Pete Buttigieg gave a great interview last week. He believes that "in moments like this, salvation really will come from the local and state levels. . . that aren't captive to some wacky ideological project. They're just focused on getting things done." Then at 1:05, he addresses the issue of trust when asked what more he would add to his 2020 book:
"One theme that was in the book that I think we need to spend a lot more time thinking about is how we get information. I wrote up a little about these studies on vaccine misinformation and the fact that Russia didn't just push anti-vax messages. Often what they would do is to push an anti-vax message and a pro-vax message at the same people because the point was just to get you at each other's throats. I think a lot of that's happened recently. Yes, they had a preferred presidential candidate, but their biggest objective wasn't to have for one side to win, it was to break down our trust. It turns out all the nuclear weapons in the world are not capable of doing what this information vector into our society did with shocking efficiency. And we're behind. I don't just mean those who are on my side of the political spectrum are behind. I think America's behind.
Here's something to think in terms of trust: For the last 100 years it's been possible to more or less decisively settle a question with photographic evidence if you're trying to prove whether a thing happened or not. That's basically not true anymore. . . . On one level, that's terrifying because it's one symptom of the fact that, right now, we have never had more information and we've never been less informed. That's the result of the information bombardment we're living with and having our news feed be decided by an algorithm instead of an editor. On the other hand, if that were true for the last 100 years, then that means it was not true for the thousands of years before the 1920s. So what would we do before that? . . . We've got to be harder targets for this misinformation, and we've got to recognize that sometimes the misinformation that comes at us won't just be designed to attack a person; it will be designed to attack our trust itself.
There are only a couple solutions I know of: One is to get things and people offline again. . . . People are better offline than when they're offline. The other is to actually understand the dynamics of the information space. . . . . We've got to be harder targets. . . . [In print] it only takes your brain half a second to realize something's an ad. You have pattern recognition that tells you. We don't have that at the same level on digital stuff. And every time we form it, a new medium arises. We're going to have to figure out how to pick through that and really understand what's real and what's not real. . . . And we need more circumstances that pull us offline. . . . Any pattern of belonging that is not predicated by your political affiliation: in a faith community, a neighbourhood, a sports team, whatever. Find those because those overlapping circles are really important."
Journalist Carole Cadwalladr made a list of further ideas to "survive the broligarchy." Some are a bit unnerving, like realizing that after they come for journalists, everyone else is next: "Individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble. Fast. The chilling will be real and immediate. . . . Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you're next." And we've long known that our time online is like submitting to voluntary surveillance: "Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is. . . . Think of your personal data as nude selfies. . . . Pay in cash." And maybe download Signal instead of messaging over less secure apps.
But she also consoles that we have more power than we think if we can "learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism." Affirm your own values and identity to know who you are so you're less easily swayed - that's a solid suggestion at any time. Like Buttigieg, she believe we must, "Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. . . . Find allies in unlikely places. . . . There is such a thing as truth."
Finally, she adds: "Take the piss. Humour is a weapon . . . They are not gods. Tech billionaires are over-entitled nerds with the extraordinary historical luck of being born at the exact right moment in history. Treat them accordingly."
A possible caution on that final point, Roger Berkowitz writes that provoking disgust might be a better way to go:
"Perhaps one of the most under-acknowledged elements of mass movements identified by [Hannah] Arendt is the rise to political and social power of a corrupt business and governing class as well as a class of intellectuals that find corruption funny rather than outrageous. Arendt describes the original reception in 1928 Berlin of Berthold Brecht's Three Penny Opera:
"The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gangsters. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song in the play, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” [“First comes the animal-like satisfaction of one’s hunger, then comes morality,” memorably rendered by Marc Blitzstein as “First feed the face, and then talk right and wrong.” —RB], was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior, wonderful fun."
Brecht’s Jeremiah Peachum is a businessman who organizes the beggars of London and takes a cut of their income. Peachum sees himself as a respectable businessman, compared to the gangster Mack the Knife, who marries Peachum’s daughter. And the Chief of Police is on the take. Brecht hoped to shock by showing the disappearing lines separating respectable professionals and gangsters; instead, Arendt writes, his satirical portrayal of corruption in Weimar society yielded glee.
Arendt is scathing in describing the attraction Brecht’s satire held for the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie suffered under the burden of hypocrisy. They had to maintain their respectability while also winning in the hard-nosed world of business. Brecht’s satirical presentation of the immoral business elite was a release; the applause showed that the German bourgeoisie “could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy.”. . .
In the wake of two deep depressions, markets at home dried up. To keep the engine of the economy going, bourgeois businessmen needed new markets. The answer was imperialism. The bourgeoisie — which had always been apolitical, preferring to focus on business instead of politics — allied itself with governments to secure military backing for its imperialist ventures. In other words, the bourgeoisie entered politics when they needed political support for their imperialist pursuit of money and power.
What Arendt calls the “political emancipation of the bourgeoisie” is the demand that state power secure private investments. It is one thing to make foreign investments; but the bourgeoisie did not want to take risks in their imperialist escapades. “Only when they demanded government protection of their investments... did [the bourgeois business class] re-enter the life of the nation.” This led to the rise of a particularly business-oriented vision of “political institutions exclusively as an instrument for the protection of individual property.”
In Arendt’s telling, the bourgeoisie’s entry into politics brought with it the brutally cynical claim that politics was about naked power and money. The naked pursuit of power contradicts the respectability that businessmen desire. Arendt argues that the bourgeois need to accumulate power had long been hidden “by nobler traditions” of respectability and by “that blessed hypocrisy which [Francois de] La Rochefoucauld called the compliment vice pays to virtue.” But in the late 19th century traditional values had evaporated and the “old truths... had become pious banalities.” The pretense of respectability became itself a vice, leading “everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob.” For Arendt, the reception of Brecht’s play makes manifest the embrace by the business and government elite of mob standards.
Even more than the bourgeoisie, it is the elite’s reaction to the exposure of hypocrisy that draws Arendt’s contempt. The cultural embrace of vulgar satire in the 1920s and 1930s, Arendt writes, is confirmation of a “cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories”; the rise of vulgar satire in Weimar Germany — and in our own time — carries with it a “frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage.” In the normalization and comic internalization of “mob attitudes and convictions,” what Arendt calls vulgar satire embraces the pseudo-honesty apparent in contemporary figures from Milo Yiannoppolous to President Trump, who abandon respectability in the name of fighting hypocrisy. It is hard not to wonder what Arendt would think of the wild success of The Sopranos, House of Cards, and The Daily Show — shows in which the self-proclaimed elite celebrate and laugh at the exposure of the obvious hypocrisy of businessmen who are gangsters and politicians who are businessmen. The appeal that totalitarianism and fascism can hold for the elite is its claim that society is rotten to the core.
It is easy to criticize the excessive nihilist fantasies that respond to the moral corruption of business and government with violent outbursts of “drain the swamp” and “dismantle the system.” We need, Arendt reminds us, to remember “how justified disgust can be in a society wholly permeated with the ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie.” One reason that Elon Musk and President Trump are so popular is that their unmasking of political and cultural corruption has a grain of truth. What the unmaskers too often forget is that every one of us wears a mask that conceals a dark cabinet of hidden vices behind our public personas. A world populated by people unmasked, their secrets exposed, would be one where all immorality is shameless and all claims to respectability are hypocritical. But shame and hypocrisy are essential human drives. The rage against hypocrisy is a rage against civilized life. The danger in mass movements is that the elite’s justified moral disgust at hypocrisy is translated into a carnival of destruction that is just so much fun."
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