Seeking Truth in the Misinformation Age

[music]

0:00:07.5 Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:09.4 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:11.5 Aaron Powell: Joining us today is Jonathan Rauch. He’s a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, and author of the new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Welcome back to the show, Jonathan.

0:00:21.9 Jonathan Rauch: I am glad to be back with you. You guys are old friends.

0:00:25.3 Aaron Powell: It seems rather odd to set out to defend truth. I mean, after all, who goes around saying, “You know, I prefer false things.” What’s the motivation here?

0:00:39.4 Jonathan Rauch: Well, there’s a couple motivations. One is that we tend to forget that every society needs what I think of as an epistemic constitution. A fancy word. It really just means a way to settle public arguments about facts, about the things we act on. You know, a lot of people think Elvis is alive, why don’t we send him a Social Security check? And we in Western liberal democracies have a very particular way of doing that, which I call the constitution of knowledge. But we forget about that. We just assume if you have freedom, you’ll get knowledge.

0:01:14.9 Jonathan Rauch: And we forget all the stuff in between, which means we forget how to defend it. And you’re right, Aaron. You don’t have a lot of people going around saying that I hate truth, but they don’t like the regime that produces truth for any of a lot of reasons. They might be Christian Scientists who don’t want to provide medical care for their kids, kind of a heart-​breaking example. Or a less heart-​breaking example, they might be Russian disinformation agents trying to muck with our elections. Or they could be American politicians, who are trying to spread falsehoods about the election. And what’s interesting is in many cases, they won’t say, “I love to lie,” but they’ll behave that way. They’re using sophisticated disinformation tactics that are basically based on obliterating the whole distinction between truth and falsehood.

0:02:00.7 Trevor Burrus: I imagine you’re not referring to anyone specifically right now.

0:02:03.1 Jonathan Rauch: Oh, I am. And I will name the names and kick the butts, if you’ll let me.

0:02:09.1 Trevor Burrus: Freedom, you said… We have, you know, the free society, a free speech regime in America that’s really robust. And we use this term all the time, me as a constitutional lawyer, the marketplace of ideas. So isn’t that what we just rely on at the end of the day?

0:02:22.0 Jonathan Rauch: Well, it’s certainly the metaphor we rely on. You know, it’s interesting, I discovered writing this book, that’s a pretty recent invention. It just goes back to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes 102 years ago, the case of Abrams v. US. And I love the idea of the marketplace of ideas, I use that metaphor myself. But it turns out, it’s… It’s important, and it may be necessary, because free speech is the critical input to make truth. You’ve got to have diverse viewpoints, otherwise you can’t figure out where your biases are. We’d never see our own biases. And they influence not just our opinions, but even our perceptions, so you’ve got to have other people who disagree with you, you’ve got to have an open system for debate and conversation and comparing and collating viewpoints.

0:03:09.1 Jonathan Rauch: So, that idea goes back to Mill. Actually, it goes back to Milton. But the notion of the marketplace of ideas is that, well, somehow these ideas will just collide in outer space. You know, there’ll just be kind of this grand bazaar, and somehow ideas will be exchanged and the best ideas will win. Well, every time I present that idea to an undergraduate class, they’ll ask a very good question. They’ll say, “Well, how do we know that the truth will win out in the marketplace of ideas?” And it’s a powerful challenge, actually. And the answer to that, it turns out, it’s worked out in this book and a lot of books by other people, you need a lot of elaborate stuff in order to set up the right kind of network that will amplify stuff that’s true, that checks out, and disamplify stuff that’s false and filter it out.

0:04:00.6 Jonathan Rauch: And that’s what the constitution of knowledge does. It sets up this global network of people checking each other’s facts, looking for each other’s mistakes, comparing, contrasting. And it’s institutions, places like think tanks, Brookings, Cato. Places like newsrooms, which is where I came up. Tons of stuff comes in, lots of tips, people sort through them, they use protocols and rules. They say, “Have you checked sources? Have you sought comment?” Only the good stuff is then passed on through the network. So, you create this network that’s like pumping and filtering stations, but it’s complicated. You have to get a lot of stuff right. And these attackers that we’re talking about are attacking that network. They’re not saying, “We’re against truth,” but they’re attacking all the mechanisms that we use to prefer truth, to find truth.

0:04:49.8 Aaron Powell: Let me take a step back and ask a foundational question that will inform the rest of this conversation, I hope. Which is, so Trevor I are both philosopher… Philosophy majors, and this is an issue that comes up in… When one’s getting a Philosophy degree, but is typically settled in a week of lectures or so. Which is, what, in this case, is truth? Is it the same thing as knowledge, and if not, how are they related?

0:05:19.0 Jonathan Rauch: Oh, boy. How philosophical should we be getting?

0:05:22.4 Trevor Burrus: Oh, we can go deep.

0:05:24.6 Jonathan Rauch: Aaron’s diving into deep waters here, Trevor. I love it. It’s important stuff. There’s been a fantastic realization over the last four years that truth… Truth matters, and all this stuff philosophers do is really very important to everyday civic life. So, truth… Now, this is… You know, other philosophers will say other things, but I think this is a good account. Truth is not a destination, it’s a direction. Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, likened it to north. It’s a regulatory guide post, it’s something we’re always seeking relative to where we are now. But you can’t ever be certain, so you don’t get to absolute truth.

0:06:04.5 Jonathan Rauch: Knowledge is different. Knowledge is what we take reality to be on any given day. It’s our closest approximation to truth, and it’s always changing, it’s always evolving, but it’s never starting from scratch. It’s built on a foundation of hundreds of years of this fantastic global social network, what I call the reality-​based community, doing all this filtering and sifting and amplifying and disamplifying, to establish what we can say we know. The more something has been tested and checked out on the network over time, the more we say we know it. And that’s objective knowledge, and that’s tangible.

0:06:40.9 Jonathan Rauch: I mean, you can see that. You can walk into a library, and you’ll see volume after volume of objective knowledge. It changes. You know, some things will be found to be false, but most of it will be pretty well checked. And an alien civilization… I know this, because it happened in Star Trek. Season 3, episode 6. An alien civilization, you know? If all humans died out… In a million years, an alien civilization could arrive at our planet, decode our books and our archives, and put that knowledge to work right away. That’s how they save Dr. McCoy from an incurable disease, they find… Trevor’s nodding his head, so he knows what I’m talking about. They find a robot spacecraft with the archives of a dead civilization, full of medical knowledge. So, this actually works. We’re talking practical here.

0:07:35.7 Trevor Burrus: Yes, I know exactly what you’re referring to. I’m outed now as a Star Trek fan, but that’s okay, we both are.

0:07:40.9 Aaron Powell: This is not the first time you’ve been outed as that.

0:07:42.8 Jonathan Rauch: My job is not done unless I can work in a Star Trek reference.

[laughter]

0:07:48.3 Trevor Burrus: So if you look at human history, and Aaron asked the big knowledge questions that you deal with in Philosophy 101 and deeper classes than that, from, say, Socrates to, let’s say, 1650, how is the main knowledge-​sharing device that the human race employs? How does that device work? And then, what changed?

0:08:12.0 Jonathan Rauch: So, there is a huge problem for any human society, whether it’s a small tribe or a big nation, and that’s how do you reach some kind of common understanding about what’s true for public purposes. That can be something very specific, which we’re pretty good at, like, you know, is that a tiger in the bush or just a breeze? Or where is the next tribe camp? But a lot of what we have to decide are abstract things that are very hard to settle. Like, who do we pray to to make it rain? Most societies have used mechanisms which are pretty authoritarian, or pretty repressive, or pretty random, like they may use an oracle. They’ll feed corn to a chicken, and depending where the chicken pecks, they’ll decide who’s right and who’s wrong.

0:09:00.0 Jonathan Rauch: Then they’ll gravitate toward authoritarians, like priests and princes, which will say, “Here’s what’s true, and if you don’t believe that, there’s going to be an inquisition, and you’ll be jailed or expelled or maybe even killed.” Neither of those things works very well in the long run, so you tend to get societies splintering into sects with different beliefs that are incompatible, and the standard way of settling that is war.

0:09:25.7 Jonathan Rauch: So, in the 1500s, the printing press is invented, Protestantism comes along, it spreads globally. You get massive creed wars, religious wars. They rage across Europe back and forth. At one point, historians estimate something like a third of the population of Germany may have been killed. Just devastating stuff. But out of these fires rises a new concept, which… You know, it dates back earlier, but I think the seminal figure is John Locke, a great English philosopher, the mid-​1600s. And he has the same idea for both politics and knowledge. He says, “Let’s outsource this to a group that no one in particular will be in charge of.”

0:10:06.6 Jonathan Rauch: No one in particular, what does that mean? It means no individual can decide. You’re going to have to have bargaining and negotiation, you’re going to have changes of government, you’re going to have… Rights are going to be set up. He sets up the doctrine of empiricism, which basically says, when you boil it down, it’s a social doctrine. In order to decide what’s true, and get it into the textbooks, Aaron and Trevor and I are going to need to compare our viewpoints and persuade each other and a lot of other people. And until that’s done, we can’t make that claim.

0:10:36.4 Jonathan Rauch: That becomes the foundation of science, and of journalism, and of law, and of government, and of the whole reality-​based community. It’s until you’ve persuaded a whole lot of other people who don’t know you, and don’t initially agree with you, and shown them enough evidence and argument… Until others have done that, until that negotiation begins to be settled, you can’t claim knowledge. So that sounds weird and unstable, but it turns out to be the greatest social network of all time, and it turns out to be capable of… It’s not that it doesn’t make errors, it makes them incredibly fast. It makes a billion errors a day, but then it finds the errors incredibly fast.

0:11:15.4 Jonathan Rauch: And that’s how we get to this incredible knowledge that we’ve got. But never take it for granted, it doesn’t just happen by itself. It’s never automatic. You have to have a lot of settings, a lot of institutions, a lot of training, a lot of social norms.

0:11:31.1 Trevor Burrus: Well, that’s the interesting thing, I think, is that you called it constitution of knowledge, and… But you think about those abstract networks you just described, and most of the things that you’re discussing are not written-​down rules, they’re dispositions. And we’ve… Historians and people like Deirdre McCloskey, you know, who argues that dispositional changes are more important, to some extent, than even philosophers and new ideas. I mean, those are important, too, but attitudes change, such as tolerance becomes something. But, it was the disposition changing… I mean, you mentioned the 30 Years War, which I’m really glad. You write about that in the book, ’cause I bring that up a lot too. Like, at the end of the day, the devastation caused people to be like… Mutual… The science of liberalism is a technology of mutual disarmament, so we don’t have to do this anymore.

0:12:28.0 Trevor Burrus: And so, part of your critique, I guess, is that if we don’t acknowledge those dispositions and attitudes and recognize them, ’cause they’re not written down, then they can disappear.

0:12:40.2 Jonathan Rauch: Well, of course, even if they are written down, they can disappear. Because the written Constitution of the United States is… It’s the founding document, but as you both know, most of the Constitution is the institutions and the norms that have risen up in the subsequent 200 plus years to embody all of those things. And as the Founders warned us, Madison said this, Washington, Adams, Franklin, all said different versions of the same thing, which is, “This constitution won’t last 10 minutes, if it doesn’t have civic virtues in the population that will support it.”

0:13:18.0 Jonathan Rauch: Adams said, I’ll paraphrase, ’cause I can’t quote anything. But Adams says, “If people don’t have these values and norms in their hearts, then various abuses, ambition,” what he called gallantry, “will pass through the Constitution as a whale passes through a net.” They’ll just blow it aside. We’ve seen those tendencies in the US over the past four years. We’re still seeing them right now. We saw them on January 6. It’s dangerous stuff. So, the question is, how do we… First, we need to understand these institutions and these norms that we rely on for our freedom and for peace and for knowledge, and then we gotta defend them. And that’s… That’s what this book is all about.

0:14:06.1 Aaron Powell: It feels like there’s potentially a disconnect here. You said one of the advantages of this reality-​based community and this constitution of knowledge and this… As a pursuit is that… Not that it creates infallible knowledge or is without error, but that it makes errors quickly and then discovers them and fixes them. But much of the conversation about truth and the assaults on truth today are happening within the political sphere. It bleeds over into, say, science and elsewhere, but it’s mostly in… You know, these are conversations about politics, among politicians, between political tribes.

0:14:50.9 Aaron Powell: The cancel culture and the trolling that are… Play such an important role in your discussion in the book are largely political things. And it seems like that… That idea that this constitution of knowledge when instantiated and followed has rapid error correction seems true in almost every area of human endeavor, except precisely the political. That our institutions, even when they’re following this, have a tendency to embrace something, and then it sticks. We don’t see rapid abandonment of political change that turns out to not work very well, or of institutions that set out with one mission and fail to accomplish it, or even general kind of ideas of governing.

0:15:41.6 Aaron Powell: And so is that… Is there a disconnect there? That it seems like the very area where this matters most is the one that, not even just today, but historically, has been the worst at this rapid error correction.

0:15:52.7 Jonathan Rauch: Interesting point. Which you could be saying one of two things. You could be talking about the fact that government institutions are not very good at adapting, which I also wrote a book about. You know, that’s why do we still have rice subsidies, maritime subsidies? Stuff that we’d never invent today. So, you could be talking about that. And, there you’d be right. Error correction is very slow, sometimes it’s non-​existent, and that’s a big problem for adaptability of government. Private sector’s much more adaptable, much quicker at that.

0:16:30.8 Jonathan Rauch: Or you could be saying something else, which is that the system that generates facts that politicians rely on is really slow and sticky. And if it’s the latter, I don’t actually think that that’s true. The system that we we rely on for facts is actually pretty fast. If you look at, for example, what people have called the Big Lie, stop the steal, a major example in the book, and a major threat, I think, to our epistemic constitution. You saw that just about as quickly as people could make up conspiracy theories and false allegations about the election, they were checked and knocked down.

0:17:12.6 Jonathan Rauch: Now, separate question, did it matter that they were knocked down? Was there an audience for the findings of the reality-​based community? But that stuff was checked and knocked down very quickly. I’d argue that that part of the system was working. The part of system that is not working is the part that connects that with a substantial portion of the American polity that has gone into its own separate reality. Meaning, it’s got its own facts in many cases, it’s got its own media enterprises, it’s got its own social networks, and that’s a different kind of problem.

0:17:53.5 Trevor Burrus: How much of this is nostalgia? We’ve had a lot of changes in the last 20 years, and just in the last 10, ’cause social media is just over 10 years old, really. And the boomer generation, of which rules a lot of our political conversations via a sense of nostalgia, where things were kind of weird for a period of time after the war. You had three networks, you had… The most trusted man in America was Walter Cronkite, you had America fighting the Cold War, and a lot of nostalgia for those days.

0:18:23.8 Trevor Burrus: Maybe not Cold War per se, but maybe enemies of that sort. But that was very aberrant in American history. I mean, most of the time, news was very local. Partisan… Partisanship was just… Has been strong at different time. Just as strong, of course, before the Civil War, at different times, and right after the Constitution was signed it was about as partisan as you could possibly imagine. So, is it really a problem now that is different, or are we just returning to the way things have usually been in America?

0:18:56.0 Jonathan Rauch: A big question. I think it’s different. There are similarities and… In the heyday of Walter Cronkite, and when I started as a working journalist in the early ’80s, we were at the tail-​end of an information regime which, at that point, had been settled in American journalism since basically the 1910s and 1920s, when the American Society of Newspaper Editors and Journalism Schools established the norms and institutions that helped us get away from the kind of journalism that you’re describing, Trevor, the yellow journalism, the fantastic partisanship of the 19th century.

0:19:36.4 Jonathan Rauch: So, we were at the tail-​end of that, so we had well-​developed institutions and norms. And of course, periodically in history, just naturally as technology develops, those settled institutions are unsettled and disrupted, and it always takes time, and there’s always a lot of angst and difficulty trying to adapt to new technologies. The printing press is the most famous example, the original printing press, the Gutenberg Press, but another was the development of the penny press and offset printing in the 19th century. Here, again, Trevor is nodding his head, ’cause he knows this history better than I do.

0:20:14.7 Jonathan Rauch: And now, today, digital media, social media, so there’s… You’re right to say there’s always a period of adjustment and there’s always the temptation to say, “This is really bad. We’ll never get out of it.” I think we will get out of it, and I talk in the book about how we get out of it, partly by understanding it, partly by… As we have in the past, building institutions to react to it. But is it worse? Yeah, I think we can say it’s worse, and I think we can have some measures that show that.

0:20:43.2 Jonathan Rauch: One is, according to a poll last summer by the Cato Institute, I think you’ve heard of them, over 60% of Americans now say that there are things they won’t say about politics for fear of causing offense. They’re chilled. And that’s true across parties, and it’s true across ideologies, except for very liberal. And even they, over 40%, are saying there’s things they won’t talk about. A third of Americans say that they will not talk about things for fear of losing their job or job opportunities.

0:21:16.0 Jonathan Rauch: Sociologists say this is roughly four times the amount of social chilling that was going on in the McCarthy era. So, why is that going on? Well, one of the information warfare tactics that we’re coping with today is social coercion, and that’s done through digital media. And that’s done far faster and far more efficiently and far more devastatingly through social media than anything ever previously invented.

0:21:42.5 Jonathan Rauch: I mean, I could have a social media mob demanding your firing. I could get that running in two hours. I could have hundreds of people sending tweets to Peter Gettler, say Trevor Burrus has got to go, he’s a racist. So, that’s one aspect. Another is that you now have over 70% of Republicans who believe a completely false narrative in which our democracy has been stolen from them, in which the president is not legitimate, in which America is no longer a democracy. We’ve never seen anything like that. We’ve never seen anything like the use of mass disinformation as it was used by Donald Trump and his troll armies and his allies in politics and conservative media. This is the wholesale application of Russian-​style mass disinformation to American politics, something that was never tried or even thought of in the past.

0:22:37.4 Aaron Powell: Maybe try to complicate the chilling-​effect narrative a bit, because… And I’ve talked with our colleague, Emily Ekins, who did that survey about this, and the data… You know, the problem is the data doesn’t have a way to get at the answer to this question. But what I immediately wondered was, so we can imagine a situation where the thing that a given person used to feel comfortable expressing, but now no longer feels comfortable expressing, is something like I don’t think black people should be allowed to vote. Or, the thing that I used to be comfortable doing in the workplace, but now I worry I could get fired for, is making off-​color jokes about women in front of my female colleagues.

0:23:23.3 Aaron Powell: And if… If it’s those sorts of things, then that doesn’t seem like the kind of chilling effect that we should necessarily worry about, because it’s good that people no longer feel comfortable expressing those kinds of ideas, just like it’s good that people no longer feel comfortable using the N-​word openly. On the other side, on the other far extreme, we could say there are things that are kind of generally held that are not particularly morally troubling, but they’re out of favor with a given group that controls the commanding heights of culture, and expressing them brings the inquisition down on you.

0:23:58.4 Aaron Powell: And that’s the kind of chilling effect that we ought to be very concerned about. And obviously, it’s somewhere in the middle, but it seems like where it is and what kinds of views are being chilled is pretty important to this conversation.

0:24:13.8 Jonathan Rauch: I would argue that we’ve kind… It’s a good point, Aaron, and I don’t disagree with it. And I’m glad that people self-​edit, and what they self-​edit will change over time as social norms change. And as a gay person, I am very glad that a lot of the things people said about me are not said anymore. Mostly, I think, ’cause people don’t believe them. That’s really the way you combat hate speech, it’s not by suppressing it, it’s by convincing people who are fearful and ignorant with better information, so they’re not fearful and ignorant. That’s really how we do it.

0:24:49.9 Jonathan Rauch: But that said, I think we’re beyond that discussion now, Aaron, and we’re now in a world where no one is sure where the boundaries of discourse are. You just don’t know anymore what it is that you say or not say that could cause one of these mobs to come crashing into your house, your digital house. Or they might come crashing in because of something you failed to say, because you were simply listening on a video call when someone else said something that upset people.

0:25:24.2 Jonathan Rauch: A guy, just an adjunct professor at Georgetown, of Law, just lost his position because of what he didn’t say in that situation. A democratic analyst, a very well-​known and well-​regarded guy named David Shor, simply tweeted out an accurate description of a study on the effect of violent social protest. This became the subject of a media campaign, and he was fired the next day. Now, all he did is accurately summarize a study. By the way, the study was by an African-​American. There’s absolutely no way for him or anyone else to know where these lines are, and that’s the point of information warfare.

0:26:12.2 Jonathan Rauch: What’s going on here should not be thought of criticism, where it’s particular viewpoints that are being challenged on the merits. It needs to be thought of as a system of propaganda, information warfare. By which I mean, it’s organizing and manipulating the social and media environment for political advantage. It’s creating a general chilling effect, which allows a certain group, actually a minority in terms of the overall population, to dominate the conversation, and to suppress dissent.

0:26:43.3 Aaron Powell: I’ve been thinking of a fair amount about this, and the way that, especially in online spaces, these kind of mobs descend, and it turns into the kind of cancelling that you’re talking about. And, one thing that I’ve wondered about is… I mean, you framed it as people are kind of consciously trying to take political advantage. They have mechanisms, they have tools, for warfare against disfavored groups or ideas. But I wonder how much this is a kind of democratization of expression and opinion in that… You know, we… It used to be Walter Cronkite gave you information, now you can get it from anyone on Twitter.

0:27:26.6 Aaron Powell: And nuanced criticism is hard, you know? I mean, like, it’s… To take, say, a text, and do a deep analysis of it is very challenging, it requires a fair amount of background knowledge. Anyone who’s been in higher education, and tried to write a paper or a dissertation or something knows how much work goes into this. But say code policing, “Oh, you used this term. Oh, you didn’t say this thing,” or, “You said something that might be problematic,” is very easy. It’s not challenging at all. And so people who want to engage in these debates, but aren’t up to the nuance of it, can do that.

0:28:14.7 Aaron Powell: And I also think that there is a… There’s a tendency… One of the tricks that social media plays on us is to make us think that our sub-​culture is bigger than it is. You know, like, if you… If I went by just my Twitter feed, I would think that 80% of America was journalists congratulating each other on getting new jobs at various journalism outfits, you know? But that’s just because that’s the small group that I follow, and these sub-​communities evolve rapidly, they develop a language, a lexicon of their own. And then, you end up thinking everybody else is aware of that.

0:28:51.7 Aaron Powell: And so, when they use a term that is out of favor in your group, you’re like, “Oh, my God, they’re going against the cultural norm,” when in fact they’re just totally unaware. And so, I guess, I wonder how much of this is this information warfare, and how much of it is just basically more people wanting to engage and this trick being played on us about the widespreadness of our sub-​cultures?

0:29:17.8 Jonathan Rauch: Some of both. But here’s where… I think the premise of the point you’re making may be a little off or where I modify it a bit. I think you’re imagining a world where digital media enables a kind of global conversation, and people participate in that conversation because they have things to say, want to make points, want to do criticism. And that’s the world we thought we would get in 1998, and we thought that would be terrific. Well, it turns out that’s not the world we’re in, for some pretty important psychological reasons. These platforms are designed primarily for advertising, to monetize eyeballs, and the easiest way to do that is to behave outrageously, to trigger people, to troll, to use outrage.

0:30:08.0 Jonathan Rauch: And it turns out that on this kind of network, it’s very different from the reality-​based community, which, remember, is mediated by all these institutions. Places like courts, and newsrooms, and scientific conferences, journals, peer review, all of this structure, which you mentioned earlier, that we have to master. None of that is there. And it turns out in that kind of environment, the incentives are not to communicate with each other, but as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls it, “to display to each other.”

0:30:40.4 Jonathan Rauch: Display is very different from communication. Display is not about exchanging ideas or views, display is about showing to my team that I’m loyal to my team by demonizing the other team. You know, saying, “Trevor Burrus, that guy is a complete racist. How do we get him fired?” That has the advantage, from my point-​of-​view, of raising my social prestige with the group that I’m in. Now, this is not criticism at all. It’s a mistake to think about this as just new people coming and playing the criticism and knowledge game, and expanding the universe of knowledge. This is a different game. This is a game about, “How do I mold the social environment so that people like me can dominate people like you?”

0:31:24.7 Trevor Burrus: Given all these biases, and given what we actually got from social media, is there something we can do to overcome our predilection to certain bad ways of thinking? Or how do we overcome our errors?

0:31:38.2 Jonathan Rauch: You know, the other day I was doing a podcast with an interviewer who is center-​left, and one of the things he said is, “Well, one difference between the US Constitution and the constitution of knowledge is the US Constitution has a Supreme Court, which is kind of the last word. And isn’t it a liability of the constitution of knowledge that it doesn’t have anything like that? ‘Cause what it is is this vast global rolling conversation. Attempt of people to persuade each other, find each other’s errors, and hold each other accountable for that.”

0:32:14.1 Jonathan Rauch: And I said, “On the contrary, that’s a massive advantage.” One of the reasons that demagogues and dictators and priests and princes and conspiracy theorists and Russian trolls and all the rest dislike the constitution of knowledge is that they cannot control it. Even in principle, there is no one you can call up, and say, “How do we change biology?” Now, if you’re Donald Trump, you can alter the weather forecast, you can take a magic marker and you can change the path of a hurricane. But that’s as close as you can come, and it’s not very close.

0:32:49.4 Jonathan Rauch: So, one of these differences, I think, is actually… It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s the fundamentally anti-​authoritarian nature of the reality-​based community.

0:33:00.0 Aaron Powell: I’m going to ask, does Trump have a theory of truth? Does it make sense to ask that question about him, even if it’s an odd one?

0:33:11.5 Jonathan Rauch: Well, I don’t know about his psychological state, but he has a theory of information. Now, that’s not exactly what you asked. So, one view of Trump is that he’s an authoritarian by temperament, but fortunately, he’s completely incompetent and wasn’t able to do very much damage. That may be true in some spheres, but in the realm of information warfare, propaganda, disinformation, he is, I believe, the most genius-​level practitioner since the 1930s. And people whose names we won’t invoke here, but you all know who I’m talking about. He has been a master at using a tactic that researchers call firehose of falsehood, it’s a classic Russian tactic.

0:34:04.6 Jonathan Rauch: It’s you spray so much garbage out there in such high quantities that’s so triggering that you dominate the agenda, you divert conversation from ordinary rational inquiry, and you confuse people. You don’t care what they wind up believing in. I mean, you would like them to believe a propaganda lie that the election was stolen, but the big pay-​off here is the many other people who now believe, “Well, we don’t really know who won the 2020 election. We’ll never know.” It all depends who you talk to. So, it’s to create this miasma of confusion, disorientation, relativism, and what’s that for?

0:34:41.0 Jonathan Rauch: You’re demoralizing people. Once they’re uncertain who to trust, who to believe, you open the door to cynicism, manipulation, and demagoguery. And that’s what someone like Trump is all about, and that’s what someone like Putin is all about. So, yeah, that’s what we’re looking at. I believe Trump understands these doctrines. I have some quotations in the book where he indicates his admiration for people who are good at these tactics. We know specific instances where the news cycle was not going well for him, so he goes on Twitter and does something or says something absolutely outrageous, and then tells his staff, “That will hold them for the rest of the day.”

0:35:20.9 Jonathan Rauch: He gets this stuff, he’s very good at it, and no one ever weaponized… Adapted and weaponized these tactics in an American context before. Now we’re going to have to live with them forever now that their effectiveness has been proven in the US.

0:35:35.5 Aaron Powell: Though it seems like this might be something of a cause for optimism, because he certainly… He has the knowledge to do this, but there’s also a natural talent that he has for it. He’s intuited his way into this, and whatever the charisma that people see in him is very real. And so, we could say, he’s now shown people how to do it, but we could also say he’s a once in a roughly century talent at this kind of information warfare. There doesn’t seem to necessarily be anyone else who’s as good at it as he is, and… And I wonder how much this is something where this kind of information warfare only works… Like his version of it only works if your talent level is sufficiently high, and that anything below that, it just looks like bullshitting.

0:36:28.6 Jonathan Rauch: Yeah. What a fascinating conjecture. I don’t think we know the answer to that yet, Aaron. I think we’re going to have to see. Historically speaking, both things are true. A charismatic leader, a Lenin, say, or a Hitler, can do many things that an ordinary leader could not in terms of disinformation, using these tactics. So, they have big amplifying powers that go with their personal charisma and followings. On the other hand, we also know from history and from the Russians that you can bureaucratize a lot of these tactics. The Soviets set this stuff up under Lenin, and refined it and developed it over generations. Vladimir Putin is working off banks and banks of data and understanding of how you adapt these tactics to different media environments.

0:37:17.3 Jonathan Rauch: You know, it used to be harder, right? ‘Cause you’d have to forge documents, and then get them inserted into public dialogue, and then get newspapers to cover them. Now, you can use Twitter. You can have a troll farm in St. Petersburg that can do it much faster. What’s the balance between bureaucracy and charisma? I don’t know, I don’t think anyone knows. But I think either way, the assignment for people like us, the reality-​based community, of which I count you and Trevor to be part, is to understand these tactics, take them seriously, not dismiss them as a fluke. Some guy got lucky. It won’t happen again.

0:37:55.0 Jonathan Rauch: Understand how vulnerable we are as a society, as our institutions. We all grew up in a role where it was inconceivable that you could get on a plane, be a complete unknown person, and 12 hours later you get off in another destination and be a global pariah whose career, who’s been fired from her job, lost her career because a bunch of people ganged up. That was not possible. We grew up in a world where it was inconceivable that someone running for president, as Donald Trump did, that over half of what he said in the course of his campaign that could be fact-​checked was false, more likely to be false than true.

0:38:31.9 Jonathan Rauch: No one ever tried that before, no one ever conceived of it, so we were defenseless, we were taken by surprise, and our job is to never let that happen again. Understand these are very serious tactics, very sophisticated people are using them.

0:38:46.5 Trevor Burrus: Now, if you talk to a conservative who maybe supports Trump, but is not a huge supporter of Trump, and they supported Trump partially because they were sick of the left controlling everything in their view, that the media has been controlled by the left and Hollywood and universities and public schools, and when it comes to the media, for example, the idea that the media gets a lot of things wrong, and we know that they’re systematically vote Democrat. If you just look at polling and say, How many people who work for the New York Times voted for a Republican or who call themselves are conservative, and anything that was that biased the other way, the left would be very upset about, so how much does the mainstream media’s sort of failures play into this phenomenon, the Trump phenomenon, and the appreciation of Trump and even his lies by conservatives?

0:39:43.1 Jonathan Rauch: It certainly helped start the cycle, and I think we… Something I write in the book, I think we have a problem in mainstream journalism. I’m a proud member of mainstream media, and I’ll go to the mat defending it and its performance these past four years, just crucial to defending our democracy. But I think we need to do better about viewpoint diversity. We’re not as bad as the anthropology department at a liberal arts college, but we need more conservatives, ’cause without those viewpoints, we will not spot our errors and yeah, I think originally, the development of conservative media with alternative points of view was a inevitable and necessary and a healthy thing, in the same way that the founding of the Cato Institute in 1970… Oh, my gosh, I can’t remember.

0:40:30.6 Trevor Burrus: Seven.

0:40:31.0 Jonathan Rauch: Seven, thank you. Was a healthy and necessary thing, and the Heritage Foundation and many others, but then something happened along the way that changed the nature of the game. A lot of conservative media switches business model without ever really talking or thinking about it much. It began getting in the business, not of biased disconfirmation, which you guys do at Cato. You’ll put out a paper, but you’ll vet it, you’ll peer review it, you’ll make sure the facts are right, you don’t want to be in a position where someone writes in and says, “Everything in this immigration paper, it’s just wrong, it’s just made up.” That’s not going to happen at Cato, but it will happen in Fox News.

0:41:13.5 Jonathan Rauch: And the reason is, that a lot of conservative media, the business model became, “Let’s get the eyeballs, let’s get the listeners, let’s get the viewers, and let’s do that by confirming their biases by telling them what they want to hear.” So Seth Rich, conspiracy, murdered, this is completely made up, completely false. Sean Hannity spends a month putting it out there. Right now, Joe Biden wants to reduce meat consumption, wants to effectively ban hamburgers. Completely made up, zero truth in that, comes out of nowhere, broadcasted over multiple channels on Fox News.

0:41:47.6 Jonathan Rauch: That kind of thing is not conceivable in reputable mainstream media, because if someone checks it, if someone looks at it and says it’s false, they pull it off the air and they run a correction. They may not do it fast enough, there may be cases when they mess up, but their business model is not based on telling people what they want to hear, whatever that may be. Unfortunately, increasingly, conservative media has spun off into a universe where the business model is that kind of epistemic rabbit hole, and that’s a game changer, that makes it much harder to have a public conversation when you have these two kinds of media with two kinds of business models. I’m not saying mainstream media’s flawless, you understand that?

0:42:28.9 Trevor Burrus: I have to admit, I got a little pessimistic in reading your book because so much of the creation of the constitution of knowledge, it involved the changing of dispositions over a long course of time, and changing dispositions within institutions to even move away from the more human nature elements of bias and partisanism and all those things that have reared their head back, and on some level, we’re fighting against human nature when we try and get people to check their sources and do this kind of stuff, this basic stuff that helps create the constitution of knowledge. So I was pessimistic and I said, would you call yourself optimistic on how we can move forward and reconstruct the constitution of knowledge and these important systems that keep lies in check?

0:43:17.7 Jonathan Rauch: Well, I’m hopeful. I don’t say I’m optimistic, because complacency is the problem. If we just assume that everything comes out right, and that we all figure out how to repair our vulnerabilities to these very sophisticated and effective tactics that are being deployed against the reality-​based community, then we’ll lose, ’cause it doesn’t happen automatically. It didn’t happen in the past. It took a lot of people, a lot of intentionality, for example, to set up the institutions and norms of journalism that made it responsible and reputable.

0:43:49.7 Jonathan Rauch: As you know, was it the New York Sun published a whole series claiming to have discovered life on the moon and describing what people who lived there where. Now, you could do that in 1820, you could not do that in 1920. And there are reasons for that, but I argue that with the same kind of intentionality, if we understand the weapons that are being deployed against the constitution of knowledge and push back, that in the past, we prevailed, these… Our reality-​based community and its networks have fantastic depth, fantastic prowess.

0:44:22.5 Jonathan Rauch: Think about the vaccine that went in my arm a week ago. Trolls can’t do that, Trump can’t do that, disinformation, none of them can do those things, but we do have to mobilize, and we can talk about what needs to be done. Good news is, some of it is being done, but some of it isn’t. We can go there in the last few minutes if…

0:44:42.6 Trevor Burrus: Yes, absolutely. We can go there. Aside from, of course, reading your book, that’s something that people can do, is there any good little list of guidelines for how we can be better members of the reality-​based community?

0:44:56.5 Jonathan Rauch: Well, so the first thing to say is, it’s always disappointing because there’s no two or three things that solve this problem. It’s an all of society, multi-​institutional, multi-​front campaign, and that’s what it always has been when we’ve had these massive information disruptions in the past. So it’s a bunch of stuff, but you can say what the buckets of stuff are. One is that individuals need to get smarter about how they shop for information, they need to look at sources, they need to think about re-​tweeting. People are getting better at that.

0:45:30.5 Jonathan Rauch: Another is education. It turns out that teaching digital media literacy, critical thinking in middle school and high school is actually pretty effective for getting people to check on stuff. The third thing is journalism needs to be a lot smarter, and that is definitely happening. In 2016, we saw Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump and their friends just ride roughshod over the journalistic establishment by spewing lies at a fantastic rate, and journalists just reported on all that, they just put it into print, sometimes they said it was wrong, but just repeating the stuff installs it in people’s heads and dominates the conversation.

0:46:07.3 Jonathan Rauch: Journalists now all have… The big organizations have reporters who are covering disinformation, they’re being much more careful about contextualizing, say, Hunter Biden’s hard drive, pointing out that that had all the hallmarks of a classic disinformation drop. So journalism is getting a lot smarter about not repeating stuff. Watchdog groups have been set up, that’s important in academia and non-​profits around the world. You’ve now got people monitoring the disinformation networks, catching the conspiracy theories. Once you get them early, you can start putting out the word to the social media companies, and you can even get inside the networks and talk to these people and figure out where they’re going next.

0:46:53.0 Jonathan Rauch: On cancel culture and all of that stuff, social coercion, there the key is to counter-​organize. Small minorities can dominate large majorities if the small minorities are organized and can wallop you if you step out of line, and that’s the tactic these folks are using. But now we’re seeing the organization of other kinds of groups, free speech groups like the Academic Freedom Alliance and groups that are organizing to help people who’ve been cancelled to push back. We’re seeing a lot of civil society around that, and that’s very important, because once the cancellers face equally organized people who are defending and putting pressure on the employers, for example, not to do the firing, at least not a hasty firing, that can make a difference.

0:47:39.2 Jonathan Rauch: And last but definitely not least, digital media companies have started to figure out that their business models were toxic, both epistemically and in the long term that they were driving a lot of their audiences away, and they’re trying to figure out how to deal with that. There’s a long way to go, but I’m actually kind of… I’m impressed with Facebook’s initial stab at its oversight board. I’m impressed with some of what Twitter is trying to do to make it harder to retweet nonsense without censoring it. If you try to retweet a link without having read it first, without looking at it, a sign will pop up and says, “Are you sure you don’t want to read this? You don’t want to look at this before you decide to send it through your networks?” A small thing, an experimental thing, but the right way of thinking about it, how do you make these platforms more truth-​friendly?

0:48:28.1 Jonathan Rauch: So I’m sorry that takes so long to walk through it, but it’s a multi-​level, multivalent kind of response. I say in the book that for me, the biggest disappointment is academia, where in a lot of departments, in a lot of universities, in a lot of disciplines, there is just no longer enough viewpoint diversity to support a real conversation or real debate, find your mistakes. It’s causing a cratering of the public’s confidence in the academic community, which is the pillar, the central pillar of the reality-​based community, and academia really has some work to do to make itself friendly to conservative and libertarian and center-​right and even centrist points of view, and have the debates that right now are hot button debates that can get you fired.

[music]

0:49:24.0 Aaron Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.