What Professional Wrestling Taught Me About Truth, Trust, Blockchain, and Human Psychology
I recently read Donovan Craig’s The Uses of Money newsletter about the potential for Blockchain technology to verify trust in a world where truth is uncertain. Craig references Feb 10, 1989 as the day that society moved to “post-truth.” Vince McMahon, CEO of the World Wrestling Federation, publicly admitted that professional wrestling is fake.
Truth vs Trust
The concept of truth vs. trust has weighed strongly on my mind recently as I’ve questioned the truth of my own memories. What is truth but a subjective label that we use to describe events consistent with our personal world views?
Equal Truth
What is fake but an equally subjective label that we use to describe events contrary to our personal world views? If I attend a pro bump-stock rally, my interpretation of events, based on my personal biases, will be drastically different from that of an NRA member.
Which does nothing to discount the validity of our individual experiences — both are equally true.
Compounding the nature of experience is the fact that memory is fallible (changing by up to 60 percent over a decade), yet conviction about the accuracy of memory strengthens over time. Truth is complex.
Concepts of Post-Truth
The concept of a “post-truth” society dates back for generations. In Western Philosophy, Immanuel Kant’s treatise on deontology in the 18th century declared morality based on universal duty as superior to subjective truth and helped kick off the Enlightenment.
150 years later, Joseph Goebbels created the ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in Nazi Germany to define truth for the public, as satirized by George Orwell in his classic 1984.
Professional wrestling is a modern incantation for expressing a view of truth through art. As the New York Times’s Tim Grant states in his wonderful opinion documentary, “wrestling is not a fake sport but a form of storytelling.” Is truth not just a form of storytelling?
What Wrestling Teaches About Truth vs. Trust
The critical date in WWE history to me was not Feb 10, 1989, but Nov 9, 1997 when Bret Hart lost his title during his final championship bout in Montreal. Summarizing what Radiolab covered in their fascinating episode La Mancha Screwjob, Bret Hart was one of the most creative, athletic, and charismatic performers in the history of wrestling.
Hart also clashed with Vince McMahon. When Hart announced his retirement from the art/sport, he orchestrated his farewell tour to culminate in his native Canada with a world title bout against Shawn Michaels.
Vince McMahon had other plans. McMahon colluded with Shawn Michaels to come out as the victor instead, leaving a shocked Bret Hart to retire from the WWE with a surprise loss.
Hart let his anger fly in a flagrant and vulgar post-match press conference where he trashed McMahon and the fake nature of wrestling, imploring fans to stop watching the sport.
Did the WWE suffer from such a raw exposition of truth from its most popular star?
On the contrary, it adapted and popularity in wrestling surged. Truth in wrestling has always been as subjective as in real life, and after Montreal the WWE no longer tried to hide it. Wrestlers abandoned their scripted characters and were allowed to act out as per their own unique personalities in the ring.
Themed caricatures played by actors such as the Undertaker and the Ultimate Warrior were replaced by genuine personas like Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Rock. Paul Levesque abandoned the Francophile suplex-er with a lower-Brittany accent that he was contracted to play (subjective or not, truth is stranger than fiction) and became Triple H.
The WWE did not enter a post-truth era. Truth was and is as subjective as ever. After Nov 9, 1997 the WWE entered an era of trust. No longer was a central controller (Vince McMahon) responsible for scripting the behavior of each actor on stage.
Truth was as in question as ever before, but trust became de-centralized across the likes of Dwayne Johnson and Steve Austin, and the WWE’s popularity skyrocketed. Why?
Whether across science or history, humans have always prioritized trust over truth. As irrefutable as the principles of chemical reaction kinetics are to me, when it comes to climate change humans accept truth from the people that they choose to trust. Facts serve to reinforce pre-existing biases.
We humans like to judge such behavior, but is it really a bad thing? Is the concept of good and bad as subjective as true and false?
In 1855, celebrated war photographer Roger Fenton released his famed photo “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” from Ukraine displaying the savagery of the Crimean War. Unfortunately, this photo was proven to be fabricated. The photo was staged with cannonballs by Fenton so as to portray a more vivid story of the cruelty of war vs. what the landscape of that single day in 1855 represented.
Fenton argued that his staged photo represented truth of the situation more accurately than the reality of the instance, and I agree with him. The fact that that day happened to be more peaceful than during intense fighting is not the story that he needed to communicate to the public. What needed to be seen by the public was how vicious and brutal the Crimean war was.
Viral Vids and Photos
As a modern example, a few weeks ago the Time Magazine published a viral heart-wrenching photo of a crying daughter being separated from her Honduran mother. This, as a result of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policy.
It was later shown that this girl in the photo had not been separated from her family. The Right screamed fake news and voiced their support for Trump. Was the point of this photo whether or not this one girl had been separated from her family? No. The photo captured the brutal sentiment of the family separations taking place — which has affected 2,300 children — a more accurate representation of the truth of the situation than the reality of the instance.
Examples — Truth or Error?
How are these examples different from a policeman planting evidence to frame a suspect? How about the example of a scientist such as Michael LaCour fabricating research data to support his thesis?
The Difference is Trust.
Fenton was trusted and forgiven, but LaCour was not — and has not been. Time Magazine is an institution that has been trusted for years and will continue to be, despite how much they may be decried for spreading falsehoods.
Danger lies in trust.
The danger of the Joseph Goebbels of the world and Big Brother was not that they controlled truth but that they controlled trust. The reason why I trust Time is not my belief in their journalistic integrity, but because they do not hold a monopoly on trust.
In a free market for media, the invisible hand applies: the co-existence of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Xinhua, Al Jazeera, and Twitter means a decentralization of trusted sources vs. a world of centralized figureheads.
Is Technology the Answer?
Which brings me back to blockhain. Just as humans rely on faith above fact, we need trust more than truth. Since the solution to the Byzantine Generals problem lies in decentralizing trust vs. exposing truth, Blockchain to the rescue. Right? This must mean that this author believes in proof of stake vs. proof of work… Ethereum. From the WWE to news media to Instagram, de-centralizing trust did not lead to a greater proliferation of truth (if there is such thing), but adoption and advancement (not necessarily progress).
I am a strong proponent of the power of blockchain technology and the multitude of product applications — and that the technology presents an elegant solution.
The fundamental problem which Blockchain addresses is the human need for trust. Knowing that humans need trust more than truth, does de-centralization of trust at scale provide benefits at scale?
The law of diminishing returns and the limits of our monkey brains suggests that proof of stake from a billion nodes is not worth much more than from 150 nodes (Dunbar’s Number, the number of connections that a human is psychologically capable of forming).
Requiring a Version of the Truth
Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we humans need a version of truth that supports our own world views. When we find the source of that truth, it becomes our source of trust.
For this reason, we are unlikely to adopt a universal source of trust any more than a universal source of truth. Perhaps this is why adoption of blockchain has been highest in financial applications, where truth is more objective.
Will we see adoption (i.e. trust) in applications such as media where truth is more subjective?
This article was originally published on July 15, 2018 via LinkedIn.
