Public discourse ... political and otherwise

[Sexismygod 1,762]

Having seen some of the recent threads, I started thinking about the concept of public discourse.  Being vain enough to think that I have something to say, I thought I'd write it down.  Apologies for the length, just got longer as I wrote it.

Tenet 1 - Politicians lie

This should come as no surprise.  It's an understood and accepted reality.  But the statement is overly narrow.  The fact is EVERYBODY LIES.  We lied as children, we lie as adults.  Lying keeps us out of trouble, makes us look better to our peers, and gets us things the truth would prevent.  We lie of job applications, we lie on our taxes ... we all lie, most of us in very small ways that won't result in WW3 or genocide, but if we're honest with ourselves we'll see that it's just a simple truth.

This doesn't make us all bad people.  We're just trying to get along in a complex, contradictory and confusing world.  A lie is just us trying to pitch our preferred narrative, a form of story telling, if you will.  The vast majority of lies being told are of no significance except to the individual and the small group of people they tell their version of the story to.

The problem with politicians lying is that they have the ability to mobilise armies, to sway the opinion of millions of people, to invoke war and genocide and hatred of "the other".  The lies of politicians have real power and cause real damage.  They manipulate entire populations to get them to believe the false storyline, an unreal truth, and thus turn it into an accepted national reality.  I doesn't matter whether you're American, British, Russian or any other nationality ... we all need to absorb this simple fact:  OUR LEADERS LIE TO US

Tenet 2 - Lies have more power when information access is limited

There are two primary ways this happens.

At the national level, control of the media is a key tool in propagating lies and limiting discourse.  This happens visibly in places like China and Russia, but let's not pretend it doesn't happen in the USA and Europe.  Dissenting opinions are quietly (or more directly) pushed to the sidelines.  They become "fringe", the far left/right, the nutters and lunatics.  It happens every day on every news channel in the world.  The result is, we are all fed a story and we have limited access to these dissenting views.  Mainstream sources carry the groupthink.  It's left to us to go find other opinions, which doesn't always work well (QAnon?).

At the personal level, we just do it to ourselves.  We limit the information we choose to take in (the "social media bubble" phenomenon) and focus on things we already believe.  It's very hard to read something that directly contradicts something we hold to be true.  We reject it almost without thinking.  As a result, we limit the information we access to avoid these contradictions.  This self-limiting behaviour creates a feedback loop that strengthens the things we believe and removes things we don't want to think about.  We make ourselves willing recipients of the lies.

The result of limited/controlled information is that the embedded lies become locked in.  They become part of our own thought processes.  Again, most of these lies are trivial (does that social media influencer really have that amazing body?), but many are harmful.  Harmful stories, from false body image to false demographic conflict to false stories about war & genocide, have become ingrained in the public conscience.  From there, the politicians don't need to say much.  There are simple trigger words that evoke immediate, powerful, emotional responses (Nazi).  These triggers effectively override logical and rational debate.  They invoke evil and the people respond.

Tenet 3 - It's up to us to be the sieve, to sort truth from lies

If we simply accept what we're told, we're doomed to live someone else's storyline.  That doesn't mean we reject everything as a pack of lies and turn our backs on the world.  I don't care if a colleague inflates his/her contribution to a project.  That's not going to hurt me.  I know I do it, too, so let's not be hypocritical.  But when we see armed conflict, factional violence, vilification of a demography, it is our obligation to try to understand.  The truth is in there somewhere and it will be far more complex than the simplistic lies wrapped around it.

We need to start from a position of skepticism and work from there to something we can accept and understand.  Most of us don't have enough information to understand to any depth so I use some simple metrics to help my sorting process:

• Does the narrative single out or directly target a demographic group?
• Does the narrative cause harm to a specific demographic group?
• Does the narrative try to sway me from logical analysis to an emotional response?
• Does the narrative create division between demographies?
• Does the narrative apply labels to people, actions, thoughts, or beliefs?

There's nothing brilliant or magical in this.  It's just how I process the information I get from the world.  And it's only partially successful.  I'm honest with myself and I know that some of my ingrained truth is actually lies ... and I really wish I knew which parts they were so I could get rid of them.  We all live in this soup of truth and fiction and have to find our own path.  Therefore, I think we all need to be a bit more skeptical of the information we're fed and try to take a logical, rational, unemotional view of it to see if we can understand it better.  The truth, if we can find it, really will set us free.

[steve25805 121,322]

What you say is spot on. In my case - and I know this to be true of myself and assume it to be likely for many others too - a large part of what I actually think about stuff is filtered through the lens of what I believe, a kind of core ideology. And that ideology was formed in my case when a young man in reaction to how the government of the day - in my case and place Margaret Thatcher's - and the economic situation of the day where mass unemployment was the norm fed massively into the views I developed. But I also know that character and outlook formed by personal experiences and feelings during childhood made me susceptible to certain types of politics already.

For example I was a loner and often bullied at school with unsupportive teachers, whilst at home discipline was often arbitrary and unfair. All this predisposed me into identifying and being supportive of those who in some ways were seen as outsiders or the other by many, this included sexual minorities, ethnic minorities, women in general, refugees, and so on. It also predisposed me towards being attracted to any ideology that put some sort of fairness at it's core, some sort of greater equality for all. Nothing grated upon me more than those who said that life just wasn't fair and I just had to learn to live with that reality. Such a statement is of course true, but I refused to accept that nothing could be done about that. These early ways of thingking came out of childhood experiences.

There is also the factor of personal character. I have always been an empathetic person with compassion and a tendency to veer more towards understanding than judgementalism. This combined with what I said before about the crucible of childhood made me into a person always likely to be sympathetic to oppressed people, refugees, minority groups, victims of military aggression, etc. My childhood also instilled in me a mistrust of authority figures, which manifests as a readiness to accept that I am likely to be being lied to by people with an agenda in power, whether that be in the media, in government, in business, in trade unions - anywhere really. I am less prone - though not immune - to the kind of patriotism that results in many giving a free pass to their own country. From a young age I grew up thinking like an oppressed loner rejected by society and therefore much less susceptible to it's group thinks and more ready to question it, often to the anger of patriots. In some sense I have always deep down felt like something of a self contained outsider.

Upon leaving school and entering the adult world of work - or unemployment which was a problem most young people in the UK experienced at some point at the time - I was already potentially susceptible to a certain kind of politics. And what I saw was a government that didn't seem to care, that justified my suffering as necessary for the greater good, whose fiscal and legislative measures seemed to act to remove security, lower pay, or increase my costs. Whilst it was a time when those who were already well off were laughing all the way to the bank enjoying massive tax cuts. This pressed the button marked "unfair" instilled in me as a kid, with me again one of the victims and not one of the beneficiaries of it. I began to cast around for explanations and solutions.

And inevitably with such a mindset, I was immediately attracted to a left wing politics that rejected bigotry, put out messages of fairness and equality, and spoke up for the oppressed and downtrodden everywhere. Like most people probably when I began to formulate my political views I quickly sought out information that gelled with me and rejected and avoided what didn't. My reading and learning became selective, the only information allowed in being what supported what I already thought, with anything that contradicted it being viewed as just plain wrong or more likely self serving lies just to justify their own benefitting from unfairness. This is called confirmation bias and we all do it, taking on and believing stuff we already agree with and rejecting as false, misinformed, or just plain lies the stuff we don't.

Many people say that they don't trust the media, that they don't believe everything they read. This is no doubt true, but it is not quite how most of us choose to see it. Because in practice what we tend to do is accept without question the truth of anything we are told that conforms to what we already believe, whilst mistrusting and not believing anything that is counter to what we already think. I spend lots of time on politics forums where there is much heated argument. But it is very rare for anyone to ever change anyone else's mind about anything there. Everyone's point of view is automatically suspect if it is not the same as ours.

We are all like this. Let's not kid ourselves about that, whatever our views happen to be. Which is probably why politics is best avoided on a site like this where it is not in any way central or even peripheral to the purpose of the site. Because the truth is that somewhere like this it doesn't matter if we are socialists or conservatives, liberals or authoritarians, nationalists or internationalists. Nor does it matter which part of the world we are from or which part of the world we live in or what our national allegiences are. Here the big unifying factor is common sexual interests and politics is irrelevent to that. My own considered opinion is that it would probably be for the greater good of this forum if politics posts were against the rules unless related to our sexual interests in some way, eg proposed legislation against pee porn.

After all, political opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one, but nobody wants anybody else's shoved in their face.

Edited March 26, 2022 by steve25805