60. THE TONE OF OUR OPPRESSION - Truth and Authority Under Trump
The current American President has already made life incredibly difficult for those of us concerned with truth. Under President Trump, epistemology has become broken to such an unprecedented extent that many Americans can no longer guarantee sharing the same conception of reality with their neighbours. Facts are no longer facts in the Trump-state. The “facts” we choose to adopt have become symbols merely of which team we are on. The narrative we tell ourselves about events is also now a choice, rather than requiring commitment to some shared notion of objectivity. We can immerse ourselves in our own media bubbles, both social and mainstream, and hear what we want to hear, regardless of whether the world we are living in has any bearing on objective reality.
Viruses, we know, like any entity seeking to disrupt a host system for its own ends, look for weaknesses. The Trump virus found the ultimate weaknesses in organised human life: 1) we have such shaky foundations at the best of times for what constitutes as real “knowledge” that if you repeat an untruth enough times, from enough “sources”, it can seem just as “true” as any legitimate truth; and 2) that the notion of external authority on which our political systems are based is entirely illusory. As any criminal can tell you: that there are laws against doing certain things impose no actual limitation on doing that which is against the law. Criminals, by definition, break laws all the time. And the only differences between those who break laws who we call “criminals” and those who break laws that we don’t, are either that they have been caught or that we don’t really enforce the law.
We are seeing this currently in the UK with restrictions due to Covid-19. Theoretically there are laws against not wearing masks in shops, etc. Fines even. Yet in reality many are breaking those laws with impunity. We know also that, while many drugs have been declared illegal, your being arrested for drug use is far more likely to be based on who you are, where you are doing them, and what particular drug it is, than on the mere fact that you broke a law. Many laws still exist on the books from centuries ago that are never enforced.
What Trump has shown, day after day, year after year, is that our notion of law and authority is just that: a notion. Time and time again he breaks with the norms of his public office, and breaks laws, yet because of his role as President and the particularly self-serving nature of the current political party system within the country, nothing is done every time he does it. His entire four years in Office has been a daily lesson in the fiction of law and authority. It is not the law, or the role, which brings authority to bear over human autonomy - it is the shared agreement to willingly comply with those agreed norms. And if the agreement is undone, then the fiction of law as legally binding melts away.
We see this as teachers in the classroom. If I ask a class to work in silence, they do not have to be silent just because I have told them to, and if they want to they can merrily ignore me and continue to talk amongst themselves. A particularly belligerent class can continue making noise even in the face of repeated threats and sanctions; and the sanctions themselves can be ignored too. All of this is possible. The only real way I can get silence is if the class themselves recognise the value of that silence and willingly choose to stop talking so they can meet the ends such silence achieves. Importantly, that willingness to silence can be undone by anything which demonstrates the silence is either unnecessary or unfair. If I allow some to talk without consequence, the rest will soon follow. If the work I have set is not worth the silent concentration, once that is recognised by the students the silence won’t last too long. The same was true for the UK Covid lockdown. At first, we saw the need for it, and we all did as we were told, even at great personal and financial sacrifice. But as soon as we saw people like Dominic Cummings breaking the rules and nothing happen to him, the more we heard about people not making all the same sacrifices as we were, or, more simply, if we simply found it impossible to make the sacrifices required of us because it would mean losing our job or our home, the lockdown fell apart. That we were “supposed” to do something didn’t make it the case that we did. To do what we are supposed to do, we first have to assent to the idea that we ought to do what is supposed.
What Trump has done since even before he was President is show that he does only what he wants to do - rules and regulations be damned. And the reason this approach has been so frighteningly successful in terms of his electability is because in his terrible actions we are seeing a glimpse of something undeniably true: that you don’t always have to do what you are told. That law is merely suggestion and agreed consent, and if enough people deny it their consent and refuse to go along with it, the law will fade away.
Unfortunately for the world, Trump is not demonstrating the fragility of social contract in a way that is liberating. Instead we have the nihilistic anarchism of a Sex Pistols punk rock stereotype instead of the positive anarchism of the true anarchist champions of punk, Crass. Trump is selfishly destroying the illusion of norms and rules for his own venal ends. Likewise, he is destroying our notion of truth for the same purpose. Whereas the wisdom of philosophers has shown us that the certainty with which we proclaim certain things may be unwarranted, and that perhaps we would all be better off taking the more “scientific” approach to knowledge as being something deeply uncertain, supported to the best of our current ability but always open for potential falsification, Trump, and the concerted effort of neoliberal think tanks since at least the 1970s, have simply taken that inherent uncertainty at the heart of what humans agree to call “truth” and they have whittled away at it until people no longer feel they can trust anything. Then, like the cult leader preying on the vulnerable, pointing out how lonely they are before offering them a place in a new “family” who will “care” the way no one else does, they offer up “trusted sources” which will show you the “real” information so you can “make up your own mind”.
As with the illusion of authority, the illusion of truth has, ironically, some truth at its core. We really don’t always know what is going on, and many news sources which do tell us what is happening in the world do and always have had their biases and ideological frameworks. There are facts omitted or not known. There are slants which can be put on different facts to make one side or the other look better or worse. And as any philosopher knows, all such second hand information getting suffers from the fallacy of an appeal to authority (and note: we have already admitted the possibility that authority is itself an illusion). When I read in the news that something has happened in the world it is precisely because I myself don’t have time to look into it first hand. I have to trust the journalist, trust their sources, and trust the interpretation of those sources by that journalist. I will likely never check the facts independently for myself. Most of us simply don’t have the time. As a result, long before Trump, news reporting could have been flagged with a little asterisk, as all science is, saying *to the best of our knowledge right now. But to do that in a competitive marketplace would be to admit the possibility that your news reporting is not as good as your competitors. In fact the marketplace was a leading cause of many of the problems with news reporting - tight deadlines leading to rushed writing, insufficient resources to fact-check and dependency on free press releases and quid-pro-quo access to sources, advertisers as financiers of the entire operation. There were may ways that “the news” traded on the notion of fact and knowledge whilst only actually supplying a patchwork of speculation and guesswork.
Which, incidentally, is absolutely fine. If such “knowledge” is the best we can have, then I am happy to call it “knowledge” (with that asterisk). But by denying the possibility of flaw and pretending certainty, the many obvious cracks have now been weaponised to undermine any conception of objectivity. In my own critical conception, I am not going that far. I am saying, like the scientist, that there is an objective reality out there and with our flimsy makeshift tools we will find the best way of getting as close to that objective reality as possible while admitting our methods may not take us all the way and our conclusions may be subject to change. At the same time, many of our reasonable inferences and supported conclusions will be good enough to call “truth”. Instead of that nuanced view, however, Trump and his ilk have simply presented the world as an arena where you can decide your own reality. You choose the conclusion first, then bend the “facts” to support the story you want to be telling.
Again - the germ of truth at the heart of the deception makes it appealing to those who feel that there are genuine critical questions to be asked about what passes for knowledge in the world. The undeserved assuredness of some has led now to a backlash and Trump has fed into that backlash perfectly. He was well-placed to do it. Historically a host of “reality” TV (itself creating the illusion of “reality” out of a fabricated piecemeal of scripted and manipulated footage) and a fan, sponsor and participant in WWE professional wrestling - another “universe” unto itself, which creates its own version of reality to suit the needs of its own storytelling. The key in both wrestling and reality TV is publicity - the reality being painted is the most dramatic and exciting version of reality possible to bring viewers to the television screen. The same has been true for Trump - his daily distortions have made for clickbait and headline-grabbing publicity. He is selling the Trump brand, just as he has been doing for decades. It doesn’t matter what crazy things he is saying, so long as we are talking about him and wondering what he will do next - which we are, often in terrible fear for our lives.
Because there is an objective reality. And in that reality thousands have died from a virus Trump failed to protect them from. And he failed them, much like the Conservative government is failing us here in the UK, not just through terrible policies, but through undermining the trust in the uncertain, yet brilliant knowledge of science - the closest thing we have as a species to “truth” - and eroding our capacity to best infer what is likely from the closest things to “facts” our imperfect news reporting can provide. Most importantly by encouraging us to act selfishly and break rules that get in our way instead of acknowledging that a law is only as good as the collective agreement and solidarity to autonomously assent to it a society can achieve and therefore we have more reasons, not less, to choose to do what is right for everyone in this case, regardless of whether or not it is the law. Of course you don’t have to wear a mask, keep social distance, wash your hands, limit your interactions with others, etc. But you can do that, and for the reason of ensuring others stay safe, if you can, you should. The government’s central role here (and it does not need to be a role for government, but in the current set up it is meant to be government who takes charge) is to enable the bit about “if you can”. Make it easier for us to make good choices than bad ones. Not through manipulation, but through dialogue. You can’t stay home because you will be fired? We need to provide you an income. You can’t wear a mask because you can’t afford one? We’ll supply the masks. You don’t like wearing a mask? We’ll find ways of making it more comfortable - change is often strange and unpleasant, but sometimes we just have to deal with the unpleasantness for a while. Etc.
Donald Trump’s actions this week show just how unfit he is to be President of the United States because within this flawed system of so-called democracy where he is supposed to be a leader, instead of using his own case of Covid-19 to bring support to those suffering or struggling, he used it to dismiss the calls for safety and to undermine the proven strategies for containment. His own life, if not saved, was made more comfortable by exceptional, free, healthcare at Walter Reed that few other Americans have access to, and once healthy enough to resume his duties as President, instead of acknowledging that privileged support he suggested that the virus which has killed so many is only as bad as the flu.
There have been many crimes committed by President Trump. I don’t believe in prison, and history has so-far shown few are interested in prosecuting him for what he has done. And as an anarchist, it may seem odd that I am concerned with the outcome of an election I already believe to be fundamentally illegitimate. But I have always believed in what I call “the tone of our oppression”. If all government is illegitimate oppression, then it at least matters what kind of oppression we are under. Is it one which at least, within the illusion of its legitimacy, fosters an illusion of care and compassion for the people it oppresses, or is it one, like the current Trump administration, which fosters only intolerance and cruelty? If life is imperfect under any illegitimate regime, under which regime is it at least less imperfect. More importantly, if we are living in a fantasy democracy instead of a real one then the fictions and symbolism are more important than ever. In our imperfect set-up the idea of the President - even if not objectively true - has always been an idea of compassion and concern for their citizens, of trying to do the right thing. What Trump has changed more than anything else is the viability of that myth. And when history has shown clearly the carnage caused by former Presidents who were, at least, ideologically beholden to maintaining that myth, it is terrifying to consider what will be done once that myth has been destroyed completely. A President who no longer has to pretend that anything other than personal satisfaction is their goal is a President more dangerous than any we have hitherto seen. And we have already seen four years of it. A vote for Trump in 2016 could be seen as an experiment; maybe understandable for some back then, but clearly now demonstrated to be a mistake. A vote for Trump this November, having watched him bulldoze through our previously held norms about knowledge and authority, can only be seen as a sign of acceptance from the American people that this new and dangerous path is OK. They know exactly what they are getting and they are fine with it. A vote against Trump in 2020 is a vote to at least restore the illusion of decency in a fundamentally illegitimate system. Because if Trump wins this November, the tone of our oppression will be like nothing we have ever seen before.
Author: DaN McKee
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