Since the Covid lockdowns, what I call Misinformation Hysteria has made its way into the minds of huge numbers of people across the world, so-much-so that I’ve had multiple people tell me that so-called misinformation is as big of a threat to humanity as nuclear war. And because this suspiciously sounds to me like something that Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum might want to have people repeating, I have to spend some time examining it and detailing my position.
When it comes to defining misinformation, I prefer to keep it simple: claims that are wrong. And that’s not to presuppose anything of the intentions of the person making the claim. Currently, the commonly accepted definition of misinformation confuses matters as there’s no clear distinction between someone being genuinely mistaken and someone deceptively spreading false information.
As for false information that has been spread deceptively, I’ll keep that simple too and continue to just call them lies, and I consider it a mistake to broaden the abstraction by referring to lies as misinformation because, suddenly, the line between a liar and someone who’s mistaken becomes very thin and is easily misjudged.
This can be dangerous in a world where people are punished for what they say and think, especially when, in that same world, many are desperate for their peers to be wrong so they can be right.
Let’s take our responses to Covid as a brief example. During the first lockdowns, we witnessed some extremely shady methods of dealing with alleged misinformation. What this amounted to in many cases was stamping out critical public discussion under the guise of preventing misinformation, and, as a consequence, only allowing one narrative (the official narrative) to be repeated.
At the height of the hysteria, those with genuine questions and even those who medically couldn’t take the vaccines were accused of spreading misinformation and labelled conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, “against the science,” etc. Communities were deliberately pitted against one another, sometimes coming at the permanent cost of their livelihoods, their social cohesion, and in some cases their family relations.
Here, it’s important to point something out: any personal beliefs we may have about Covid, the vaccinations, how other people behaved during this period of time, etc., are irrelevant up against the truth of the nature of the censorship and blind authoritarianism that became the norm. This has only been confirmed over and over by this point, as damn-near every single claim that gave rise to this censorship has since been disproven, walked back, or the goalposts have simply been shifted so much and so far that their origins and purposes are now unrecognisable.
Now, with the recent Paypal leak, signalling their intentions to fine customers up to $2,500 for spreading misinformation and engaging in activities they don’t approve of, the rising numbers of police encounters and arrests in the UK being made because of so-called offensive speech and hate speech and other “non-crime hate incidents”, and the Alex Jones trial coming to a shocking, unprecedented end, there’s an increasingly high likelihood of people’s concerns for truth being hijacked to keep their thoughts and their words in line.
Many have cheered at the result of the Jones trial out of pure dislike for the man, not realising that this is a deliberate tactic of having them welcome their own censorship further down the road. Those who overlook the factors that potentially compromise the integrity of that case simply because they don’t like Jones aren’t considering where this will go next, and are most-likely remaining wilfully ignorant because their dislike for Jones runs stronger than their care for freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and truth itself.
The same can just as easily be said for the recent Andrew and Tristan Tate case. The amount of people who wanted the Tate brothers to not only be found guilty, but to be guilty of the alleged crimes out of sheer dislike for them exposed a new low when it comes to people letting their emotions and personal character judgments taking priority over the truth.
In our world, it’s governments, in collusion with large corporations, who currently have the technical ability to decide how and what people are allowed to say, and they are making leaps in their progress towards defining what people are and are not allowed to think.
But in George Orwell’s fictional state of Oceania in his book 1984, it’s the Ministry of Love who take the extreme-equivalent role of our global political and corporate rulers; The Ministry of Love is one of the four branches of government in Oceania. This branch of the government concerns itself with the enforcement of laws, and the punishment of Thought Criminals. The ministry is responsible for punishment and torture to brainwash the accused to love Big Brother and to fix their minds. The Ministry of Love, like the other ministries, is misnamed, since it is responsible for the practice and infliction of misery, fear, suffering and torture.
On one hand, these corporate and political powers act as a rudimentary form of Orwell’s “Ministry of Love,” regulating what everyday people can and can not express in open society and arbitrarily deciding what punishments are appropriate. On the other hand, they seem to operate with near-impunity when it comes to the misinformation and lies that they deal in, extending themselves the luxury of claiming they were mistaken, and that they can only “move at the speed of science,” while everyday people are instantly mobbed and accused of spreading a malicious kind of misinformation.
Now, to bring this back down to the ground, I’ve believed in and made many false claims in the past related to my own misperceptions, and a central pillar of the strength and insight I needed to overcome them was having the ability to take my questions and confusion to serious-minded people. Similarly, I’ve also played a small part in others overcoming various mistakes in their own perceptions. If neither of us were able to discuss for fear of social stigmas or being punished for spreading misinformation, then it’s quite possible we’d still be believing the same bullshit today, and who knows where that could have ended up?
On top of that, I personally have zero confidence in agencies of any sort making my decisions for me. I can only speak for myself here, but I feel confident in my abilities to deal with (mis)information head-on. I’m definitely not keen on the idea of government or corporate agencies deciding that I can’t view certain content or have certain discussions “for my own safety.”
This line of logic will not only lead to bigger government that seeks to control people through micro-managing their thoughts and words, but will also leave people incapable when it comes to doing their own research, and wholly dependent on the discretion of The Ministry of Love.
Since when do these agencies, many of which were supposedly originally there to provide services for us and nothing more, get to tell us that we no longer have the right to be wrong?
How will we educate and grow if being too much of a critical thinker runs the risk of making you legally liable?
Why would someone seek answers and insight from someone else when that person might just try to have them persecuted for “spreading misinformation” or expressing themselves in “hate speech”?
I suspect that, with the crackdown on free expression and through these social concerns of misinformation and hate speech, something a lot more sinister is making its way into the realm of the acceptable. It’s as if, as many have observed and speculated over the years, we are being gradually led into accepting more and more restrictions from increasingly overbearing governments. Or, as Thomas Sowell calls them, the “distant bureaucrats.”
The most extreme social consequence of Misinformation Hysteria is a dystopian society where only one social narrative is accepted, where thoughts and speech are governed by a totalitarian uniformity, and anyone who steps out of the state- and corporate-sanctioned norms will be liable to meet the consequences.
But, if we are to have government and corporate agents telling us which content we’re allowed to consume and which words we’re not allowed to speak (and those we must speak to affirm a particular narrative), then what’s the plan to stop corruption? How do we prevent ideological compromise of our own equivalent of the Ministry of Love? How do we stop individuals or groups seeking to silence or persecute others simply because they disagree or are offended?
After all, they’re just people. To think that they’re some kind of eye in the sky that know enough to separate truth from untruth, and that their priorities are our well-being rather than their own political, financial or personal agendas, and that they’d never do anything against us… is a perspective based on a level of naivete that not a single historical example supports.
In conclusion, of course bad/faulty information presents as much of a threat to individual people and the world at-large as it always has. What we are seeing unfolding today is not a recognition of that, but instead, a set of fear-driven reactions that call for institutional gatekeeping of both our ability to seek the truth and to think critically.
It wouldn’t be so bad if these institutions were more informed than they are, or if their priority really was truth over ideological, political and financial gain. As it stands, the divisive, authoritarian fabric that composes them provides far too much cause for their intentions to be derailed and refocused on all-out social control, which has now even made its way into them trying to micro-manage the thoughts and the words of everyday people.
I suspect the establishment is testing the waters with controversial people such as Jones, the Tate brothers, and others like Tommy Robinson, who are “easy to dislike” in the eyes of a great deal of the public, and that this is a kind of trojan horse that will be used to usher in a new level of censorship and thought-control that was once left to the realm of conspiracy theories.
