My Least Favorite Four-Letter Word

No…not that one. But I’ll get to that. John Dewey was a philosophy and wiki-described “dangerous radical” who made major contributions to public education in the United States. That “scientific method” poster in your classes was partly based on his idea: we learn by testing our beliefs against experience and seeing what happens. If we hold a false belief, sooner or later experience will show that it simply doesn’t “work,” or, if we’re lucky, we’ll learn what works better, or what might work instead.

The belief that we learn by testing beliefs against experience can itself be tested. I was guardedly optimistic that after 20 months the information would speak for itself, the beliefs that “worked” would increasingly become clear, and we would all be spared a lot of pointless suffering.  However, I think PT Barnum, not John Dewey, is a better lens through which to see what has actually happened: there’s a “sucker born every minute,” that it’s not truth or a good-faith search for it, but illusion, greased by the wheels of money, pride, publicity, and influence-peddling, that’s driving the bulk of collective human behavior. In fact, the more important knowing the truth of the matter is, the more people seem willing to be fooled by charlatans, hucksters, and ideologues—and the more tempting it becomes to attack any who dare puncture our cherished illusions.

Maybe Jean Baudrillard has something to say about this, too (his work influenced the Matrix series and the film Inception, after all): the fake reality we create has actually replaced the real, or at least emptied it of meaning and significance. A world obsessed with appearance, surface, image, and reaction, profound only in its shallowness, remains. And maybe this surge in nostalgia for a lost real is expressing itself in countless ways: a single-minded will to find literal truth in literal text; a compression of the range of human need and experience to mined data and cost-benefit analysis; a reactionary fever-dream to recapture some golden age that never was…perhaps these are understandable instinctive efforts to sprinkle lime over the dead and rotting corpse of reality; a necrophiliac love for the dead letter, push-poll result, falsified echo of the past, is really a comfortably distracted search for a nonexistent arrow rather than an imperfect journey toward an unknown destination.

To be clear, this is not a criticism of faith, but of what religious persons call idolatry. Faith is living and breathing, it changes us and makes itself real by changing reality. Faith changes the world because it changes us. What I’m describing is a negation of faith, its opposite: when we buy the lie, we enter a false reality together, where we can negate reality and flatten characters to conform to an ever-present simulated surface. It is not faith, but power, a self-justifying end-in-itself, resulting in an interminable ingroup/outgroup power struggle with much noise, some blood, and no resolution. The noise becomes the point, as do the cruelties that accompany it. A kingdom of noise.

This is not a conspiracy theory; it is a search for truth. Seeking truth means puncturing illusions, and sometimes, using words to see what lies past and between them. Conspiracy theories do not seek truth, but are themselves illusions; they are political tools that assign blame, and give substance to anger, fear, and power. Conspiracy theories convince us we are clever and freethinking while leading us down the path to disempowerment: when angry and frightened enough, we will hand the reins over to someone, anyone, who promises to deliver “us” from “them.” And that is my least favorite four-letter word, “them,” the plural expression of who “we” are not. To speak of “them” is to create a plural enemy, a many who are one, equal parts vague and evil, beyond rational appeal or moral suasion. Few words—few ideas—have brought more suffering into the world.

I haven’t given up on Dewey even though things have been bleak for some time. I’m not a gloomy person, but I study gloomy things, and in seeking truth, must express gloomy views. However, once the lab rat sees the outline of the maze and smells the distant reward of cheese for what they are, she has a choice: keep running the maze until no longer needed, refuse and die, or find an escape. I pick the third option: I refuse to be a “them” to you, and I refuse to allow you to become a “them” to me. Maybe I just have never been able to see true evil clearly enough, and if I step back from this fake reality, I will come to realize there is in fact a “them” that deserves my blame, fear, hatred, rage; and that all that could be awaits on the other side of making “them” go away. But I suspect exactly the opposite will in fact occur.

This isn’t an attempt to solve a problem: the problem I raise is moral, not technical, and therefore cannot be solved by technical means. This also isn’t an attempt to create another evil “they” to shift blame for my own missteps and incompetence onto, be it soci@l med!a or other manipulations of public opinion; I see the moralistic hypocrisy of that, and I reject the idea that we human beings, you and I, are just pawns or unwitting dupes. This is a “me and it” problem, not an “us and them” problem, if you like; if I am right, then I am a sucker, as much as any and more than some, and some time away to clear my head should make that evident. I can’t singlehandedly change the game, but I can leave it for a while. Seventy-two hours after this post goes live, I’m deactivating all my soci@l med!a accounts for no less than 30 days, and perhaps more depending on how it goes. I’ve tried to do this before, but often fail, because it really is hard to overcome the fear of missing out, and the terror that one must be alone with the void once clear of all the noise.

I have a website I’ll continue to maintain, email, text, and a youtube channel, all of which are options (info below). I’ll also post a blog entry in January to let folks know how I’m doing (if you’re interested, email me and I can contact you when it goes live). Maybe I’ll even post a new song by then. If these thoughts turn out to be the mad ramblings of a troubled man who has struggled (perhaps too long and too much) to make sense of the present and what may come, then we both should know that soon. Until then, I hope you are well, that you are safe, that you and those you care about take care.

Onward!-L.

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Sources:

PT Barnum “Humbugs of the World”

Jean Baudrillard “Simulations”

John Dewey “Philosophy of Education and the Quest for Certainty”

“necrophilia” and “dead letter” is part of a quotation from “After Theory” by Terry Eagleton

Notion of ingroup/outgroup power struggles comes from Richard Stivers’ “The Illusion of Freedom and Equality.”

I have written on conspiracy theories—recent publication Szrot, Lukas Fast Capitalism (link to follow)

“Kingdom of noise” is a phrase I first encountered in C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters” as a description of Hell from the standpoint of two demons in conversation with one another.