How On Earth Did This Happen?
Isn’t it annoying when seemingly intelligent people fret about some disturbing trend, without once touching the question of why the trend is occurring?
Consider that 2264 years after Eratosthenes successfully measured the circumference of Earth, we suddenly have 2 to 5% of the population of North America and Europe believing that our planet is not spheroid but rather is a flat plane. We should be asking ourselves: how on Earth did that happen?
It would be one thing if over those two millennia there had been a steady contingent of flat Earthers, but that’s simply not the case. There were virtually none, and then suddenly there were millions.
Causality is always a tricky thing, and as Malcolm Gladwell has shown us, trends can arise fairly spontaneously. But something this ridiculous and also this big? There must be more to it.
And indeed there is.
The “more to it” is called Glavset.
Glavset is a group that simply wants to cause trouble around the world. They want to see disagreements that can be nursed into raging arguments, which can be further encouraged to erupt into civil wars.
Some have called Glavset’s a form of ideological warfare, but as the flat Earth example shows, the wars need not have anything ideological about them. Any point of contention will do. If necessary, Glavset will create one from the tiniest catalyst. In this case it was Glavset’s discovery of a number of books bearing the title “The Earth Is Flat” – despite the fact that in every case the title was metaphorical.
So now we have a mad megalomaniac seeking to destroy the world in a scene fit for an animated kids’ film, but would this Doctor Evil actually have a way to accomplish that in the real world?
Sadly, yes, there is a set of tools that will serve quite nicely in a mission to provoke the world into blowing itself up. Those tools started out fairly innocently with Edward Bernays, the nephew (on both mother’s and father’s side) of Sigmund Freud. Essentially, Bernays invented public relations, a set of basic methods with which to manipulate perceptions.
Josef Goebbels refined those methods into what I call goebbelsology and put them to work selling fascism to the German people in the thirties.
Since then, six sets of tools have been added, creating advanced goebbelsology:
Television
Social media
Bot farming (learn about it here)
The use of targeted fear to invoke the limbic brain’s dominance over the neocortex
Echo chamber economics
Artificial Intelligence
There is only one defense against advanced goebbelsology, and that is to prepare audiences, formally teach them in school, to be alert to the signs that someone is attempting to take over their perceptions. Just intelligence and a discriminating mind is insufficient defense.
I have stayed apolitical – until now. That’s because as soon as one mentions anything political in the current goebbelsology-dominated environment, one drags the discussion right over to the limbic brain, which appeared in our species long before the neocortex.
The fact is that these methods are used on both left and right, with devastating effectiveness.
About the Author
In 1981 Wes Kussmaul, working with friends at the MIT Joint Computer Facility, created the world’s first online encyclopedia, implemented using what Wes calls “the world’s worst business model.” Over the the next year the addition of social features transformed the encyclopedia into the more sustainable Delphi social network, which in 1993 was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corp.
Wes is the author of four books about bringing accountability with privacy back to social networks. One of those books caught the attention of a group at the ITU, a United Nations agency, while it was building a global PKI-based source of trust that resembled what the book advocated. Wes announced its re-launch as The City of Osmio in a 2008 presentation to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society.
Wes is the founder of The Authenticity Institute, a provider of a PKI platform to licensed Authenticity Enterprises, which may be seen here. The outcome of the work of those Authenticity Enterprises may be seen at Authentiverse.