Fake Disinformation
“I can’t believe he said that.” Judging from the reactions of some media talking heads over the past week, I’m not alone in this perplexity. During a recent congressional grilling, Department of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed that a Disinformation Governance Board would soon come into being. Disinformation? Was this an error in his choice of words, or an inadvertent slip that exposed a government agenda certain to raise eyebrows across the spectrum of political philosophies and persuasions? If merely a vocabulary blunder, it could have been quickly defused and clarified with the kind of after-the-fact “misspeak” apology we’re so accustomed to hearing from public figures today. But whether we call it disinformation, misinformation or even “fake” news, the meaning falls about the same on most ears. It suggests something deceptive, deliberately meant to manipulate our thoughts and steer our actions, particularly at the polls. Which then makes me wonder, are we launching a government agency to disseminate lies, or to refute them? I’ll assume Mr. Mayorkas intended the latter, just as I’m certain that comedians and administration detractors will line up to lampoon or decry the former.
I guess none of us should ever be surprised when those in power or with a public image to protect go to great pains in “setting the record straight” about their motives or conduct. Such initiatives have been part of our political and reputational history for as long as politics and reputations have been linked to power and influence. Every government on earth--including every one that we have known since George Washington convened our own constitutional republic--spends a lot of its energy clarifying its positions in justifying its policies and actions. This is as true in societies committed to the free and open exchange of ideas as it is in totalitarian regimes. And it is as much a part of the information landscape of press-friendly America, England, Japan and Israel as it is in state-controlled Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Everywhere we go and to whomever we listen, the sharing of information, a.k.a. a particular narrative of what is considered the truth, is both the privilege and priority of those seeking to shape public opinion.
If we lived in a world like the one portrayed in the 2009 Ricky Gervais film, The Invention of Lying, where truthfulness was the rule and every uttered word was both honest and sincere, then all information could be taken at face value. No deception, no ulterior motives, agendas or manipulative spins would raise our deflector shields of doubt. No dubious or discouraging word would require us to employ any of the cognitive filters of skepticism that evolution and experience have refined in us as mechanisms of our species’ survival. Communication between humans at every level would be transparent and trustworthy. But as that film so cleverly poses, the moment even one lie is introduced into human discourse, a single untruth in speech or writing, the dissolution of all of our innocence and naiveté would be triggered, and every inkling of trust between two people would be shattered. In other words, life, in an instant, would be transformed into what we now experience and take for granted.
Remarkably, the majority of us tell the truth and expect others to do the same most of the time. Without it we would barely be able to make it through any of our days, so paralyzed would we be by suspicion and cynicism. Ironically, it is our widespread social expectation about human decency and honesty that empowers pathological liars and con artists to prey on us, for without it their deceptions would be cynically rejected. That we count on truthfulness in most of our social relationships should come as no surprise. Haven’t we all had to learn, often through bitter experience, that once trust has been violated it takes not one, but many validations of truthfulness before the wounds of our hurt begin to heal? While a “sucker” may be born every minute, a “believer” takes the repetition of trustworthiness over time to convince and confirm.
That leaves us having to sift, moment by moment, through the plethora of information in which we are bombarded in order to discern its veracity and reliability. Blood and friendship often tip the scale of our credibility, but those in authority over us, whether in our workplaces, our churches, our schools, or our governments—must prove their believability with each kept or broken promise, each kind or insensitive remark, each generous or cruel action. It is therefore no surprise that the Biden team would like to get a handle on what information people use to base their judgments of its programs and policies. And so has every administration holding the reigns of political power during my lifetime, from the Democratic White Houses of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton and Obama, to the Republican Oval Offices of Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, the Bushes and Trump. Every one of them wanted his information to be taken for gospel, and opinions to the contrary to be dismissed as erroneous falsifications that reasonable and fair-minded citizens would refute and ignore.
Secretary Mayorkas’ comments triggered other avenues of reflection, however, that reawakened a number of long-dormant and terrifying ideas from an era now apparently unknown or forgotten. Could anyone familiar with George Orwell’s 1984 not see a linkage between the Board of Governance Disinformation and The Ministry of Truth in his freedom-suffocating, dystopian vision of the future? This post World War II novel gave us many of the words and images we now readily attach to fascist and communist regimes, whether Hitlerian, Soviet or Maoist. And a few of them fit like shoes we may be reluctant to own or wear as Americans. Orwell’s evocations of an authoritarian Big Brother, monitoring our every movement via cameras and other tracking devices, may be a bit uncomfortable to any of us who’ve become wary of the ubiquity of so many of our smart technologies. And are the parallels between 1984’s newspeak, groupthink, thoughtcrime and unperson not a little too close for comfort in this era of cultural warfare, political correctness, censorship and the cancellation of both people and history?
I’m thinking our soon-to-be-implemented Governance Disinformation Board couldn’t have been the brainchild of anyone over thirty. If it was, then his or her misreading of the extent of the negativity and embarrassment that any agency with such a title would provoke is as inexcusable as it is unbelievable. Perhaps a Board of Transparency—as clichéd as this term has become—would be far less objectionable. Admitting that most of what we say has an element of propaganda in it is one thing. Openly heralding its value is quite another, perhaps a foreshadowing of an emergent 1984 universe some three decades later than its author once imagined.
Since Orwell indulged in the creativity of time travel when he forecast ahead of his own 1940s vantage point, I’ll conclude this essay by doing the same. But I’ll set the way-back machine to a time well before anything we would describe as modern or even classical. Yet even a few millennia prior to our moment under the sun, these ancestors fully understood the power of words in describing or dissembling, in strengthening community or destroying it. How important it is for us to hear those voices, not as echoes of an irrelevant past, but as those still small voices that convey truths to which our modern, ear-plugged, and jaded ears seem deaf. How life changing it can be whenever we realize how sacred is the value of each of our words when honestly spoken and truthfully received, especially in this age in which the veracity of so much of the information upon which we depend seems up for grabs.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor, nor spread a false report or make a false accusation, nor lie to one another.”
Compiled from the commands found in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy in the Jewish Torah.
“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”
I John 4:1
“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
John 8:31-32
