Post-truth
When I was helping run a social hub project in Ilford, a woman with much more expertise and experience than I have told me my choice was to do things my way to make progress, or to wait for the organising committee to make their own progress as and when they could. It is a choice between measurable outcomes as demanded by funders and the ownership required for more deep-seated change.
Equally, many people, perhaps Alex Steffen chief among them, say that it is hopeless trying to have a reasoned debate (about e.g. climate change) with people who have infinite funding to produce propaganda and disinformation. All the carefully crafted communication in the world will not produce change of mind in an institution which is there to delay a more general change of mind.
Bystanders are apt to make a category mistake and look for which party to a dispute is more convincing, or closer to their own values, or connected to other parts of the larger social network that they trust. In the competition for hearts and minds, those category mistakes are fatal, literally and figuratively. We cannot afford to mistake the nature of the players, blinded by their plausibility.
Alex Steffen’s term is predatory delay: players who want to kick the can down the road at all costs while they make their profits and wreak destruction. They just need time to do it, and time can be bought by plausible lies and political emasculation. The truth of a situation is buried under mounds of bullshit and, if necessary, armies of social media bots make sure that anything approaching the truth is savaged and buried.
We have been drip-fed the notion for a century now that “such-and-such is a great product” is a meaningful sentence in English. Teslas are good cars. Polyunsaturated oils are good for you. Banks can be trusted. Michael Gove is clever. Whereas, of course, these propositions are not even testable without a context. Which particular wet brown paper bag is Michael Gove supposed to be able to fight his way out of?
Warm data
The notion of warm data is that everything is relationship. Everything is specific context. And as such everything we might choose to care about has many, many dimensions. Michael Gove might outsmart his cabinet colleagues on a specific policy issue. Teslas can accelerate obscenely fast given conditions where that can be demonstrated. London banks launder eye-watering amounts of Russian money and can be trusted by oligarchs to do so.
I replied to a tweet from Raj Thamotheram about what the POSIWID of anti-vaxxers might be. There is enough weird political dogma attached to big money in the US, and enough cynical corruption of science and data in big Pharma that the POSIWID approach is salutary. What do these systems actually do and how does that play out? Always in the warm data sense keeping that specific and contextual. There is little doubt for instance that the vaccine juggernaut severely disadvantages the poor and minorities, even in countries where there are sufficient vaccine doses to be had. And there is little doubt about the sudden and unprecedented concentration of power in right-wing governments.
With warm data there are no simple conclusions to be drawn. We will not be polarised into black and white, for or against — often this is the sole aim of interventions, to polarise us. Nor will we be tempted into wait-and-see, hear both sides, give the benefit of the doubt. If a government policy throws half the population into debt, that is what it does: the theory is nowhere, the fig leaves can be seen for what they are. Post truth.
Paths of change
Will McWhinney distinguishes usefully between different realities. For instance, the unitary reality in which there is only one truth, like the world of the law, or sensory reality where there are many, many valid experiences of things in the world. We could note at this point that the abuse of legal processes to challenge, out of malice, the election results in the US has been formally called out as an abuse of what law is for.
An admission here. While consulting to Tesco I arranged a day for the board directors to have conversations that I hoped would allow them to shift their thinking. I used the McWhinney model to map out a framework for the progression of these conversations. In the event, one of the directors who I had crossed swords with on an earlier occasion said, “We don’t play games” and none of the other directors would challenge the stance. End of!
In McWhinney’s book there are sand drawing by First People thinkers, showing how major and conflicted change can be navigated. We should include here Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, where the artists are Aboriginals but the subject matter is equally subtle. What we see here is that our Western thinking is slow and faulty and poorly adapted to subjects that really matter.
Yunkaporta says that no wise person from his tradition would ever simply publish their views. You have to earn the respect of such a person and be prepared to spend months and years in conversation before they will engage. A more polar opposite from social media is hard to imagine.
There are four realities in McWhinney, that need to be traversed and re-traversed to enable thinking to change and new social agreements to emerge. There are minor paths and there are the two great paths of renaissance and revitalisation, which traverse in opposite directions. From the unitary world which is monistic and deterministic we either move towards free will and a mythic consciousness or towards the pluralistic world of the sensory. We either need different stories or we need other data.
Classical truth is nowhere here. No propositions and no excluded middles. Indeed no isolated single factors or considerations. A path needs space for Yunkaporta and an aboriginal Oldman interlocutor to discuss on and off for months. Why does it? Because that is the state of the issues that are interwoven. What to say on the BBC in the meantime: just say no to any of that. I blogged previously about a couple, both senior teachers, who told me that if I couldn’t articulate something it wasn’t real. I am closer to believing that if something does not support subtle discussion over the months it isn’t real: it is somebody’s oversimplified and corrupt narrative.
Are the Covid “vaccines” safe? Sounds oversimplified to me. It is a question that is almost certainly a trap. By asking such a question publicly people will come to harm. Post-truth.
There is a narrative in the best of medicine and medics about informed choice. And informed choice is fatally attracted to simple propositions. Without love and care, professional informed choice becomes abusive so quickly. To follow a path of change is to dwell for a while with different information about choices, with different sorts of choices, with different values and expectations on which choices might pivot.
Flags and flags of convenience
There are still some people who want to run a flag up a mast and say: this is the truth and I will live and die by it. Some of the science brigade. Some of the evangelicals. Some of the medics. In the UK flags have been co-opted by people with scant regard for the truth: by rabid nationalists and duplicitous populists. In the US the Confederate flag now symbolises all sorts of unholy things, including insurrection.
Flags are for rallying round in the heat of battle. Flags are to indicate whose side you are on. Flags are claims to territory and can be the locus of a last stand. But it is all too binary. I seem to remember some tribes in Colombia, trapped for years between government forces and guerrillas who had to find a way to say they were not part of either camp, it was not their fight and they were never going to take sides because of the nature of the dispute. They could not take the roles that were being forced on them
And all this is too much in the public eye, for public consumption. To make progress with change requires not secrecy but respect for the process, a belief that seemingly endless debate in good faith will indeed unlock the potential in a situation. Change does not occur via social media, although social media may bring pressure to bear on people who are used to being able to control the agenda. Post-truth does not have an Everest or a South Pole to plant that flag in, or even a post.
Brighton rock
A group of people who care deeply about the natural ecology or about human rights for the dispossessed, or about injustice, are not necessarily either right or effective in their campaigns. But groups working on the same issues without caring deeply are even less likely to make progress. I know a man, born in Nicaragua, who on return visits there sees the same people working for the same NGOs on the same issues as they did thirty years ago.
The integrity to stay with those insights of whether anything is really changing despite best intentions is what deeper care can give. A good parent will find a way for their child, a way that does not respect any of the conventions or best advice. The quality of concern and creative interventions is the writing that goes all the way through the Brighton Rock. Incidentally, my favourite piece of industrial sabotage is still the person who wrote something really rude through all the sticks he was making.
Care transcends the different realities of the Paths of Change. It will have different implications in different realities and will express itself differently, but that is precisely the point. You can invert that insight and try to understand the different realities by imaging what care would look like expressed within them.
Conversely, serious character flaws such as those of Priti Patel will ruin everything she tries to do no matter her superficial intentions or the technical quality of a design. Brighton Rock will out and people will find ways to get their own back for the hurts.
Dynamics
Social meanings and constructions cannot help but be in flux. All the dictionaries in the world cannot prevent the word sad, for instance, changing its connotations radically. It happens simply because today’s utterances and their perceived meanings are the available basis for tomorrow’s meanings. Warm data documents the movement of truths in this fast-moving matrix. Is a fleeting truth and insight post-truth? That seems to me to be a recursive question.
When our grandchildren reduce each other to tears by saying unreasonable (and un-meant) things it is hard to get them to see the exchanges for what they are. When we are treated to endless unreasonable propaganda by the MSM, much of it produces the required reaction as it does with toddlers. But the movement of truths, while hidden, is not, and can never be, completely occluded because everyone understands at some level that this game is not substantive. When I was at college, pornographic confessions by women in Cosmo were understood to be written by Oxford dons. Even then many things were not the same as before.
How could it not be so? When large corporations spend billions of dollars building tissues of lies and deception, how could people caught up in them not break free. How could they not build stories on top of those elaborate and flaky foundations? That is not truth and some truths will never be known but it is precisely what they are supposed not to do. They are supposed not to treat with creative levity those billion-dollar seriousnesses.
There is messaging around vaccines and boosters that could not be more serious in its intent. And it is already a joke because it cannot see its own ridiculousness. Verily, the mask slips.
