This is a commentary on Lou Keep’s piece on HyperNormalisation.

My aim is to repeat what he says, and this warrants an explanation as Lou is an excellent writer. I’ll save that for a future blog post, but the short version is that writing about it forces me to actually understand his argument and condense it into something aiming to be clear, concise, and without words like “jeremiad”.  I apologize to Lou in advance for disfiguring his piece past the point of recognition:

HyperNormalisation – Now in Technicolor

The  BBC documentary of the same name is less important.  What is important is this argument which you may recognize from elsewhere: people in the modern world, are being fed false facts [by the media]. This causes them to be complacent [as opposed to revolting].  Lou’s 5,000 word essay looks at this statement (from now on “statement” in bold), and uses it to make a point. This point is (more or less) that modern society ignores the is/ought problem and acts like knowing facts is sufficient for doing; when in reality different people respond to different facts in different ways depending on their values. Lou uses the word “truth”, but I’ll stick with “facts” as that is what is meant, and the word “truth” has historically been seen as  something distinct.

The Obvious

Every good piece of writing tends to have arguments you already know about and agree with. For me, these were the following. Firstly, from the you’re-not-stuck-in-traffic-you-are-traffic-department:

I would say that’s a neat trick, “Look over there at that media, not we media”, but it’s not a trick. I think he actually believes it, as do other members of the media. This is terrifying

Then, from the there-is-nothing-new-under-the-sun-department:

Julius Caesar was reinterpreted as a Deity, and prayed to as such. How are we to interpret this if “lie becoming truth” is characteristic of modernity?

Both of these points are easy to understand, and there’s nothing groundbreaking about them. They are more or less consistent with the statement, and not the main point of Lou’s piece, because the main point is

The Is/Ought Problem

People making the statement assume that falsehoods cause complacency. The underlying assumption is that if people knew the facts, then they would act differently.  But knowing something (Is) doesn’t imply action (Ought):

This assumes that “truth” has some kind of power. I mean, if lies do, then truth definitely does. Use truth in exchange, enough of it will slay the demon […] Truth, a rote pile of facts and neato information, results in nothing.

A specific example:

The fact that 18% of Americans think the sun moves around the earth has no motive force behind it. What do you do with it? 82% of you will mock the dumbasses, and 18% will not get why they’re being mocked. Those are different responses, in case you weren’t aware of that, i.e. this simple truth doesn’t have any inherent action underlying it.

Or a corollary: if you’re told what action someone takes, then that doesn’t tell you what facts they know (and vice versa). Lou’s point is that in modern discourse, people making statement don’t get this, and incorrectly assume that falsehood is the only possible reason for complacency. This makes a lot of things that previously made less sense to me make more sense.

I have good news for anyone who comes  across an “inconvenient truth” and bad news for those hoping to spread them: none of them mean anything.

What you call “truth”, i.e. a bushel of factoids, leafed together solely with the pithy twine of your self-regard, doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t make people act, it doesn’t make them think. Assuming that it does is madness, as though properly manipulating a syllogism will finally make “change” “occur”.

If “truth” dictates action, and if people don’t act how you think they would  if they had the truth, then:

Conspiracy!

Step one: Truth makes people act (how I want them to).
Step two: But the people are not acting (how I want them to).
Step three: They must not have the truth, because of […].

This is interesting, and I think is related to how people don’t realize how diverse people’s thoughts (and values) can be. Lou ties this to that other modern pathology – narcissism – and of course to nihilism:

Nihilism is the period at which our highest values become unsustainable. It doesn’t look like bombs and leather jackets. It looks like ashen-faced, Serious Men puking trivialities and staring slack-jawed when this fails to provoke anything.

I’m not sure I agree, more on that below. But there’s still the question about whether or not the manipulation part of the statement itself is true or not.

You need someone so good at lying and distorting that they can annihilate the entirety of the internet, and of public education, and of…

But if we disregard that, and assume facts really were misrepresented on a wide scale, who would be easiest to fool?

Educated people are more susceptible to manipulation by the media

The problem with elites is that they’re smarter than the average rube, and they know it, which is why they’ll never get the point. They’re smarter because they do read the journals the periodicals and the magazines. They’re “informed”. But being informed means no filter, i.e. direct from the prop machine. Which means that they are prime propaganda territory, not Joe the Plumber.

Educated people who are informed get their propaganda straight from the source – the media. Joe the Plumber gets the trickle-down version from a wider variety of sources including coworkers, friends, family, etc.

I like this argument, and it has a Chesterton-like feel to it (I suspect Lou has read Orthodoxy), but at the same time I think it is only partially true – people who think tend to be educated [citation needed],  and people who think may be less susceptible to manipulation by the media [citation needed], which would reduce the susceptibility to manipulation of the educated in an average sense. Lou ignores the question of whether education may be correlated with ability to not be manipulated, which is a shame because this is  the standard argument against what he writes.

Some Comments

In my opinion, Lou makes some very good points. But I wish he had said “facts” instead of truth, as this conflation of the two is really what his argument is about (which Lou acknowledges).

1. “Truth” here is considered as a series of facts. This is the common conception of truth, and the one we’re examining, so that’s how I’ll use the word in this essay. Heidegger BTFO until I can make my point.

If this conflation isn’t made, we can throw away the notion that this has something to do with modernity – truth in a more complicated sense has been seen as a value from ancient times (some examples¹, also the related aphorism “knowledge is useless unless it leads to wisdom”, etc..), but in pre-modern times people were more happy to speak about objective values or truth in a more mystic sense which completely changes the relationship between truth and action. Maybe the modern view of truth is closer to it being a series of facts, but I don’t think this is entirely the case – there’s always a moral connotation to “truth”, and moral connotation implies values, which Lou wants to keep separate.

Also I don’t quite get how this ties to nihilism: assuming that facts imply action to me assumes objective values which is more or less the opposite of nihilism. Nihilism is not “Serious men puking trivialities and staring slack-jawed when this fails to provoke anything”, nihilism is if people say valuable things but this fails to provoke anything. The over-reliance on truth as a value shows that modern society is less nihilistic in the sense that those making the statement believe in objective values. The problem seems to be that they don’t realize people don’t have uniform values. But probably Lou uses a different definition of nihilism with with this makes more sense.
Quotes

These didn’t really fit in anywhere above:

People are more consistent than we like to think, they just don’t show their work.

The easy critique of “speaking truth to power” is that power already knows the truth, they just don’t care