Making Money Real

Human civilization in this discussion is taken to be the broad socioeconomic organization of unrelated and dissimilar humans with common values that enhance survival for families and individuals by providing the advantages of specialization and trade, the persistence of human knowledge, and the rule of law.

Democratic societies rely on the rapid dissemination of accurate and complete information to all members of the society, equipping them with a common knowledge of reality on which to base their democratic choices. It is necessary for the sources of information to all agree on that reality for a democracy to work and survive. This, in turn, is only possible when what is reported IS about reality. The many versions of unreality that are available to those who abandon the standards of scientific inquiry or journalistic rigor do not permit a democracy to agree on any facts.

The adoption of a policy of deliberately attacking science has had more dire consequences than the longer-than-necessary continuation of business as usual for the tobacco companies and its likely death sentences for many of their customers (“The Merchants of Doubt” -Oreskes & Conway, 2010). It has stripped away the ability of our democracies to agree on what “accurate and complete information” even is. We are offered “alternative facts” and the freedom to believe without evidence, and no few in our democracies have availed themselves of those tools to accuse scientists of lying, politicians of pedophilia; and women seeking only the minimal right of control over their own bodies that is offered to a corpse, of murder. Belief without evidence is also part of the definition of “faith.” Religious extremists are at the forefront of the mob tearing at the foundations of our society.

Ignorance, intentional or otherwise, of scientific realities, will ultimately cause damage to the nation. Science has been under attack for at least 30 years, and we have reached a point where many people who have not learned much of science, have become willing to distrust the reality that scientists understand in favor of a belief that scientists are lying to them in order to control them. That is, of course, what the people who own the media they trust instead of the science, have told them; in order to control them.

The problem is that a nation that cannot agree on facts cannot have a rational debate about actions, policies, and consequences. The democracy collapses into warring tribes and descends into despotism.

Non-democratic societies rely on the control of the majority by a minority that uses overt force, control of information, or socioeconomic compulsion to force their view of reality on the majority. This can work well enough if the chosen viewpoints conform with reality, but they seldom do. When they do not, they eventually fail owing to the fact that reality is persistent, while unreality can only endure until it runs headlong into the unyielding obstacle of reality.

The result of the propaganda war attacking science, initiated by big tobacco and continued by big oil, has been a loss of trust in such news media as has attempted to remain truthful and the science. Instead, we have half the nation believing news media that reports partial truths (the most damaging form of lying) and outright falsehoods. This appears to be most severely the case in the countries where the news media controlled by Rupert Murdoch has been permitted to publish his fantasy facts. Fantastic claims sell a lot of “newspapers.”

But big oil and big tobacco were not alone in their attack on science. They did not take out many advertisements directly questioning science but instead funded and worked through existing organizations. Organizations that were originally formed to promote the interests of the very wealthy in our society.

The unrestricted individual freedoms that were originally libertarianism had economic liberalism added to them by the owning class to give us the neoliberal movement as we now know it.

A cloak of philosophical respectability was thus drawn over the activities of the wealthy, big tobacco, and big oil. It exists to this day in the form of the CATO Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and astroturf organizations in many countries. Their original goal was to justify selfishness, and Ayn Rand is an iconic proponent of their philosophy.

The merging of this bankrupt far-right ideology with the attack on science was almost certainly not intentional, but it has consequences more far-reaching than any of its adherents ever imagined.

In the places it has taken root, our populations have divided according to the truth they have allowed themselves to be told, and substantial numbers believe that science itself is lying, in order to exert some malign control over ordinary people. In the process they have also embraced a culture in which wealth is equated with virtue. They are so thoroughly lost to the propaganda machinery that they vote for the privileges of the wealthy, even at the expense of their own lives.

Democracy, where it works, elects representatives rather than leaders, and those representatives may have great power, but they are constrained in its use. The people who elect those representatives are not led by them but instead by the information that they are afforded by the sources they trust. The newsreader on Fox and the journalists reporting for the New York Times may report the same event, but one would never believe that, if one listened to the first while reading the second.

It is notable that ONE of those sources has admitted, in court, to lying. Its legal defense asserts it to be mere entertainment, and nobody in their right mind would believe its proclamations. Its followers are not swayed by this, they memorize and recite the lies rather than believe an inconvenient truth. So we have a bitterly divided democracy, with each side entirely convinced that the other is delusional or thoroughly evil. Tribal democracy? One might as well say a return to feudalism as explain that we live in an oligarchy. We are returning to the dark ages, or the age of the inquisition, and neither of those worked all that well for us, but they are the only things we understand, if democracy fails.

To do better than the oligarchy and its feudalism, we have to all be better educated, able to understand and trust science, and have reason to trust our news sources. The owning classes, our oligarchs, are not fond of that ideal. It would remove them from power. They control many of our news sources, but in all of history they have never managed to control scientists, or the reality they describe. Which leads me to the following short conclusions:

1. The news sources we can trust best are those that present the science the way the scientists agree it should be presented. In other words, the peer reviewed journals and the organizations of scientists are the best sources. They may be wrong, but their efforts to accurately understand reality are the best we can do.
   
2. News and entertainment media that contradict or attack science, particularly widely understood and accepted science like climate change, are media that CANNOT be trusted.
   
3. There are severe problems with the way we fund our sources of information when the owning classes, in their effort to control us, attack science itself.

My next post will propose some possible solutions to the control exerted by our owners.