The Misinformation-Outrage Cycle, Part 1: “There are no Yankees here!”

122 Comments /

This is Part 1. It’s generally best to follow the advice given to Alice and the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop.” But if you must read out of order, here are all the links:

Overview:

  • Democracy requires adherence to facts.
  • Because of the current information disruption, facts get lost in a firehose of lies, misunderstandings, speculations, and opinions.
  • This creates misinformation-outrage cycles, which then activate authoritarian impulses in ordinarily pro-democracy people, thereby endangering democracy.
  • The current information disruption is best compared to the invention of the printing press: The influx of new information threw Europe into such turmoil that it ignited religious wars that ravaged the continent for decades. The situation didn’t right itself out until people adapted to the influx of information and learned to evaluate sources and weigh the authenticity of the information. When I taught English at the college and university level in the 1990s, students learned to evaluate written sources. Encyclopedias with teams of editors and fact checkers were still a thing.
  • All of that is now in disruption and, as a culture, we are sinking in a mire of misinformation and disinformation. The problem, of course, is that self-governance requires people to have access to facts.

The Misinformation-Outrage Cycle

Part I: There Are No Yankees Here

Plato argued that democracy was inferior to other forms of government, including monarchy, aristocracy, and oligarchy because democracy—by its very nature—undermines the expertise necessary for good governance. This summary of Plato’s thoughts is from the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy:

Most people do not have the kinds of intellectual talents that enable them to think well about the difficult issues that politics involves. But in order to win office or get a piece of legislation passed, politicians must appeal to these people’s sense of what is right or not right. Hence, the state will be guided by very poorly worked out ideas that experts in manipulation and mass appeal use to help themselves win office.

Democracy requires an educated population able to analyze the implications of government policies. It requires voters to look beyond their own interests and consider the interests of society as a whole. It requires people who are aware of the appeal of a demagogue and can withstand that appeal.

This cannot happen if people do not have accurate information.

The British philosopher A.N. Whitehead famously commented that the history of Western thought “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

This brings us to the question: Will America prove Plato wrong? Or will America’s experiment in self-governance prove to be another footnote to Plato?

Democracy v. Authoritarianism

First, a few definitions. By democracy, I mean this:

Democracy is a form of representative goverment with free and fair form of elections procedure and competitive political process. All citizens are given the right to vote regardless of race, gender or property ownership. A democracy may take various constitutional forms such as constitutional republic, or federal republic, or constitutional monarchy, or presidential system, or parliamentary system, or a hybrid semi-presidential system.

Democracy draws its authority from rule of law. Rule of law requires an adherence to facts, or what sociologists call a shared factuality. A court of law cannot function if jurors say, “I don’t believe any evidence you are showing me. I only believe whatever the Leader tells me is true.”

Authoritarianism, in contrast, is based on lies. The underlying lies are these: “I am the great and powerful leader who can solve all of our problems. I alone have the answers. I am strong and bold enough to protect you from our enemies and the dangers that threaten us.”

Because authoritarianism is based on lies and democracy is based on truth, the way to destroy democracy is to obliterate truth. Here’s the problem: Authoritarianism has a lot of appeal. Democracy has a lot that people find either distasteful or unacceptable.

  • Democracy is messy. All of those checks and balances and divisions of power slow things down. Autocracy is streamlined and swift.
  • Democracy is complex, particularly in a country as large as the United States in an age of globalism. Autocracy is easy to understand: It offers easy answers.
  • Democracy requires working with people who share different views. Some people cannot tolerate compromise.
  • Democracy requires work. “Demos” comes from the ancient Greek word for people, and “cracy” comes from the word for power. This means that the people govern and governing is hard.

About a third of the population is, by nature, authoritarian and anti-democracy

In the 1940s—when the world was reeling with shock over the rise of fascism that led to World War II and the devastating brutality of those regimes—German sociologist Theodor Adorno began studying what came to be called the authoritarian personality. The authoritarian personality describes the people who fall in line behind an authoritarian leader (the rows of people dressed alike raising their hand in salute).

The authoritarian personality is also called an anti-democratic personality.

A criticism of Adorno’s work was that he focused on right-wing authoritarianism. In fact, authoritarian traits have been identified in people across the political spectrum. Political psychologist Karen Stenner cites this chart:

The authoritarian personality includes these dimensions:

  • support for conventional values (for example, the concept of the traditional family of man + women + children with each performing traditional roles.)
  • authoritarian submission (submitting to perceived authorities)
  • authoritarian aggression (aggressive about enforcing hierarchies and norms)
  • stereotypy (a tendency to repeat certain words and phrases; think of group chants)
  • rigidity
  • glorifying toughness and power (and despising bookish weakness)
  • cynicism
  • projectivity (the view that the world is a dark and dangerous place)

Political psychologists define the authoritarian personality as one that rejects nuance and complexity (including diversity) and tends to engage in all-or-nothing thinking. Those with an authoritarian personality prefer sameness and uniformity and have “cognitive limitations.” Karen Stenner calls them “simple-minded avoiders of complexity.” For more, see this article.

Conspiracy theories appeal to those with an authoritarian disposition.

A Conspiracy Theory is an attempt to explain harmful or tragic events as the result of the actions of a small powerful group. Such explanations reject the accepted narrative surrounding those events; indeed, the official version may be seen as further proof of the conspiracy. Conspiracy theories increase in prevalence in periods of widespread anxiety (emphasis added)

Stenner and other political psychologists have concluded that about 33% of the population across cultures has this personality. We often see this number repeated. The Nazis came to power with 33% of the vote. Le Pen won 35% of the vote.

If those who are anti-democratic are only 1/3 of the population, there shouldn’t be a problem, right? The 2/3 can simply outvote the 1/3.

So why doesn’t it work that way?

We saw part of the reason in the recent debacle when the House Republicans tried to elect a speaker: Those who are anti-democracy don’t follow the rules. Duh, right? Democracy is based on rules and they are anti-democracy. They listen to what their leader (in this case, Trump) tells them to do.

Because they don’t play by the rules, they punch above their weight. This gives rise to these kinds of pronouncements:

  • Democrats are bringing a knife to a gunfight
  • Democrats need to fight like Republicans

The problem with that should be obvious. If both sides abandon the rules, there is nobody upholding the rules and they lose all meaning. At least one side has to hold on to democratic ideals and democratic rules or they will be lost. You can’t save democratic ideals by abandoning them. Put another way, the moment pro-democracy people accept the terms of authoritarians, the authoritarians win.

To put it yet another way: People who are pro-democracy should not try to out-fascist the fascists. The fascists will always do fascism better.

The only way to save democracy is with more democracy. This requires a population that can adhere to facts.

Let’s define our terms

Traditionally, the political spectrum has been pictured as a straight line with radical leftists on one end and the reactionary right wing on the other:

 

Because the far left and the far right exhibit similar tendencies, some draw the spectrum as a horseshoe:

The problem is that there is a lot of dispute over terms. What does it mean to be “left” or “right” or “centrist?”

I am going to start with a different approach: There are people who are pro-democracy and people who are disposed toward authoritarianism—and there are degrees. Some people are extreme, but there is lots of gray. Many (if not all) people can exhibit authoritarian traits, particularly in times of high anxiety.

I think this graph works better:

“There are no Yankees here.”

Now, I’m going to tell you a story about my experience with Yankees.

One day, while I was visiting friends in a Northern Virginian suburb of Washington D.C., I announced that I would be attending the University of Pennsylvania. A friend said, “So you’re going up North where the Yankees are.” I had no feelings about Yankees one way or another. (Obviously, there are no Yankees in Missouri and California, where I had lived until then.) My only reference was the song, Yankee Doodle Dandy and the New York Yankees. It seemed perfectly reasonable that there were Yankees in Philadelphia.

At one point, while living in Philadelphia, I mentioned the fact that there are Yankees in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvanians immediately objected and told me, “No. There are no Yankees here. The Yankees are in New England!”

That seemed reasonable.

After college, I lived for a while in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While in Cambridge (you guessed it) I mentioned the fact that there are Yankees in Boston. “Nope!” I was told. “The Yankees are up north!”

One day, a group of friends and I drove to a friend’s home on Lake Champlain, not far from Burlington, Vermont, about 90 miles from the Canadian border. It seemed to me that I had finally arrived in Yankee country. I mean, how much farther north could I go? When I mentioned it, I was told, “There are no Yankees here. The Yankees are out in the hills.”

I often thought about my Yankee story while discussing authoritarianism on social media. I noticed that people are comfortable talking about authoritarianism because everyone assumes this refers to someone else.

“There are no authoritarians here. The authoritarians are on the other side.”

Nope.

The “Yankees” are right here.

In the next few posts, I will demonstrate this:

  • We are currently in an information disruption that has resulted in a proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories. 
  • The way people get their information today is bringing out authoritarian tendencies in otherwise pro-democratic people, thereby causing them to move up this scale:

Put another way: The current information disruption and proliferation of conspiracy theories is making it less likely that enough citizens will be able to make the kinds of informed decisions that a working democracy requires.

Click here for Part 2: Creating the Conditions for Mainstream Conspiracy Theories.

Subscribe and I will let you know when a new post is available:

I have disabled my comments. Because this is my own website and not a social media site, I feel I must monitor the comments, and monitoring them has become too time-consuming. Instead I have added share buttons for discussion on social media.

Scroll to Top