The Slow March to Truth
Evidence and logic eventually convince people
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 20, 2019
Most everything that we see, hear, or read now is noise. That doesn’t describe the deeper levels of discourse, literature, or culture in all of its ever expanding forms. It does describe the cacophony that seems to overwhelm us in day to day life.
That noise is mistaken for information but is, now, usually the opposite of information. In electronic communication and communication in general the opposite of information is noise. We now need to understand and use this in daily life.
For people connected to the normal, uncensored, network flow we have come to live with this although we are increasingly troubled by confusion and noise being claimed as information. This is being illustrated for us by the Trump impeachment process and, I think, that realization is beginning to spread.
This process has come to mesmerize a major part of the connected human population over the last three years. The majority of the human population has chosen to ignore this and that includes a significant portion of the US population. But the great majority of people with an active interest in human society and its fate are struggling with the symptoms of social and political malignancy.
Our normal efforts in these situations is to try to figure the thing out. That has not gone well. The continued spread of lies, easily debunked conspiracy theories, and information distortion by mainstream media and high ranking political officials is a profoundly troubling and arcane mystery.
Many people, included in the category of those working to ignore what is happening, have just given up. This is most commonly articulated as “Their all lying!”. Ironically part of this process is an orchestrated and surprisingly effective, Russian intelligence agency campaign to foster this type of nihilism as a means of weakening Russia’s opponents.
The history of political misinformation and manipulation campaigns as a form of warfare evolved from the late 19th century spread of new ideologies. This was part of the rise of nationalism, and the new nation states of Europe, that was part of age old cultural conflicts and the integration of…
