Remember, 99% of anything anyone tells you is a lie. Don’t let the demons get you – they got to me.
Chieftain Mews
I originally began writing this on the 5th April, but left it unfinished because I was struggling to find a story to a) make it current and b) link the below accounts together. Then Trump came out with two clangers in two days in regards to injecting your body with disinfectant as a treatment to Coronavirus – and it was all the context I needed.
It’s not so much the initial statement that raised eyebrows – Trump has now had that many transgressions during his relatively short time in office, most have now come to accept that it is merely a hallmark of his presidency. The real concern came the following day, with a brazen attempt to pass-off his ill-informed advice as ‘sarcasm’, while simultaneously attacking the journalists attempting to hold him to account.
The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth
Garry Kasparov
Trump’s disinfectant U-turn was shrouded in a blatant and embarrassing lie, but in the reality of post-truth politics, the line between facts and rhetoric is becoming increasingly blurred.
In school, it was commonplace to be assessed on directly contradicting topics. During period one, we would be taught that the Universe and everything in it was formed by The Big Bang. In period two, we would be taught that Universe and everything in it was created by God. Both can’t be factually correct, and even the theory I choose to believe has a degree of precariousness itself.
You are free to do as we tell you – go back to sleep.
Bill Hicks
Fast-forward 15 years and we’re met with the same dichotomy as before. Not just between science and religion, but also politics, culture and enterprise. All of these elements can be dictated by rhetoric rather than reality, and pose the question: “how much do we actually have to know in order to get ahead?”.
In an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm I watched recently, Cheryl’s friend Wanda comes to the Davids’ house to warm them about an imminent terrorist attack in Los Angeles.
The information was relayed through her brother’s friend, who works in the CIA, information which as come from the ‘highest source possible’.
The entire episode perfectly encapsulates the panic which can develop around the spread of misinformation. Larry is also revered for sharing with select individuals, and even uses it as leverage at one point to win someone over. During all of this, the actual authenticity of the details goes unchallenged and without scrutiny, much like most shared accounts currently circulating about COVID-19.
In instances such as this, it isn’t so much the processing of facts in the sea of fiction, it is more about deciding if the truth is relevant at all – or if it’s simply become an inconvenience to be brushed under the carpet. Looking to the past, Eric Hobsbawm notes in his book ‘On History’ that “the most ideological abuses of history is based on anachronism rather than lies”. Much like conjecture around how the Universe was formed – put forward with conflicting evidence from different classes – we don’t have the capacity to separate the truth from interpretation.
Major zealot-led unrest can easily take hold through manipulation of information and records. Twisted to suit a particular faction, religion or empire, we’ve seen reoccurring incidents throughout history. Hobsbawm remarks that “they can determine what goes into schoolbooks, as the Japanese authorities knew, when they insisted on a sanitised version of the Japanese war in China for use in Japanese classrooms”. Like the cosmological dispute between science and religion, we are not assessed and credited on the accuracy of raw data, but how we can formulate an argument and interpret the content laid before us.
Christopher Columbus didn’t discover North America. Queen Victoria probably never quipped ‘we are not amused’, nor Marie Antoinette with ‘let them eat cake’. More recently, ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ highlights inconsistencies in the origins of mechanics:
There are no men living at present who can justly claim to have invented the machinery that exists today. The most they can truthfully say is that they have added to or improved upon the ideas of those who lived and worked before them. Even Watt and Stevenson merely improved upon steam engines and locomotives already existing.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
When the Conservative party changed their CCHQ Press Twitter account to mimic a factchecking service against Labour, they were given a dusting down by the social media platform, stating that “any further attempts to mislead people by editing verified profile information – in a manner seen during the UK Election Debate – will result in decisive corrective action” – hardly a fitting punishment when you consider the amount of people who may have already been swayed.
Mark Twain said to “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”, which has been the mantra for many establishment institutions and forces in the modern age.
Note: the above is also a fabrication – the pendulum swings both ways.