Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 10 – Many people believe
that the “post-truth” period the world is entering now is something new, but in
fact, most people historically and those who lived in totalitarian regimes in
the recent past have existed in a “post-truth” environment in which faith overwhelmed
facts, according to Vitaly Portnikov.
Indeed, the Ukrainian commentator
says, “the cult of truth” existed for only a remarkably brief period in a
remarkably small number of countries where high-quality media promoted the idea
that facts matter and that all beliefs should be checked against them rather
than simply accepted (7days.us/vitalij-portnikov-postpravda-vozvrashhenie-k-proshlomu/).
“The strength of the
totalitarian regimes of the 20th century consisted in a return to
the middle ages and from an era of knowledge to one of faith,” Portnikov says.
Even as “the Western world with the help of new technologies consistently developed
… the Bolsheviks converted their own ideology into a genuine religion” and
their media into a “post-truth” one.
The Soviet media “existed in a
hermetically closed space. It did not compete. It invented facts and did not
reflect them. The customary agenda of a
Soivet newspaper was flourishing in a time of hunger, ‘the rotting’ of
capitalism, and stories of spies everywhere as a kind of children’s story for ‘the
new Soviet man.’”
What is most interesting about this
and often not remarked is that “the majority of the population of the USSR preferred
to believe in all this without reflecting about any of it. Only near the end of Soviet times did Western
broadcasters like Radio Liberty and VOA “supply their listeners with real news
and not ‘alternative facts;’ and these stories were ever more connected with the
life which the ordinary Soviet man lived.”
According to Portnikov, “the
leadership of present-day Russia is trying on the level of propaganda to return
to Soviet propaganda with its mythology and it is succeeding,” as one can see
by the widespread acceptance among Russians about the supposed existence of
Ukrainian “’fascists’” or even “’the crucified child.’”
The question arises: “how is this
possible in our time?” People can turn
to almost any source via the Internet; but “as it turns out, in an era of total
access to information, it is much easier to deceive people simply because a lie
is so easily unmasked.” People in Russia
and the West accept what they hear because they believe that otherwise it would
be unmasked.
And because they believe that, they
make ever fewer efforts to check what they are told by media outlets they
routinely listen to or watch. This makes
them much easier to mislead because they assume that they can’t be and allows
their rulers to move back from “an era of knowledge into an era of faith.”
Another factor at work has the same
outcome: People choose their favorite sites or their favorite channels and rely
on them, again without checking, because that provides them with a significant
degree of personal “comfort” and that in turn means that they will accept as
true what is only a matter of belief.
“That is why President Donald Trump
is right when he talks about ‘fake news.’
Such stories are fake from his point of view because they do not
correspond to his own picture of the world.” Trump at least reads papers and
watches electronic media outlets that provide this alternative picture, even
though he doesn’t accept it as true.
But someone a generation younger,
Portnikov continues, won’t both to read or watch any alternative at all. And in Russia that means that people who back
Putin will watch the first channel and not check it against any other outlet or
even against the reality that they should be able to see around them.
That pattern creates a dangerous new
world, one in which people act not only
facts but only on beliefs, a world which, the Ukrainian commentator suggests,
is going to be full of surprises, the most serious of which although rooted in
the past are still very much ahead of today.
No comments:
Post a Comment