Truth is dead

Almost everyone knows the old Chinese proverb about the three selves. It goes something like this:

There is the self you know, the self others know, and the self you really are.

Unfortunately, it seems that many people no longer believe the latter one exists.

Recently I was watching the anime series Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig. The series is a crime & espionage drama set in Japan in the near-term future of 2031, a world that is both very familiar and far more sophisticated. In the series, an international event is brought about through manipulation of media and information, amongst other things. One character, a resistance leader called Kuze, is asked why people tend to fight and be ignorant. He says something to the effect of "people tend to believe what they want to, what they already agree with, and then begin to fight."

Meanwhile his opposite number, a sinister manipulator called Ghoda, is busy altering media and information to stir the populace up and create an environment wherein a specific military action can be undertaken. It's a classic case of an agent provacateur but taken to a new and scary level through the use of information warfare. At one point, a submarine is set to launch a nuke at a Japanese city, so that Ghoda can claim a seperatist group headed by Kuze set off a stolen nuke they don't relaly have. Members of the "good guy's" team see this, but cannot stop it, so begin to plot alternate approaches to defeat him. One method suggested is to display an image of the submarine launching on all the various media. One of the team mebmers then interjects with "but in this cynical age, nobody will believe it!"

I thought we were talking fiction.

I was sadly wrong.

Sitting in one of my classes the other night, we were discussing the phenominon of War of the Worlds. The radio drama, which was broadcast in 1938 as if it were a breaking news event, was beleived to be true by many who listened at the time. Some even barricaded themselves into their houses. When the instructor asked the class if we thought it could happen again today, the vast majority instinctively suggested yes.

Then one student took it to far. He seemed a perfectly normal guy, middle aged, mild mannered, married with kids. Strange people come in all sorts of packages, however. It wen't like this:

"Yesterday, the American military launched C130 gunships against a terrorist camp in Somalia. On this raid, they killed a group of Al-Queda terrorists. Now I don't know anything about this, since when were we in Somalia? And who were these 'terrorists'? Did it even happen?"

For background, fighting has been going on in Somalia for about a month now. In December, troops from Ethiopia, supporting the legitimate but mostly exiled Somali government, began an offensive to drive out extremist muslim forces who had taken control of the country. The terrorists that we struck against from the air were the same people the Somalis and Ethiopians are fighting daily on the ground. But since this guy hasn't been paying attention, he assumes that this is a "sudden" event. Since he's ignorant of the circumstances, further, it may never have even happened. Sound like Kuze's words yet?

This has brought me to a frightening concept. In this decentralized media age, have we gained information at the expense of knowledge? While the limited heirarchy of traditional media lent itself to manipulation, now we're leant to a further, chaotic scheme. Anyone, in essence, can pick and choose any "fact" they wish off the internet to believe in. People can construct alternate realities based upon rumor, theory, inuendo, and white-noise. While this was always possible in a limited way, now it's possible in ways that can take on massive porportions in a short period of time. How long before the likes of David Koresh are replaced by internet cults that can spread virally across the network? How long until we have vast segments of society that never talk to their next-door-neighbor, yet have a vast social network of fellow conspiracy theorists worlwide? How long until the number of people who believe in fantasy worlds outnumber the number of people who believe in an objective reality that can be measured? It's as if society as a whole is getting dimensia.

In the late 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced that "God is dead." For the following century, it seemed as if much of the leadership of modern society bought into that. Society put forth such men as Lenin, Stalin, Musolini, Hitler, Kruschev, Pol-Pot, and the like, buthcers who attempted to remake the world in their own image and did not concern themselves in how many were killed to do so.

Now it seems as if we will soon be able to make the Nietzschian statement that Truth is dead.