani unearthed a great quote from Hannah Arendt from 1951 :

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

So : this is a short book which asks many difficult questions. Recommended.