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jenny_islander"Lesson 10: Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights."
This lesson gave me a stable place to stand and think amid chaos. Back in 2016, someone at a now-defunct forum that I used to visit described the morning after election night as (IIRC) "standing in a crowd that is listening to a boasting tyrant, looking at my friends and neighbors in the crowd expecting to see them looking back at me with the same expression, but instead seeing them gazing adoringly at the tyrant even as their faces split open to reveal the fungus within." That feeling of bewildered horror has been with me and with many for nine years. What tyranny is proclaiming--what tyranny is demanding we follow--is so manifestly untrue. It is an overflowing stew of poisonous lies. How can so many people adoringly swallow it?
Snyder has made a lifelong study of exactly how. In this chapter, he quotes extensively from two eyewitnesses to the rise--and fall!--of tyranny, Victor Klemperer and Eugène Ionesco. Their collective thought may be distilled into four points--"four modes" in which "truth dies."
First: "Open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts." Choosing to live in "a fictional counterworld" denies truth, therefore denying the responsibility to act in light of the truth, as well as the responsibilities to protect and to pass on what is true. It also often involves intentionally destroying evidence of the truth and calling anyone who points to where it used to be an enemy of all right-thinking people.
Second: "Endless repetιtion." As I quoted from Brave New World for the previous lesson, "Sixty-four thousand nine hundred repetιtions make one truth." Repeated lies and insults to the truthful drown out truth. People who study high-demand groups also speak of thought stoppers: phrases or names that signal that there is no more to be said and thus no more to be asked. Repeat a thought stopper enough times and...well, thinking stops.
Third: "Magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction." Tyranny proclaims that mutually exclusive assertions are true. This requires the tyrant's followers, if they wish to continue partaking in the feeling of strength that comes from being in the tyrant's camp, to consent to "a blatant abandonment of reason." Reason is replaced by belief in a person--more, by belief in one's own belief in a person. Anything the tyrant says or does is right because it must be right because belief must be right. The irrational self-contradiction displayed by the tyrant does not matter. Even the physical outcome of the tyrant's actions does not matter; as Klemperer learned firsthand, you will find people proclaiming that a tyrant is honest even after the ruin of their lives at his hands. The sunk cost fallacy is at play, but so is something else.
Fourth: "Misplaced faith." Watch, says Snyder, for people who "self-deify." Such people will promise literal miracles; they will tell you that only in their power can you live in safety. I add that we should not call people who fall for this fools. As a Christian I take for granted that humans naturally need a trusting relationship with someone or something greater, whose entirety we cannot perceive, because we need the certainty that we are not on our own in a complex and dangerous world. But you don't have to believe in any spiritual realm at all in order to understand the importance of faith. Young children who are nurtured have faith in their parents; their faith helps them to live in peace at a vulnerable age. Faith in the skill and goodwill of engineers, pharmacists, and many others whom we shall never meet enables us to live our lives. The danger lies in the co-opting of faith by a tyrant. "When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way," says Snyder, "no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience." The tyrant demands all, even unto death.
So what do we do in the face of people who appear to want everybody to live in their fictional counterworld with them and/or die?
Don't try to argue. Ionesco describes a group of friends meeting regularly to try to find arguments against tyranny. In searching for a way through the lies, they naturally repeated them many times to one another. All but a few ended up joining the tyrant. Besides this, there's the problem of trying to argue rationally with people who have abandoned reason.
So what do we do? We can first of all take comfort that "nothing in our own world would startle Klemperer or Ionesco." They saw tyranny rise, but they also saw it fall.
Snyder does not present a list of actions to take, but from his concluding remarks I draw some suggestions:
Bring "the small truths of daily existence" to common attention. These are not the grounds of an argument: they are an argument. For example, what's the price of eggs? For example, how much taxpayer money did a man who recently called Social Security recipients "the parasite class" receive? For example, is downtown Portland (or Seattle or Chicago or what have you) truly destroyed by protesters? The truest of true believers won't care about truth at all, but for every true believer there are others who still have one foot in reality--people who will begin to think, without you prompting them further.
Tyranny loves to co-opt religion. They are filling a void in people's lives. If your religious group is still free of it, practice your religion more, and invite people to join or rejoin you. If religion is not your thing, what is your ritual? With whom do you gather on a regular basis in order to do the same thing you did last year and so reinforce the stability of life and of community? Now's the time to do it more, and pitch tyranny fans out the door while you're at it. Don't even argue with them. Just boot them out!
Stand on and for the truth and refuse self-glorifying myths. Study history--documented history; find journalists who practice old-school journalism, and read their work. Talk about them. Invite others to read. Discuss them for themselves and not in relationship to whatever the tyrant is bloviating about today.
Watch carefully for breaking announcements that try to get you to feel rather than think. What are they trying to get you to do? Or what are they trying to distract you from?
Watch extra carefully for the times and places where the name of a leader appears when something else should be there. Why is the leader being glorified? Why is the leader getting credit? If work is being done, who is doing it? Is the matter really as simple as the leader says it is? Why are they acting like this? Who died and made them God?
This lesson gave me a stable place to stand and think amid chaos. Back in 2016, someone at a now-defunct forum that I used to visit described the morning after election night as (IIRC) "standing in a crowd that is listening to a boasting tyrant, looking at my friends and neighbors in the crowd expecting to see them looking back at me with the same expression, but instead seeing them gazing adoringly at the tyrant even as their faces split open to reveal the fungus within." That feeling of bewildered horror has been with me and with many for nine years. What tyranny is proclaiming--what tyranny is demanding we follow--is so manifestly untrue. It is an overflowing stew of poisonous lies. How can so many people adoringly swallow it?
Snyder has made a lifelong study of exactly how. In this chapter, he quotes extensively from two eyewitnesses to the rise--and fall!--of tyranny, Victor Klemperer and Eugène Ionesco. Their collective thought may be distilled into four points--"four modes" in which "truth dies."
First: "Open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts." Choosing to live in "a fictional counterworld" denies truth, therefore denying the responsibility to act in light of the truth, as well as the responsibilities to protect and to pass on what is true. It also often involves intentionally destroying evidence of the truth and calling anyone who points to where it used to be an enemy of all right-thinking people.
Second: "Endless repetιtion." As I quoted from Brave New World for the previous lesson, "Sixty-four thousand nine hundred repetιtions make one truth." Repeated lies and insults to the truthful drown out truth. People who study high-demand groups also speak of thought stoppers: phrases or names that signal that there is no more to be said and thus no more to be asked. Repeat a thought stopper enough times and...well, thinking stops.
Third: "Magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction." Tyranny proclaims that mutually exclusive assertions are true. This requires the tyrant's followers, if they wish to continue partaking in the feeling of strength that comes from being in the tyrant's camp, to consent to "a blatant abandonment of reason." Reason is replaced by belief in a person--more, by belief in one's own belief in a person. Anything the tyrant says or does is right because it must be right because belief must be right. The irrational self-contradiction displayed by the tyrant does not matter. Even the physical outcome of the tyrant's actions does not matter; as Klemperer learned firsthand, you will find people proclaiming that a tyrant is honest even after the ruin of their lives at his hands. The sunk cost fallacy is at play, but so is something else.
Fourth: "Misplaced faith." Watch, says Snyder, for people who "self-deify." Such people will promise literal miracles; they will tell you that only in their power can you live in safety. I add that we should not call people who fall for this fools. As a Christian I take for granted that humans naturally need a trusting relationship with someone or something greater, whose entirety we cannot perceive, because we need the certainty that we are not on our own in a complex and dangerous world. But you don't have to believe in any spiritual realm at all in order to understand the importance of faith. Young children who are nurtured have faith in their parents; their faith helps them to live in peace at a vulnerable age. Faith in the skill and goodwill of engineers, pharmacists, and many others whom we shall never meet enables us to live our lives. The danger lies in the co-opting of faith by a tyrant. "When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way," says Snyder, "no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience." The tyrant demands all, even unto death.
So what do we do in the face of people who appear to want everybody to live in their fictional counterworld with them and/or die?
Don't try to argue. Ionesco describes a group of friends meeting regularly to try to find arguments against tyranny. In searching for a way through the lies, they naturally repeated them many times to one another. All but a few ended up joining the tyrant. Besides this, there's the problem of trying to argue rationally with people who have abandoned reason.
So what do we do? We can first of all take comfort that "nothing in our own world would startle Klemperer or Ionesco." They saw tyranny rise, but they also saw it fall.
Snyder does not present a list of actions to take, but from his concluding remarks I draw some suggestions:
Bring "the small truths of daily existence" to common attention. These are not the grounds of an argument: they are an argument. For example, what's the price of eggs? For example, how much taxpayer money did a man who recently called Social Security recipients "the parasite class" receive? For example, is downtown Portland (or Seattle or Chicago or what have you) truly destroyed by protesters? The truest of true believers won't care about truth at all, but for every true believer there are others who still have one foot in reality--people who will begin to think, without you prompting them further.
Tyranny loves to co-opt religion. They are filling a void in people's lives. If your religious group is still free of it, practice your religion more, and invite people to join or rejoin you. If religion is not your thing, what is your ritual? With whom do you gather on a regular basis in order to do the same thing you did last year and so reinforce the stability of life and of community? Now's the time to do it more, and pitch tyranny fans out the door while you're at it. Don't even argue with them. Just boot them out!
Stand on and for the truth and refuse self-glorifying myths. Study history--documented history; find journalists who practice old-school journalism, and read their work. Talk about them. Invite others to read. Discuss them for themselves and not in relationship to whatever the tyrant is bloviating about today.
Watch carefully for breaking announcements that try to get you to feel rather than think. What are they trying to get you to do? Or what are they trying to distract you from?
Watch extra carefully for the times and places where the name of a leader appears when something else should be there. Why is the leader being glorified? Why is the leader getting credit? If work is being done, who is doing it? Is the matter really as simple as the leader says it is? Why are they acting like this? Who died and made them God?
