Five hundred years ago, Italian diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli put it very bluntly: “One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”
Just over 100 years ago, the French historian Marc Bloch in ‘Reflections of a historian on the false news of the War’, said: “The masses are aroused by false stories. Items of false news, in all the multiplicity of their forms – simple gossip, deceptions, legends – have filled the life of humanity. How are they born? From what elements do they take shape? How do they propagate themselves, gaining strength as they pass from mouth to mouth or writing to writing? No question should fascinate anyone who loves to reflect on history more than these.”
As receivers of information we are never passive or innocent bystanders. In every basic act of communication consisting of the sender of information, of information itself and the receiver of information, we decide what to do with the information that we receive.
In this age of social media, we are all senders of information as long as we have an internet connection. We participate actively in the flows of information flooding our societies.
When we receive information of any kind, do we stop to evaluate it? Do we believe it? And if so, do we believe the information on the basis of its intrinsic merits or because we approve of the source? If we reject it, why do we? Do we check it for facts? In the act of interpreting it and in the way we react to it, do we recreate it in our image, selecting only those parts that fit our perspective and ignoring the rest?
Mixture of the true and the false
If we are deceived, it happens with our complicity. Why do we need to be deceived? If we want to become critical and discerning receivers of information, what can we do? If we depend always on our preferred source of information, we are more prone to being deceived.
No single source of information is adequate to give us a complete picture of reality which is always complex and multifaceted. We need to consult different and opposing sources of information. We need to listen to all the different voices. We must ensure that we do not listen only to the voices of the powerful. It is not true that the powerless are silent. It is more true that we are not able to listen to them.
Information becomes the continuation of war by other means- Evarist Bartolo
Bloch warns us about eyewitness accounts: “There is no good eyewitness, hardly any account is good in all its details… there is always a mixture of the true and the false.” Persons observing the same situation give different accounts of it based on their own perspectives, experience, culture and knowledge. It becomes more complicated with secondary witnesses who recount in their own way what they have been told by others.
So, we need to ask ourselves: where do we get our information from? How is that information constructed – by whose human hands? How has that information been shaped by vested interests? Who has funded that information? What is left unsaid? Why?
Bloch argues that fake news and disinformation need an ecosystem to survive and flourish; “it is from group psychology that false news arises”. In his book about ‘The Royal Touch’ (the belief that if you touch a king you will be healed of your disease) he says: “The error propagates itself, grows and ultimately survives only on one condition – that it finds a favourable cultural broth in the society where it is spreading. Through it, people unconsciously express all their prejudices, hatreds, fears, all their strong emotions”.
Bloch says that, especially in times of war, information is weaponised. Information becomes the continuation of war by other means. Reflecting on World War I and what happens when millions of people are displaced (as they are displaced today), “This sudden displacement from country, this abrupt severing of essential social connections gave rise to a great moral unease… nerves are strained, imaginations overexcited, the sense of reality shaken.… One easily believes what one needs to believe… Of course, in passing from one person to another, it had every chance to be amplified and embellished.”
Have we not all become displaced and disoriented existential nomads trying to find our way in a strange world?
The society of the trenches
Bloch describes how rumours spread and that: “Little by little, belief became a sort of dogma that had almost no non-believers… Everyone was on the lookout for something to confirm a common prejudice... False news is a mirror wherein the ‘collective consciousness’ contemplates its own features.”
Bloch says that, in war, people find it difficult to reflect critically on what is going on: “Methodical doubt is ordinarily a sign of good mental health. That is why harried soldiers, troubled at heart, cannot exercise it.” In our busy daily lives, how much time and calm spirit do we have to evaluate with “methodical doubt” the information we receive so that we are not deceived?
Paradoxically, as we are more globally interconnected, we have also become more isolated. ‘Social’ media mobilise us into like-minded clusters where we converse only with those who agree with us while we dig trenches from where we attack our enemies.
In 1921, Bloch said this about ‘the society of the trenches’: “Frequent contacts between people facilitate the comparison of different accounts and, by the same token, stir the critical sense.” But if we interact only with those who we agree with and exchange similar accounts of reality our critical sense is dulled.
Trying to understand reality is not easy. We cannot be boats anchored in safe harbours. We must venture out at sea and navigate uncharted waters. As Noam Chomsky says: “Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.”