Confusion

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“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”—attributed to Abraham Lincoln

We are one Hell of a confused nation.

Take Covid-19, for instance. It’s a respiratory virus. It travels through the air. You can have it without knowing you’re infected. So you can pass it to others without even knowing, merely by breathing or talking. Wearing a mask cuts down transmission, both to you and from you. Masks are a simple, cheap, cause-and-effect medical safety measure.

Current data also tell us that, if you wear a mask and still catch the disease, you’ll have a milder case than if you don’t. The severity of illness depends on viral “load.” More mask, less load.

Pretty simple, isn’t it? A properly instructed child could understand.

So why do we have so many people who don’t wear masks? Why do we have a president and governors who have not only balked at requiring them, but have encouraged not wearing them? Why is Brian Kemp, governor of Georgia, suing the mayors of Atlanta and other Georgia cities to keep them from requiring residents to wear masks?

Then there’s the economy. We’ve shed tens of millions of jobs since the pandemic hit. Millions are sitting at home because they have no job and no money to spend beyond survival. Even if not sick, they’re waiting, helpless, barely able to feed themselves, in fear of getting evicted and becoming homeless.

The experts tell them that going out and socializing normally are the quickest ways to get sick. So they’re not going out—at least not to spend money they don’t have.

Businesses and institutions that depend on “packing them in” are cratering. That includes restaurants, movie theaters, sports stadia, rock concerts, cruise ships, airlines, and even churches and political rallies. Remember the empty seats at Trump’s rally in Tulsa?

This, too, is easy to understand. People aren’t spending because they fear going out, and the unemployed have money for survival only. Two causes, one effect. The causes are fear of getting Covid-19 and tens of millions facing destitution. The effect: our economy craters.

So why are Republicans—and an American Enterprise Institute shill for the oligarchs—saying unemployed people won’t go back to work unless we cut their Covid-19 “extra” $600 unemployment insurance. Can people go back to work when there are no jobs?

If you cut relief money, won’t the unemployed have less to spend on necessities, like groceries, clothing and rent? Won’t their destitution just propagate right up the chain, to their landlords, local businesses, supermarkets, and even Amazon.com?

This, too, is just common sense. And there’s no evidence to the contrary, as Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recently reminded us. Yet we’ve got “serious” think tankers and “serious” pols like Mitch McConnell saying, in effect, “cut their safety net and let them bleed,” so as to force the destitute back to work in non-existent jobs.

Forget about empathy. Forget about kindness or humanity. Wearing masks and giving people monetary relief from destitution are the simplest, most direct ways to fight the pandemic and keep the coming economic depression from getting much, much worse. They’re practical remedies for what ails us.

More generally, how can we believe our president? He brags about “acing” a test to rule out Alzheimer’s and senile dementia. He says he’s “a very stable genius.” So why has he gone to absurd lengths, including threats and payoffs, to keep secret his college grades and test scores, from when we was young and virile?

Yes, we’re really confused, as a nation. Or some 30-40% of us are. How did we get so gullible?

This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t start with Trump. For over forty years, we’ve developed the strongest institutions to sow confusion in human history. Unlike foreign propaganda organs, ours are private entities, and big money makers. They make the people who own and run them rich, filthy rich. They make propaganda profitable.

It all started with Rupert Murdoch and his Fox media empire. He got fabulously rich deluding our people and making his pundits’ delusions entertaining. And Congress rewarded this foreigner—an Aussie—with US citizenship for helping destroy our collective contact with reality. Now Fox, with its consistent alternative reality, is the most-watched cable news program ever. For those in its bubble, it’s an addiction.

But Fox was just the beginning. We’ve also got the bit players—Rush and Alex Jones—who’ve made millions peddling hate, self-obsession, conspiracies, lies and (in Jones’) case, patent medicines like twenty-first-century snake oil.

Our coup de grace was the Internet and its “many-to-many” communications modes. Facebook and Twitter let anyone into the act. Sheer amateurs, as well as professional deluders and political operatives, can now peddle lies, fake news, invented conspiracies, and hate by the bucketful. So can foreign spooks and trolls, including the Russians, Chinese and Iranians.

Our worst enemies inject us with doses of false reality. They watch the confusion grow. They laugh and gloat. And no one, it seems, can stop them.

Trump doubles the confusion by using Twitter to peddle his lies to the known universe. The “mainstream” media amplify and broadcast each bogus Tweet. They do so both because he’s president and because he has the base cunning to make his lies titillating.

So sensationalism displaces sense not just on the Internet—a medium just over one generation old. It also displaces sense on the venerable lions of print media, the NYT, the WSJ and even the WaPo. All unwittingly hawk Trump’s confusion because his lies are titillating “news.” He plays all the media, including the most respected, like cheap fiddles.

The political theory underlying our First Amendment is that the truth will emerge from a cacophony of competing voices. That theory is self-evidently not working in the Internet Age. There are too many competing voices, and too little time for anyone to hear them all. So our public has divided itself into separate information “bubbles,” each with its own competing version of reality.

Our massive profit-making organs of confusion have blown bubbles big enough to envelop some 30-40% of us, thereby enriching themselves and entrenching the very oligarchic ideology that frees them from restraint. They enjoy a positive feedback loop: delusion to profit to more money for deluding to political power to further license for more delusion. Their positive-feedback loop rivals the one for global warming, which might decimate our species.

As the examples above show, the Internet and modern electronic media are tailor-made for confusion. Yet those examples are only the tip of the iceberg. The chill of confusion extends to every field of human endeavor, from politics through foreign policy to science.

A small but telling consequence is devaluation of experience and expertise. It started long before Trump’s recent belittling of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Ronald Reagan began the trend. He had been grade-B radio announcer and movie actor, and his relevant pre-presidential experience was eight years as governor of California. If you include the years of active military leadership of our general-presidents—Jackson, Grant and Eisenhower—Reagan’s was then the least leadership experience of any president ever elected.

Next came Dubya, George W. Bush. He cut the minimum experience level down from eight to six years, as governor of Texas. With that second precedent, Trump’s zero years of military or political experience was just a step in the same direction, a predictable mathematical progression.

Joe Biden marks a stark contrast. Before running for president, he had two years in local office, 32 years in the US Senate, including 4 years as chair of its Foreign Relations Committee and 8 years as chair of its Judiciary Committee, and eight years as Vice-President. That’s a total of 42 years in elective office, including 20 years in leadership positions. Few postwar presidents even came close.

But our national confusion won’t end with Joe’s election as president, or even with a second term of his or his chosen VP’s. It took forty years to drive us into our ditch, and it’ll take an immense and sustained effort to pull us out.

Our organs of confusion are more powerful than any organs of propaganda in human history. They’re especially resistant to change because they’re private and dispersed, because they have varied and shifting motives, and because they make their owners filthy rich and so more powerful. Their persistence and dominance fit right into our comforting national myths of virtuous capitalism, the supernatural powers of “entrepreneurs,” and (since Reagan) the goodness and beneficence of greed. Our First Amendment protects them from government censorship, so we must curb them by subtler means, including social and business pressure, economic restraint, and boycotts. All that will take time.

Meanwhile, our organs of confusion have turned the words attributed to Abraham Lincoln on their heads. As it turns out, ideologues don’t need to fool all of the people all of the time. In a so-called “democracy” based on minority rule—our Senate with its filibusters and our Electoral College—all they need to do is fool a minority of some 30-40%. That’s precisely why we have Trump as our supreme leader, and why we are now in social, economic and political free fall.

Trump has willing or reluctant lackeys in the GOP, in Congress and the media. His dismal example of success in lying, concealing, distorting and distracting will survive his presidency and his life. If others adopt his example, our skilled workers who have lost their jobs, their factories, their industries and their dignity may soon “own the libs” but little else. The oligarchs who feed the confusion, and profit from it, will have conquered all.

Confusion is not an ideology. It’s a state of mind and a crude but effective means of political control. We must learn to control its deliberate sowing. If not, our democracy will be shorter lived than was ancient Rome’s after Julius Caesar invented demagoguery and his fellow Roman senators killed him for it. Just like Caesar’s reputation, which every school child learns today, Trump’s skill at lying, cheating and playing the media will survive long after he’s gone. It needs a durable antidote.

Endnote: Today’s routine bit of confusion is Trump’s threat to delay the election. He has no lawful power to do that: the date is fixed by our Constitution and federal statutes, not presidential edicts. But much of the nation doesn’t know that, and the media universe hangs on Trump’s every Tweet. Thus does he create yet another bogus “controversy” to distract attention from his miserable performance on the pandemic, the economy, his trade war and would-be Cold War with China, and his retreat from unlawful and unwanted military intervention in our cities.

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