The Truth Factories
Dictatorships do not begin and grow through repression. At their heart is a truth factory.
The reason for this text
In an introduction to an event titled "Why Americans Don't Understand Dictatorships," Interintellect founder Anna Gát looks at some popular depictions of dictatorships in American culture and wonders:
Why is it so hard for people living in Western democracies, even for the most sensitive artists, to imagine the mindset of people living in the psychological travesty that is a dictatorship?
This is a valuable question, as it points to why Americans are genuinely vulnerable in the face of dictatorship and even why they may not observe if they already live in one. My short answer is that this stems from the habit of reducing any authoritarian regime to its most superficial aspect: its repressive mechanisms. This simplistic portrayal implies that while people struggle under the oppressive weight, they know the truth and want to fight for it. This is the typical American fantasy about dictatorships: the evil ruling by force from above and the good fighting for freedom from below. But the reality is that the true power of any authoritarian regime lies not in its mechanisms of repression but in its ability to provide the masses with a new, credible reality. Violence, even if always present, is not the basic building block of a dictatorship. What makes or breaks such a regime is its ability to fabricate a new, desirable reality and a new form of truth that completely replaces the old truth. When violence is the only reason for its survival, every dictatorship is on the verge of extinction, its truth being rejected by most. It's not brute power but an efficient truth factory that lies at the heart of every authoritarian regime. Looking at the history of communism, the shocking appearance of the German Nazi state, or even the "third way" in China, one can always find a truth factory at their core, one that explains why each of these oppressive regimes enjoyed real popular support. The purpose of this text is to explain why this is so and how we may need to position ourselves about two basic concepts of Western civilization: truth and reality.
There's a lot of talk these days about disinformation and fake news - terms that have been amplified and weaponized by the US ruling Left as its primary intellectual tool to combat its "evil" opposition - except that they aren't the cause of our social problems, but the effect of a hidden problem we can no longer ignore. Like the Newtonian physicists who blindly believed in the absolute quality of space and time, unable to grasp the mere idea of relativity in Einstein's theories, we too look on in disbelief as the idea of absolute truth and reality turns into a mushy, sticky mud, brutally modeled by the boots of the online hordes roaming in all directions.
Truth and reality, like space and time, have never been absolute, objective "things" independent of the subjective mind1. They were always only the product of the subjective mind2, forever changing as our knowledge grows. We didn't see it because reality changed slowly3, and we had an elaborate mechanism for incorporating new truths and realities into our culture. What is happening today is a double problem. While the structures born over centuries to validate truth in general (structures we’re mostly unaware of) are crumbling under the siege of an unprecedented political assault, the amount of new information challenging old truths and waiting to be integrated into our collective knowledge as the new truth explodes. The system feeding our concepts of reality and truth, one we have never seen, is clogged. And now we see it, but we’re not sure what we’re looking at. Some have rushed to claim that we have entered a ‘post-truth’ era. Only there never was a “truth” era. The crisis we are in is of a profound philosophical nature, not a political one.
What is “real”?
Let’s start with this simple question: what is “reality”? We could quote a lot of great thinkers and theories, but we’ll stick to simple reasoning. We usually say something is real when we have verified it with our senses. But of all the people convinced the Twin Towers were real, how many saw them with their own eyes? Probably a distinct minority, less than 100 million, out of the billions who believe they were real. But why are all these billions of people, myself included, who never saw them, convinced that they were real? We believe that, and many other things we haven’t been able to verify for ourselves, because we have a network of invisible “Reality Validation Institutions4” that we unconsciously turn to whenever we need to distinguish reality from fantasy. We have never looked at them because we have never had reason to. They just seem to work “behind the scenes.”
How do we know unicorns do not exist? Because there is no reliable evidence of them. But if it were, most of us wouldn’t see it with our own eyes, and we’ll have to believe some reports about them. And we’ll have to dismiss any isolated report under a fake name because it obviously can’t be trusted. These simple examples prove an important point: we take much of what we call reality to be real and not fantasy because we believe some sources that report and testify about reality. In most cases, there’s no other way to distinguish reality from fiction. Simply put, credibility is at the core of our “reality validation institutions,” and “reality” is what we have chosen to believe based on our choice of these “reality validation institutions.”
At this point, we need to say more about these institutions, which are not organizations created by a few people to do something on purpose but rather an informal mix of people, concepts, and private formal institutions that have grown organically in our culture with this one specific role: to validate what is real and discard what is not. One of these institutions is what we call “science,” an ever-evolving body of knowledge and principles constantly being cross-checked by a relentless army of scientists, academics, and researchers trying to prove each other wrong. Ever since Popper, we have known that if a theory is not falsifiable, then it’s not a theory at all, and that’s why all those involved in science are constantly trying to prove the current theories wrong. This ensures that what we accept as true at any given moment is as close as possible to scientific truth at that specific moment. It is precisely because science has to be falsifiable that it is credible. (It is not science itself that is losing its credibility these days; it is scientism, which is an entirely different matter .)
The press of the past century is another excellent example of a “reality-validating institution.” Newspapers first - but soon followed by radio and television news - had the principle of credibility in their DNA for a simple reason: if people stop believing you, they’ll stop buying you. The press is a particular case, however, because it highlights the fundamental vulnerability of such institutions. Many have realized (politicians first) that the real problem is not reporting the world honestly but getting people to believe you. Having millions believe your version of reality is power, there has always been a temptation in the media to manipulate, either by omission or by distortion of a particular reality, mainly because that is what politics is.
But the “free” press has never had a “carte blanche” in terms of credibility and has had to prove itself worthy over and over again to be believed. Great investigative journalism and a host of rules about confirming and verifying information and protecting sources were born out of the press’s need to prove its independence while increasing circulation. But there has always been some owner, writer, or reporter in bed with politicians. Especially in times of crisis - when something like “the end justifies the means” logic is quickly swallowed by the public - the press falls under the strong influence of government and politics; this is how “propaganda” was born. Writer and journalist Walter Lippmann wrote “Public Opinion” in 1922. After witnessing the power of propaganda to change people’s minds during World War I, he became genuinely distrustful of the collective wisdom of the masses, whom he called the “bewildered herd.” For herd we were. But we learned to live with that press, and they worked hard to earn our trust. In the end, if we took their political views with a grain of salt, we mostly believed all “non-political” reporting, not least because we knew they had no real incentive to lie. Throughout modernity, the press has been a powerful “reality-validating institution” as long it was not about political discourse.
There’s also the “personal credibility institution.” Some people are more trustworthy than others because they’ve proven over time that they’re willing to go against public opinion to tell the truth 5. We took all these implicit institutions for granted (we were sure we only learned truths in school!) and never thought about what made them possible. But today, not least because of the advent of AI generative machines that make the question of truth and reality pop up in our minds and public conversations, we are forced to change our minds and understand where reality comes from. How can we distinguish between fabricated and valid realities when they are almost indistinguishable? We cannot trust our eyes and ears, so we are finally forced to look back at how the notion of reality was born in our society. The ridiculous and ill-intentioned “fact-checking” initiatives are just a politicized attempt to exploit people’s disorientation. Still, they suggest that “reality validation institutions” are a real thing we need to understand.
Besides the press and science, there is probably a long list of these “reality validating institutions” that have existed for centuries, on small or large scales, all taken for granted and never thought about, all working in a network to generate what we end up calling “reality” and “truth” on our level6.
Scientific Reality and Truth
Let’s go back to science for a moment because there’s another really good point to be made: What we call “scientific reality” is a continuously re-validated body of ever-expanding knowledge. When Einstein died in 1955, the Higgs boson was not real. Peter Higgs proposed the mechanism that bears his name nine years later in 1964, and the Higgs boson was only experimentally validated as real in 2012. The Higgs boson became part of reality in 2012. Science clearly shows that what we call “reality” is evolving, and most of the time, it is evolving by literally expanding the boundaries of the observed world.
One way of looking at this is a simple geographical analogy: the known world during Alexander the Great’s fabulous reign accounted for less than 20% of the populated Earth. What the ancient cartographers called “There Be Dragons,” i.e., the Unknown, was an area not belonging to reality but destined to become part of reality sooner or later. This Unknown can be seen more generally, beyond geography, as the totality of what the human species does not know at any given time. Since man (even more than nature) is afraid of the vacuum, this unknown is heavily populated by the productions of our conscience: visions, hypotheses of all kinds, fantasy, and fiction in general. The unicorn is in this realm and never made it into reality. The Higgs boson was there between 1964 and 2012 when an experiment at CERN made it a reality. If you look at it closely, you can see a guardian at the border between this unknown realm and the realm of reality that allows only some of the inhabitants of the first realm to pass into the second. This guardian is what we call the “Truth”7.
What makes an idea, dream, or fantasy a reality is that the propositions describing its existence have the value of truth. If “reality” is only a quality of “things” in the world, “truth” is the quality of language about all things. Truth is a broader concept, going beyond reality into the abstract realm of concepts and logic, but one thing is sure: any proposition describing reality8 must be true. We can say even more, that anything validated as real must have a description in language that is always true. What we call these descriptions are “definitions.” Definitions are always true statements about objects of reality.
More precisely, it works like this: a new “thing” emerges from our imagination or our relentless exploration of the world. This thing must first be given a name and a description; it is defined9. Once defined, our reality-validating institutions know what to validate as part of reality. When validated, that “thing” enters reality with a new name and definition10.
Truth and reality are closely intertwined, with reality referring to the existing world (an object is real) and truth referring to the quality of language about everything, including the existing world (only a statement can be true). Because everything that is proven to be real has a specific “true” value, and because we connect to reality mainly through language, we won’t talk about “Reality Validating Institutions” anymore but about “Truth Validating Institutions” or TVIs.
The Birth of Truth Factories
Without getting lost in theoretical details, what we should keep in mind at this point is that:
Most reality lies far beyond our senses and is validated as “real” by several validating institutions: free press, science, schools, the personal reputation of specific individuals, etc.
Language and, therefore, “truth” are the essential tools for validating anything as real.
These “truth-validating institutions” derive their power mainly from their credibility reputation: they have simply proved that they can be trusted.
All TVIs are informal and have grown organically out of the fabric of free societies. They are not controlled by anyone or any group and have internal health mechanisms based on reputation: by losing credibility, they lose influence and fall to the periphery of society.
Politics always tries to influence and corrupt various TVIs and usually succeeds in the short term. However, this is limited and primarily accepted in free societies as long as it stays within the bounds of political discourse.
The final fail-safe of all TVIs is the principle of free speech. Given the complicated network of organic TVIs at all levels of scale, any corruption initiated by a person or group in any part of the TVI system is bound to generate intense contradictions in the overall system, usually ending in the natural “squeeze-out” of the corrupted reality from what is accepted as reality. Freedom of speech is essential here, as it guarantees a rapid and even spread of feedback, making the corrupt element a minority.
Consider the points above and ask the evil part of you to devise a plan to change what the masses call “Reality” to your benefit. What will you do?
The first thing will be to choose TVIs as your target and perhaps plan to corrupt them in a sequence that makes your action inconspicuous. You should start with the schools and then move on to science to build a critical mass that will make credibility challenges difficult. Infiltrate schools and science with numerous “agents” ready to replace reality with your version. Remember, intellectuals are the ones who start revolutions.
The second will be to focus on building credibility. Massive use of science will be best; who can deny science? But first, build credibility by creating voices and individuals with good reputations for sticking to accepted reality. Do not rush things!
Since all TVIs are organic and their existence is based on free speech, you don't want to turn them into some state institutions overnight; people wouldn't buy it. Don't fight them head-on! You have a better idea: first, create a plethora of NGOs, all destined to save something valuable in the world and build their reputation first. Covertly fund them so that you can't be directly linked to them. If you're a government, fund them openly in the name of doing good in the world. Just grow them, in great numbers, worldwide, and keep them in the news with their new message of salvation. Pick your issues for them wisely, you want neutral, science-based dangers to save us from. Climate change is a good one. But the threat of "fake news" and enemies of the state using disinformation to defeat us is by far a better one!
Once these NGOs have credibility - because they are organic and have a "voice of the people" authority - they will pressure the TVIs to confirm their new realities. Because TVIs are built on free speech and big numbers, and you have the big numbers, they can't fight you. If you're the government, you can start your NGOs and fund them; once the issue is credible, it's all in the name of the good. Who can argue if you, the government, fund a lot of NGOs to fight disinformation online? Once your "disinformation" threat has been made real by your previous hard work, it's only to be applauded when the government gets involved!
If you started with schools and science as advised, it wouldn’t take more than 5-10 years to get to the point where you have a lot of voices in the scientific community and a lot of young academics and researchers in universities and big companies adding their credible voices to the plethora of NGOs fighting to save the world from its various ills. This will defeat any fail-safe TVIs that may have, simply because of the sheer numbers and free speech.
Soon, the free press will fall naturally. As the enormous pressure of science, academics, and NGOs builds up, any other reality that differs from the one you need will fade out of the press. The new reality has been established.
Congratulations, you just got yourself your very own Truth Factory! Is this possible? Of course, in fact, it has just happened all over the “civilized world”! But one more ingredient is essential for such a complex plan: everyone on your side must act out of conviction, not conscious participation in your plan. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a revolution! They must act as proper masses demanding that a new truth and reality be established. All these NGO workers, academics, scientists, teachers, journalists, executives, etc., must have faith in what they do. They need a vital cause.
And all history proves no stronger causes exist than inequality and existential danger. People are willing to die for that. Inequality fueled the October Revolution, while existential threat fueled the most incomprehensible and deadly war of all time: WWI. So, you must carefully pick up the flags under which your army will fight. Stick to inequality, injustice, and dangerous enemies that threaten the nation's existence.
All this may sound a bit forced until you realize that the same mechanism is more or less at the core of every dictatorship. In the beginning, there are always the intellectuals and students claiming a new reality fueled by a grave threat or insufferable injustice. There is always the “voice of the people” gathered in groups not called NGOs but doing the same thing: fighting for a better world and some enemies of it. There is a lot of conviction and faith because inequality and suffering are great or the enemy is threatening. But all of this works in a single direction: to change the truth and the reality. Propaganda, when a dictatorship begins, is not made up of ready-made slogans that nobody will believe. By the time that happens, the dictatorship is already disintegrating. Propaganda, at the beginning, is just the new truth, the truth that everyone has faith in. This is precisely what American creators representing dictatorship in their creations always get wrong, and this is precisely why most Americans fail to see they are already victims of their own elites’ propaganda.
How we can save actual Reality and rediscover Truth
Of course, no fabricated reality can resist actual reality; in the end, any truth factory will fail. But this can take generations and bring pain, horror, and changes that are impossible to reverse. At first, dissent will appear as a new TVI grows organically within society (sometimes completely underground) under the pressure of actual reality. Dissent will spread, and censorship will follow. America is in this stage now, meaning that whatever authoritarian regime the elites had in mind, they mostly failed. As The Free Press, Taibbi, and numerous others show, new, healthy TVIs are growing (organically, as they should). The fight is far from over; academia, schools, and the traditional press are still bursting with activists ready to die for their manufactured causes of justice in the face of invented discrimination or white supremacist systemic racism. Politics itself is deeply corrupted and disconnected from the masses, and it may take decades to get back to where we were 20 years ago in terms of true democracy.
But this brings us to the heart of the matter, which is the ultimate truth that freedom of speech is not a nice to have, some sort of “equality of opinion” democratic mechanism, but it’s the main principle behind healthy TVIs. There is no other way that reality and truth can be validated in accordance with the facts of the outside world other than by allowing all possible descriptions of reality and truth, coming from anyone, to feed our truth-validating institutions. Reality and Truth are born out of free speech, from the clash of different descriptions, not from anybody’s edicts (much less scientific ones).
And there is another takeaway from this story: no TVI, under any circumstances, can act in an official capacity. The abomination of “fact-checking” companies and NGOs was born precisely from the manipulated illusion of the danger of certain lines of speech. Any truth-checking institution acting with an official purpose fails in its mission and ends up consistently as a propaganda outlet; The Twitter Files prove that beyond doubt.
So there are only a few simple things to do to avert the painful, probably criminal authoritarian regime the new elites seem to be contemplating:
Protect free speech at all costs, levels, and forms of human organization.11
Place a higher value on personal credibility and severely punish those in authority who are proven to have deliberately lied publicly12.
Ultimately, it is worth saying that reality and truth are collective constructs and representations, not some objective thing ready to be found and described. In our struggle with the new Marxism hidden in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, we have failed to see that there is a valid point in the idea of the relativity of truth and reality;13 truth and reality have always been subjective, contextual, and somewhat statistical. Where the new Marxism goes wrong is in pushing the idea that, because they are constructs, they can be changed by individual or group will; it is this aspect of the voluntary design of truth and reality that places it close to all the dictatorships the modern world has known; it is the political push by its influential supporters for this change to happen today that is causing our pain and unrest and threatens that a new kind of authoritarian rule will replace democracy. While it is true that reality and truth itself are collective constructs, the emphasis is always on “collective,” not “constructs.” If Shadow, Anima Animus, or Self are archetypes of collective unconsciousness, we can say that Truth and Reality are collective consciousness archetypes. In this sense, they are inaccessible to the individual will, manifesting the numinosity that only a true archetype can have.
This is a hard-learned lesson in quantum mechanics, where we have come to accept that there is no such thing as a "real position" of a particle and that what we measure as our measurement heavily alters its position. In other words, there is no such thing as an "independent observer" observing an "objective" reality.
Here, one can delve into Kant's description of phenomenon and noumenon and discover that this is hardly anything new.
Interestingly, the speed of change also brought down absolute space and time in physics.
“Institution” is used here in its broader cultural sense, not in its organizational sense.
I can’t think of anyone other than Seymour Hersh.
Contrary to popular belief, there are no “general” truths, only personal truths. This is because any truth is seen as such only from the subjective point of view: you have all the power to decide what the truth is. Any truth-validating institution only offers its collective version, which you are free to take as is (most of the time) or to adapt based on your personal experience. The only possible collective truth is religious belief, usually mistaken for a personal choice these days: you cannot decide what that kind of truth is. But religious belief is an entirely different matter.
Heidegger brought back this ancient Greek term, “aletheia,” and called it the condition of being; it means “to uncover,” “to bring out of hiding,” and it perfectly describes the passage of things from the unknown into reality. (It really is a three-step process, Unknown -> Existence -> Reality, but about that in another essay.)
I mean honest description because people can lie when they see a cat in front of them and describe it as a lion. But if cats are real, they must have a true description.
“Defining” creates what an endless chain of philosophers used to call “the Being.” Many failed to observe that there is no being outside of language.
In this respect, the “included middle” logic proposed by Stéphane Lupasco in 1951 seems more adequate to describe how things can pass (or not) from the unknown into reality. In 1964 and 2012, the Higgs-Boson hypothesis was neither true nor false; it had a form of existence that was not part of reality.
It should be said here that any social media regulation should include strong free speech protections. Under the pretext of fighting “hate crimes,” these have been transformed from hubs where versions of reality flow freely into instruments used by the government to install a fabricated reality. All forms of censorship must stop. We already have laws and institutions to deal with hate crimes.
The value of personal testimony and the individual's credibility must be significantly increased in our culture. This is the only way to protect us from the fabricated realities of AI generative machines. No matter what a movie shows you doing, the testimonials about you need to be more important. We may also need to move from “image” (what people appear to be) to “achievements” (what people actually do) in judging people. Paradoxically, the value and credibility of any digital recording will be significantly diminished.
One that can be found in Hannah Arendt's works, too.
We are neither trained, nor ready to understand the truth. From our early education till maturity, we play the truth card in the most subjective way. We are good in building the truth not discovering it. We don't have the logical and intelectual tools to do this because of the education system. Only very few people with metaphisic approach are capable to "find" the "truth". Nowadays, as in the past, truth belongs to "truth manufacturers" and as consumers we are happy just to enjoy their "product".
"How do we know unicorns do not exist?"
Actually they do. Rhinos are good enough unicorns. There might be others as well but I stick to rhinos. 😁