There are facts, and there are fantasies, and societies which discard truth to capture imagination detach from reality and prematurely collapse. Entire nations have fallen by waysides overreacting to theatrics while real and looming threats went unaddressed or simply ignored. In an interview fifteen years after 9/11, historian Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens) suggested that terrorism, what he calls “a strategy of weakness by those who lack power,” has been one such overblown melodrama. While terrorists (including domestic) accounted for a few dozen American deaths each year, obesity and related illnesses killed tens of thousands. Yet al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, not cheeseburgers and soft drinks, dominated headlines, and trillions of federal dollars that could have gone to arresting air pollution and boosting pandemic preparedness, perhaps saving many of 1.3 million Americans lost to COVID, went to military budgets and inordinate displays of force. Those DeMille-dwarfing productions, including costly invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, may now pose far greater threats to our security than the terrorists themselves. Harari equates this to a fly in a china shop, the china shop being the Middle East. Except for insect droppings deposited on a saucer or two, the fly is incapable of causing any damage. But should it buzz maddeningly within ears of a window-shopping bull, chaos and wreckage ensue, spawning new generations of terrorists whose influences germinate in ashes and rubble.
Throughout my lifetime, the U.S. relied heavily on scientists and a select, trusted corps of newscasters to aid in discerning between truth and fallacy. Before the Internet, unfiltered social media, and profitable hyper-partisan propaganda on radio and TV, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Huntley and Brinkley et al served as antibodies against the plague of Orwellian mind control infecting national consciousness today. Newspapers, such as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Washington Post, were flagships in a journalistic flotilla ready to sink the fallacious and unproven. Truth mattered then more than myth and illusion, even if “inconvenient.” We weren’t warned to look away from television sets when facts became unsettling because loving America, however it fell short of idealistic promise, meant acknowledging those imperfections, not ogling some air-brushed centerfold of denial. We were challenged to “do for your country” by correcting historical missteps even if it meant long and arduous backtracks to roads not taken. Dan Rather reported from Viet Nam rice patties, where wounded soldiers, some fresh out of high school, were medically transported to our living rooms. Body bags were photographed on tarmacs. Snail darters, northern spotted owls and old-growth forests were accepted as more important than lumber yards and dams. Sounds of night sticks cracking skulls in Selma, Alabama echoed nationwide eliciting sympathy for those denied their civil rights. Actors Yul Brynner and William Tallman, dying from cancer, looked directly into cameras and implored us, “Don’t smoke!” Truth was our bridge to liberty and justice, and still is today.
Towards that end we scientists remain, vetted by years of academic rigor and empirical consensus, the most reliable source of information on the globe. Science discovers and validates truths because it’s a self-correcting process constantly refining and fine tuning what our senses, bolstered by technology, experience as real. Supported by science and scientific experts, one has to ask: why doesn’t the news media stop allotting time to charlatans and peddlers of disinformation, call-out the liars, openly fact check and debunk the frauds? As Oliver Wendell Holmes delineated, free speech stops at shouting “fire” in crowded theaters. While the Fourth Estate still holds sway over public opinion, financial incentives make certain networks and publications increasingly susceptible to politics, plutocrats and marketplace. Some restrict access to dissenting individuals and opposition parties. A few advance questionable, even odious ideologies; and others won’t criticize the powerful, absolving them of failings which are clear and present dangers.
We like to think freedom of the press and freedom of thought are sacrosanct in democracies such as the United States, France, Australia and Canada and only under attack by authoritarians in Russia, North Korea, Kazakhstan, China and Iran. As seen through the lens of western media, only the latter countries’ governments propagandize. But what if that lens were turned into a mirror? In 1988 Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann co-authored the book Manufacturing Consent challenging the notion that the U.S. media’s function was to restrict political power and to serve and inform the public, enabling us to better engage in guiding America’s future. Instead, many of the big, oligarch-beholding media fabricate consent, or at least our tacit approval, for whatever those in power can extort, extol or convince us to believe. What better could explain a working class bamboozled into laboring in debt, slaving through their lives and dying dispossessed of everything they own? Media conglomerates act as checks against the people, not the powerful, by creating an illusion of democracy and transmitting what the privileged intend for us to hear. They do so, according to Chomsky and Hermann, by sieving information through five filters.
The first involves ownership. Big mass media syndicates are, by and large, enormous corporations, whose sole raison d’etre is to generate profit to which critical journalism is subordinate. The second filter is advertising. Advertisers support the high cost of media by paying for an audience, and we (as that commodity) are gathered as a target group to sell promoted brands. If the news is too discomforting, threatens to reduce audience size or negatively impact sales, reality is either sidestepped entirely or altered to be more palatable. Despite conditions in Gaza, Ukraine and our increasingly incendiary politics, moral progress in relationships among humans has actually improved, albeit marginally. At the same time, however, moral regression in our treatment and attitudes towards other animals has worsened enormously. Despite this, when do you last recall seeing news footage of rainforests being clear-cut, bird and insect populations crashing, or billions of cows and chickens, suspended and struggling on conveyors, having their throats slit in slaughterhouses, before being scalded and disemboweled? Thirdly, the establishment manages the media. Media cannot be an effective check on the powerful because the system itself breeds complicity. Governments, institutions and corporations know how to play the media by feeding it scoops, official accounts and interviewed “newsmakers,” who adhere to false narratives when the rest of us won’t. Those seeking to improve systems by challenging power, insisting on fairness or questioning dysfunction are marginalized and unheard, sideswiped by the media and left stranded in a ditch ─ that is the fourth filter. Finally, to manufacture consent you need a common enemy, the fifth filter to which Chomsky and Hermann allude. Communism, terrorists, immigrants, “elites”; LGBTQ communities are interchangeably “the other” with which to foment fear, court xenophobia, and mold, distract and manipulate public opinion.
As a social animal, cooperation within and between groups of individuals, including sharing information about the world, has always been our species’ stock and trade and a key to our survival. While common myths, such as the biblical creation story, have often been implicated in unchecked destruction of nonhuman life, imagining things collectively, as Joseph Campbell noted, is also a glue enabling humans to cooperate in large numbers. Nations, economies, laws and justice do not exist outside our common imaginings. Good or bad, there would be no state lines or religions if we could only speak about things that physically existed, such as mountaintops, rivers and polar bears. But, as history and current events dictate, myths can dangerously divide us if totally divorced from science and the truth, and that’s when real things such as air quality, drinking water, plants and animals (human and nonhuman) ultimately suffer. Since the Cognitive Revolution, our species has too often been torn between objective reality and imagined concoctions, including nations, corporations and gods, usually to the detriment of the planet and a rational, moral sharing of its resources. America, for example, is currently imperiled because myths and false securities, on which they rely, have gained a political upper hand.
Fortunately, unlike biological evolution and the universe at large, myths (and cultural evolution by extension) can change rapidly and, when more closely aligned with objective reality, usually for the better. Though bloodily, the French turned on a dime in 1789 from believing in divine rights of kings to the sovereignty of the people in accordance with changing conditions such as crop failures and widespread hunger, royal extravagance and profligacy, and military debts from fighting the British, even for us. Out of environmental, economic and sociological necessity, trending blunders in American policies will reverse in due time, hopefully without guillotines and with enough alacrity to mitigate climate change and the ongoing mass extinction. But none of that will happen without a renewed emphasis on science and multiple memes of common ground for what is factual. Neanderthals, after all, didn’t go extinct because they had smaller brains or lesser size and strength than Homo sapiens. Neanderthals’ brains were actually bigger and their size and strength imposing. They were, however, unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers. Neither could they adapt their social behaviors to meet a rapid rise in existential threats, predominantly the arrival of Homo sapiens in increasingly large, aggressive and coordinated numbers. In today’s 21st century America, fictions such as religion, culture wars and nationalistic politics divide the country and make us resistant to trade, cooperation and intellectual exchange with other tribes. According to anthropologists, that same isolationist “cave-dweller first” mentality was exhibited by Neanderthals with whom 1 or 2 percent of our DNA is shared, expressed currently perhaps as MAGA. It takes trust to trade, and trust is predicated on mutually acceptable standards and expression of honesty and truth. By propagating distrust and imposing tariffs, the White House is antithetical to both and an obstacle to human progress which, with prices so high, deserves no countenance.
On whom, then, in addition to scientists and old school journalists can we rely to keep reality in focus and facts on constant display? To discern, relay and promote truth, fields of expertise and competency are pretty much irrelevant in the U.S., where celebrity is celebrated over substance. Offering a grab bag of intellectual skills, artists and philosophers from Goya to Bertrand Russell have historically weighed in on geopolitics and war, and served as societal beacons. Consider Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.” Long considered a children’s tale, it served to reference flaws in Victorian England which still seem valuable metaphors for America today. It was a literary exposé of socially condoned 19th century horrors disguised as youthful fantasy. Those scenes of Alice growing and shrinking after eating strange substances and drinking mysterious liquids (to which Jefferson Airplane alluded in their 1967 rock classic “White Rabbit”) weren’t about psychedelic drugs a century before the fact. They were about widespread opium use, where an estimated 5 of 6 Victorian families during Carroll’s era regularly used laudanum (i.e. liquid opium, aka morphine sulfate) for anything from headaches to quieting teething infants. Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup and comparable products were commonly administered to crying babies. While many women worked 14-hour shifts at textile mills and garment factories, their infants slept quietly for the duration thanks to daily spoonfuls of sweet opium-laced syrups. Before long, coroners linked laudanum to a rash of blue-lipped infantile deaths, and kids, who survived the narcotic, were frequently deformed by their deteriorated health. Carroll alluded to this in his pig-like transformation of the Dutchess’ child, witnessed by Alice in Wonderland.
The Mad Hatter, of course, represented hat-makers addled by mercury nitrate poisoning, working long hours in city shops making felt from chemically-treated animal skins, mostly rabbit. After years of exposure to the toxic metal, uncontrolled trembling led to slurred speech, derangement and death for which surviving family members were never compensated. After centuries of anecdotal proof, mercury’s toxicity was formally declared by the medical community in 1829. French doctors confirmed the connection to hat-making in 1869. Even the public knew. Yet in England, mercury nitrate and rabbit skins remained fixtures of felting until 1941 when it was banned only because the military needed mercury for WWII detonators. Similar systemic indifferences to working class suffering exist in America today. Carroll’s “queen of hearts”-“off with their heads” caricature of royal authority, where card-gardeners paint white roses red, is a thinly disguised reference to England’s Wars of the Roses when politically incited murders were commonplace. White roses symbolized the House of Lancaster, red roses the House of York, both political affiliations contributing to the bloodiest period in English history when the throne changed hands through assassination and executions. In Towton in 1461, the wrong colored rose on their apparel targeted 28,000 citizens for politically-motivated murders. In Tewksbury (1471), scores of Lancaster supporters were beheaded while seeking refuge inside an abbey. Is this where we’re headed with red and blue states? Truth comes in all forms and from all sources, but we must recognize it when we hear it.
America’s originators emphasized the need for an educated and virtuous populace to uphold and understand their nation’s founding principles. By choice, we’ve lost wisdom and empathy in this country because cluelessness is easier to control and empathy and compassion defy profit. Ignorance goes viral while profound truths are buried under noisy distractions and entertainment. Quiet reflection is either ridiculed or ignored. Algorithms amplify our outrage because serious contemplation requires effort and patience. That, as Kierkegaard foresaw, is anathema to modern societies, where nescience and collective thinking, built on validation, feel soft and fuzzy on the mind. People are told what they want to hear, not what they need to confront, whether it’s global warming, unconscionable disparities in wealth or mass extinction. Villains (i.e., communists and immigrants) are preordained for us because cognitive ease requires paths of least-resistance, and trails of pre-selected enemies have neither brambles nor rocks.
Because critical thought and studied, independent evaluations can sometimes be discomforting, we’ll often seek truths but settle for reassurances, collectively avoiding logic and facts. After all, wisdom confronts illusions, and myths are highly profitable. Expensive cell phones and social media may keep us engaged, but they ultimately disconnect us from reality. In an age of Nietzsche-like perspectivism, facts and truths are prejudicially replaced by so many interpretations that ignorance has become an easily exploitable building block for power, and tribal perceptions and opinion almost invariably displace careful reflection. Social media crank up the volume making the loudest opinion, no matter how wrong, the biggest attention-getter. Wise application of knowledge eventually awakens us, but attention means profits (especially in the U.S.), and wisdom does not. The ignorant flatter, amplify their messages and turn complexity into slogans. The intelligent confront and grapple with nuances, finding themselves muted and apart from the crowd. The result: wisdom is no longer celebrated in America because comfort, no matter how ephemeral, is more important here than clarity and truth. As a result, evil can hide behind anyone who claims to hunt it, using flag-waves and prayer. So, hail to the wretchedly mendacious kabuki theater of U.S. politics! Hail to its two-party domination and Big Money slush funds! Hail to its hand-me-down billionaires and protected lists of sex-abusers! In this season of thanks, let us at least be grateful for the truths and facts we still share and the will to defend them in a floundering nation.
Scott Deshefy is a biologist, ecologist and two-time Green Party congressional candidate.