In this episode we explore the social implications of business-models that are based on knowingly selling lies as truth
Propaganda, as the art of deliberately manipulative lying, is a key part of information-warfare against a nominal enemy or, perhaps even more, against one’s own people. The latter seems kind of unethical, to say the least, but yeah, that’s Reality Department for you…
Either way, the sad part is that it works, because it takes far more effort to refute the lie than to say it; and if, to quote US political-activist Steve Bannon, the propagandist can “flood the zone with sh-t”, then the effort to refute all the falsehoods becomes so great that many of the lies can slip through unchallenged. The grand-master of this game, of course, was Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister of Hitler’s’s Third Reich.
Sadly, many others have since adopted either part or all of Goebbels’ propaganda-playbook to support their own propaganda efforts. For example, the current notion of ‘fake news’ comes directly from Goebbels’ advice to accuse others of whatever unethical act your own group or you yourself have done, coupled with his notion of ‘Lügenpresse’ - literally, ‘lying press’ - as a descriptor for any newspaper that actually told the truth.
And propaganda is also an essential tool in building and maintaining a cult, using a closed monopoly on information-sources to provide a continual feed of the cult’s preferred misinformation and Other-blame, and to shield them from any conflicting real-world truth. (See an earlier episode here, ‘On cults’, for more about what those mechanisms do, how they work, and why they’re so important for the cult as a means to protect their own self-delusions.)
Most propaganda is built around some kind of ‘cause’, an ideology, belief or conflict - though whether the propagandists believe in their own lies, or even the ideology itself, is often questionable at best. Yet there are some in that literally-dishonest business who are too cynical even to bother with any beliefs at all, other than in themselves and their own self-importance: and that’s those whose entire business-model is built around lying for profit.
Lying for profit: ‘making money’, by deceiving others, without any care of any kind for the consequences to the wider world from doing so. As a business-model.
Perhaps that’s Not A Good Idea…?
Sadly, there are all too many people who do this as their literal business-model: one who comes immediately to mind is the conspiracist Alex Jones and his decade-long campaign of lies about the Sandy Hook massacre, solely to sell more junk-vitamins and the like on his Infowars channel. Organisations that indulge in ‘greenwashing’ and the like would likewise provide all too many more examples. For me, though, perhaps the one person who stands out most for this - again, out of all too many examples - would be the ‘news’-publisher Rupert Murdoch.
With Murdoch in particular, it’s the sheer scale of it that makes it so damaging. Alex Jones made millions from his lies, but he’s only one person, on one channel; by contrast, Murdoch has made literal billions from a vast multinational business-empire built almost entirely upon lying for profit on a truly industrial scale. And that’s not a mere opinion, but hard legal fact, confirmed time and again in court-cases, legislative enquiries and more:
In connection with Murdoch's testimony to the Leveson Inquiry "into the ethics of the British press", editor of Newsweek International, Tunku Varadarajan, referred to him as "the man whose name is synonymous with unethical newspapers".
I remember that when I first moved to Australia, way back in 1989, a phrase I heard often was “Is that the truth, or did you read it in the Herald-Sun?” - the latter being a Melbourne newspaper that Murdoch then owned. We saw the same again and again in Britain, such as documented in the 2011 Leveson enquiry mentioned above. And in the US, the 2022 defamation-lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Murdoch’s Fox News Network, emails and text-messages between Fox hosts and Fox News management showed clearly that they knew that the claims that the 2020 election had been ‘stolen’ were false, but they still went ahead and promoted ‘the Big Lie’ anyway. Doing so primarily because, as the Dominion case also showed, they knew that their viewers wanted to believe the lies, which would thus protect the advertising-revenue that came in from running those TV-shows. Lying for profit - not just metaphorically, but literally so.
So why does this matter? It’s because this kind of lying, especially on this scale, can and does have huge social consequences. At the personal-level, Alex Jones’ lies about the Sandy Hook massacre caused literally life-threatening further trauma for the already-traumatised parents of the murdered children; Fox’s promotion of ‘the Big Lie’ caused similar threats to be made against election-workers. At the business-level, the ‘Big Lie’ all but destroyed the business of some of the voting-machine vendors, such as Dominion and Smartmatic. At the social-level, there are solid arguments and solid evidence that, in the US especially, it has incited a broad atmosphere of stochastic terrorism:
describe[s] public speech that can be expected to incite terrorism without a direct organizational link between the inciter and the perpetrator. The term "stochastic" is used in this instance to describe the random, probabilistic nature of its effect; whether or not an attack actually takes place
…of which, arguably, the 2021 attack on the US Capitol was one very large-scale example. And at the national-security level, the fact that Fox News still has a mandated monopoly as a ‘news’-provider on all US military bases has been a direct cause of radicalisation of a disturbing number of US military personnel, such as in the case of Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old National Guardsman alleged to have been responsible for the recent leaks of US classified information on Ukraine. Tucker Carlson’s constant promotion on Fox of Russian propaganda about the Ukraine conflict would have made things worse in that regard too - in fact, under the circumstances, arguably just one step short of actual treason, “aid and comfort of the enemy”. Not A Good Idea…?
What can we do about this? Short-answer: it’s not going to be easy, but we need to do the best that we can, anyway. The main challenge, as I mentioned earlier, is that it’s far easier to churn out disinformation than it is to counter it - and when the intended audience want to hear the lies and don’t want to hear any counter-truth, well, yeah, that’s a problem.
In the longer term, the only feasible answer will be what I’ve been advocating here in other episodes: the complete and total eradication of the possession-economy, and its replacement with a responsibility-based economics; and the total replacement of ‘rights’ with mutual interlocking responsibilities. The reasons why those by-no-means-small changes would be needed is because of what’s actually going on here.
On one side, lying for profit is a classic ‘let’s you and him fight’, as I described in the episode ‘The real cause of war’: the perverse-incentives that arise when the one who benefits from war does not take any of the risks of war nor suffers any of the pain. The only way to stop that kind of game is to remove any means via which anyone could profit from the game - which is why we need to end the possession-economy and its literal ‘death-pledge’ model where others’ lives and livelihoods are used as the source of stolen possessions and parasitic monetary profit.
On the other side, the purported ‘right to lie’ provides another classic perverse-incentive, summarised as “privatise the profits, socialise the risks”: the liar keeps the gains from lying, but others bear the consequences. The only way to break that kind of game is to push the consequences back onto the liar by ending all notions of ‘rights’, and replacing them, as above, with mutual interlocking responsibilities.
Yes, I know that that’ll be hard, particularly in the US with its disastrously-dysfunctional Bill of Rights: but we must do it, somehow, before all of this lying for profit costs us the world.
Quite right Tom, Mr Murdoch has a lot to answer for with his influence on topics at critical points in history.