how to save the world

cartoon by the late New Yorker cartoonist Robert Weber, one of the few cartoonists who worked mostly with charcoal

One of the things that CoVid-19 has made clear is that “offices” for individual workers (and so-called “executives”), and even for groups of “white collar” workers, are in most cases completely unnecessary. That’s not to say people don’t want them, and want to get back to them. It’s to say they aren’t needed — that with a bit of relearning we can do everything from home that we can do in an office, and perhaps more, and just as well if not better.

The immediate benefits would be (a) eliminating an enormous amount of commuting time, (b) drastically reducing commuters’ automobile emissions and expenses, (c) freeing up a huge amount of wasted space, much of it in cities that are desperately short of affordable housing, (d) reducing the demand for space in “prestige” areas of cities that are obscenely overpriced, and hence bringing rents down, and (e) reducing a large portion of the costs of doing business that are passed along to customers, potentially reducing product and service costs to customers.

This wouldn’t change the world, of course. The dangers are (a) that the 1% would simply pocket the savings themselves, (b) that a lot of bullshit “office” jobs would simply be eliminated, much as most secretarial jobs were eliminated a generation earlier, when it was clear they served no purpose, and (c) that “top executives” will still retain their personal offices, making having an office even more absurdly sought-after as a status symbol than it is now (and entrenching and deepening the hierarchy between those “with” and “without” offices — a further gutting of the last vestiges of the middle class). And of course for many, especially the poor and working women, working from home is currently nearly impossible, and they would need to be provided with spaces near their homes where they could work effectively; a challenging but not insurmountable problem.

The argument for having offices and other physically proximate spaces for workers, even when not necessary to produce anything, is that people are allegedly more productive and accountable in an office working alongside peers and bosses (read: bosses don’t trust subordinates), and that physical proximity encourages important consultation and collaboration. But so far little or no effort has been put into either (a) finding out if that’s actually true, or (b) improving tools and technologies that render it no longer true.

I was one of the first “executives” in North America to pilot what was then called the “mobile office”, lugging around my “portable” computer (in those days it was so heavy I developed “PC syndrome” tendonitis); I essentially carried my “office” in my briefcase. I was given the best available technology at that time; in return I gave up my physical office (financially, that was a wash to my employer).

These “pilot programs” were mostly unmitigated disasters. Then as now, if you wanted to talk to someone “important”, or a decision-maker, you had to do so in person. Then as now, “important” people didn’t answer the phone (then, they had secretaries to run interference for them; now, they have voice-mail and email and assistants to automatically delete voice-mails and emails addressed to them). So if you tried to operate without an office, you couldn’t talk with anyone “important”. You had to come into the office to be “visible” and basically wait for an invitation, for them to visit you. Since that could be a long wait, you generally needed to book a “visitor’s office” on the off-chance of being granted an audience that day.

Peers looked upon these “visitor’s offices” with suspicion and denigration: Don’t you dare encourage people to take my office away; I have a “real” office with “my” files and other important things that have to be here, so I have to be here. You might try to jam a lot of visits and in-person conversations into your scheduled visits to “the office”, but no one would cooperate with you — that’s just not how things were (and are) done in “the office”. I could go on, but you get the idea: Becoming a “mobile office” worker was a de facto demotion, in the eyes of both bosses and peers.

Nothing has changed that much. There’s still jockeying for, measurement of, and hierarchy-ranking of and preening over offices. So for many, at all levels of the bullshit jobs codependency, giving up one’s office is unthinkable, and eliminating offices would be considered a grievous and insulting error.

So I’m not naive enough to believe it will happen, at least not until the economy collapses, which may still be a decade or two away. I’m just saying it could happen, with enormous net benefits for just about everyone. Just as you really don’t have to physically shake hands to sustain a healthy business relationship during CoVid-19, you really don’t have to have physical offices — any offices — to sustain a healthy organization. They are anachronisms, like the suit and tie, clung to by the conservative and the fearful.

Imagine, then, what a world without offices would be like — assuming the technology has improved to accommodate this change — cameras and audio quality and screen-sharing that simulate physical presence in a space as much as possible:

1. Except in those rare places where large numbers of people absolutely have to work in close proximity to manufacture real products that cannot be largely automated, there would be no “rush hour”. Emptier highways, cleaner skies, less road rage and stress.
2. I think there would be a tendency for people to be evaluated more on how accessible they make themselves to others (fellow workers, customers, suppliers). And perhaps less on the size and trappings of their office, or on their “span of control” or job title, or on their dubiously-computed “contribution” to profits.
3. I think there would be less capacity and less indulgence for micromanaging, and necessarily more delegation of decision-making capacity to front-line workers. A lot of painstakingly collected and scrupulously ignored research suggests this would be a good thing.
4. It would be much easier to logically reorganize a company or organization because the physical silos would no longer help entrench the structural ones. That would include more easily breaking an organization into autonomous units that would be more customer-facing and less hierarchical. This would be a huge (and for executives, scary) change, since they have long conned the world into believing the myth that their decision-making is more important and valuable than that of front-line workers.
5. Trust would of necessity become the currency of business. After trying to establish “check-ins” to ensure remote workers are observing “office hours”, owners would eventually have to give up and learn to evaluate people on the quality and value of what they produced and not how many hours it took to produce it (or whether they were regularly in the office working early or late).
6. Shareholders and directors, who’ve been conned for years into assessing management on all the wrong bases and entrenching an absurdly disproportionate remuneration and reward system for executives, might have to start looking at value-for-money, value added, real customer and employee satisfaction surveys (not the fake scale-of-1-to-10 fraudulent surveys used now), and measures of organizational innovation and resilience, to assess the quality of their investments and management, instead of using profit growth as the single, universal surrogate. It would start to become clearer, I think, how very equally everyone working for an organization contributes to its success, or failure. But maybe that’s wishful thinking.
7. Executives would no longer be able to con customers and investors that they were skilled, knowledgeable, important, and worth a lot of money, based on the trappings of their offices, titles and real estate. They might have to demonstrate that they actually do something of value to justify their salaries and patronage.

I hear some objections that “serendipitous encounters” in the office are essential to networking, to collegiality, and to innovation. If you think so, please show me the evidence that these even occur in most organizations, let alone that they produce useful results. Middle managers hope to have such encounters with executives to make their presence known and possibly move up the ladder.

But my observation is that this is mostly just dreaming and projection. There are very few organizations where promotion has anything whatsoever to do with merit — it’s about connections, family, and image. Just look at the political “leaders” in any country and you’ll see a public demonstration of what it takes to get “to the top”. Water coolers, even when they existed, served only as a means for peers to gossip and hobnob and for executives to pretend they cared about occasionally mixing with the minions.

There has been considerable “cultural anthropology” work done that shows that the presence of offices and departments in an organization is more of an impediment than a help to cross-sectional interaction and communication. The sheep of one kind are all placed in one pen so they’re easier for their shepherd and their sheepdogs to herd, not so that they can commune with other sheep.

The sheep aren’t going anywhere — if they’re still working in large hierarchical organizations they’ve imbibed the corporatist kool-aid and believe that theirs is the only way to succeed (or even survive) in business. (Sadly, because of the criminal imbalance of wealth and power in our global economy, they’re now probably correct.)

But the corporate elite could easily let them do their bullshit jobs from home — it wouldn’t make any difference and would provide the five benefits noted above. And this elite might even dare to get their fellow executives to give up their offices too — it would make zero difference to anything that matters, and some of them might actually get to spend some time with their families, if they dared.

I know this sounds bitter and over-the-top, but in all my years of business with many organizations, I’ve just found it to be more and more true. Our economy is built on many myths, most of them completely untrue; the myth of the importance of offices is just a minor one of these.

Pollard’s Law of Complexity asserts that:

Things are the way they are for a reason. To change something, it helps to know that reason. If that reason is complex (and it usually is), success at truly understanding and changing it is unlikely, and developing workarounds and adapting to it is probably a better strategy. Complex systems evolve to self-sustain and resist reform until they finally collapse.

Offices evolved for reasons that are in part anachronistic and in part to demonstrate power and to simplify command and control over employees. None of those once-important reasons still applies, so the system is continuing, much as the wearing of suits and ties continues, because of inertia. For the last 30 years those of us weary of these dysfunctional remnants of old paternal industrial culture have been working around them. Perhaps now is as good a time as any to encourage them to collapse before they do so naturally.

The implications would be far-reaching, and extend beyond the politics and economics of corporatist hierarchies. It might start to dawn on us that appearance (and citizenship, and lineage) have nothing to do with someone’s capacity, intelligence, creativity, values, or value to society. And that wealth and power are inherited things, passed usually from father to son, and that they have absolutely nothing to do with either merit or effort (even if you believe merit or effort entitles you to an obscene share of the world’s wealth and power).

And, on a closer look, it might dawn on us that most of the expenditures that are built into the things we struggle to buy — expenditures on executive salaries and perks, on the wages paid for bullshit jobs, on advertising and PR, on litigation against potential competitors and uppity customers, and on acquisitions and share buy-backs — that make up in many cases 80-90% of the “cost” of what we buy, are completely unnecessary, and result in products costing an order of magnitude more than they need to, even if we were to halt the offshoring of labour and materials to struggling nations.

I think that in time, we will realize this sad and outrageous truth, this gargantuan $47T dollar theft from workers by corporatists and their shills, from the rest of us. I think most of us have at least started to realize that capitalism, as it’s been practiced over the past two centuries, is just an elaborate boondoggle to funnel wealth to the ultra-rich from the rest of us.

Like the desolating and ruinous global industrial growth economy that sustains it, this boondoggle is teetering and will soon come crashing down, no matter what we do. If it takes a while we may yet obliterate the half of the world’s natural wealth and biodiversity that isn’t already gone, and accelerate even further the destruction of our air, water, soil, food, lands, oceans and resources that have led to the sixth great extinction of life on our planet. Perhaps if we gave a little push to this one little domino — offices and what they represent — it might start something in motion that would precipitate something more profound, and at least spare future generations some of the consequences of our folly.

But just watch the resistance from the plutocracy if this starts to happen. They know what they have to lose. And if they decide they need fewer offices after the pandemic, you know whose offices will remain untouched.

This is the 13th in a series of articles on CoVid-19. I am not a medical expert, but have worked with epidemiologists and have some expertise in research, data analysis and statistics. I am producing these articles in the belief that reasonably researched writing on this topic can’t help but be an improvement over the firehose of misinformation that represents far too much of what is being presented on this topic in social (and some other) media.

Throughout the current pandemic, there have been ‘experts’ of all kinds trying to build a reputation (political, professional, social) by badmouthing what the world’s public health officers have been saying, doing, and urging the public to do, in the face of CoVid-19.

Some of these have been conspiracy theorists and their repeater-drones, who are not worth wasting further effort engaging. But others are seemingly well-meaning, intelligent, mentally balanced people. There is a propensity I think in most of us to challenge popular wisdom: “Everything you thought you knew about X is wrong:”. In many cases, when that skepticism is based on reason, research and reasonable doubt, such challenges can be very useful, even essential. But in other cases (as with the climate collapse skeptics) they can cause harmful confusion and delay, and destroy the morale of people doing important work, especially in a crisis.

I’ve been critical of the anti-mask professionals (“There’s no definitive proof they do any good”), and the anti-social distancing and anti-shutdown advocates. Our society has suffered immensely from our seemingly inherent incapacity to exercise the precautionary principle, even in times of crisis. The majority’s collective global response to CoVid-19 to date has been a rare positive signal that we can exercise this principle, and this discipline, when we have a mind to do it. If we can, then there’s hope for resilience in the crises to come.

What the “until there’s unequivocal proof I won’t accept it” argument leads to is the antithesis of resilience. It leads to resistance to change, inability to adapt, and refusal to give others, and perilous situations, the benefit of the doubt. Whether it’s spoken by doctrinaire conservatives or doctrinaire libertarians, in sufficient numbers it can paralyze our capacity to deal effectively with complex situations of all kinds. It leads to dithering, backsliding, and denial that there’s a problem — the kind of thinking and emotional responses that have been so much on display among the political leaders of the US, UK and Brasil in particular in the face of CoVid-19 and all the other crises that have arisen recently and will become more and more commonplace in the years ahead.

Public health leaders have been saying for decades that we need to be prepared to take drastic, immediate, global action to deal with the threat of pandemics in our ever more crowded and ever more mobile world. Except in a small handful of countries that have breezed through the current crisis, they have been largely ignored.

What the latest group of nay-sayers are now proclaiming is that the mortality of CoVid-19 is evolving to be much lower than was thought or feared, and as it moves more aggressively through younger populations around the world the death toll will prove to be much lower than the 0.68% IFR (translating to 50 million global deaths) that scientists and public health experts have been computing it to be, and assuming, in the absence of better estimates, it to be. It is possible they are correct. It could be as much as five times lower (0.13%, translating to only 10 million global deaths at most).

In a typical year a half million globally die of influenza viruses (50,000 in the US); most of those who die are old and/or suffer from complicating medical conditions, and for that reason the ’cause’ of death may be complicated and hence the numbers are very imprecise). So if the upper limit of global CoVid-19 deaths is 5 million a year over a couple of years, that’s only 10 times the normal influenza rate, and it’s only half the number of people who die each year from cancer. Still a pandemic, and awful, but not the historical catastrophe many feared.

What this group then goes on to suggest, however, is that public health experts and politicians knew this to be the case, and have used the “pandemic” as an excuse to grab executive power and throttle civil liberties. This implication is IMO dishonest, dangerous, and an insult to our public health community and the health care professionals dealing with the disease.

If it turns out that CoVid-19 is only, at worst, ten times as bad as a normal flu season, the obvious questions are (a) how could we have been so wrong, and (b) if we’d known, what would we have done differently?

For a start, we really have little way to know what the actual infection and death toll numbers are. Data collection methods in most places are crude to non-existent, decisions on what ’caused’ a particular death (especially with other preconditions) can be all over the map, and there was (and still largely is) no accurate method to detect who is infected and who is infectious, though we’re getting better at it. So estimating the IFR is a wildly imprecise and ever-changing exercise. Due to lack of testing there were early estimates that IFR could be as high as 3-4%, though opinions varied by as much as an order of magnitude. We are still wildly behind in processing what little credible death data we have, and will never know how many CoVid-19 deaths we missed, though several studies suggest that we’ve missed at least a third of them in our reports in most affluent nations, and 90% of them in some struggling nations, based on excess deaths data. Even with the benefit of hindsight, estimated deaths from the 1918 H1N1 pandemic still vary by an order of magnitude, from 10 million to 100 million — the 50 million most often cited is really, still, just a crude guess.

The data from the SARS-1 and MERS coronaviruses, the two most recent “novel” coronaviruses (novel in that they’re not “common” like the many common cold coronaviruses), suggest that they had terrifyingly high IFRs of 10-50%, but fortunately were not very easily transmitted, so keeping the number of infections under tight control (isolation) allowed the death toll to be reduced to a tiny proportion of what might have occurred if it had had the transmissibility of CoVid-19.

So when China announced CoVid-19, there was understandable terror that this might be “the big one” that epidemiologists worldwide had feared. The combination of high virulence (IFR) and high transmissibility is a nightmare, with the potential to lead to a repeat of 1918 or the global plagues of much earlier times, or worse.

It should therefore be no surprise that the world’s public health leaders, with the best available information, strenuously recommended lockdowns, social distancing, and (in some cases) masks to mitigate this risk. The explosion of deaths, overloaded hospitals and huge positivity rates in March and April did nothing to ease these fears. Some surveys in several countries suggested that the IFR looked to be about 1%, while others suggested it was between 0.2% and 2%. Public health advice was based on the 1% assumption, which seemed consistent over several months — the best guess at the time.

More recently we’ve discovered that many people contract the disease asymptomatically, and including them in the case count lowered the best guess of the IFR to about 0.68%, which  is the estimate that is still being used by health authorities as more data comes in. As noted above, a 0.68% IFR in a highly transmissible disease (ie where everyone will be exposed until a herd immunity level where around 70% of the population has been infected and is hence immune, is reached) translates to a potential death toll of 0.68% x 7.8 billion = 50 million, less whatever proportion is not affected due to herd immunity, and barring an effective vaccine. That’s less than the potential 80 million deaths that a 1% IFR could have produced, but it’s still in 1918 range in total numbers killed, and two orders of magnitude more than “normal” annual influenza deaths. Worth a lockdown? Most people thought so.

By the end of September, the global reported death toll was more than a million, with estimates of global actual deaths averaging closer to twice that number. Reported deaths for the past four months have been very consistent at about 180,000/month, and reported cases and positivity rates in several early-hard-hit areas have been spiking upwards again. More troubling, even though the reported newly infected were much younger and expected to die in much smaller numbers when infected, CoVid-19 hospitalization numbers in the US and some other areas jumped back up to record levels in the late summer. But reported deaths did not rise nearly as much, causing some to question whether more people had actually been infected without incident than earlier thought (although models already suggested that as few as 10% of infections had actually been reported). Could the underreporting of cases be even more extreme than thought, and could the IFR be much lower than what the data so far had been pointing to?

That’s where we are now. The biggest challenge is that our tools for testing who has been infected are still limited, and not terribly reliable. Antigen tests until recently had suggested that even in the hardest-hit areas, only 20% of the population had been infected (far below herd immunity levels), and that worldwide on average only about 2% had been infected — still supporting the 0.68% IFR (2% x 7.8B x 0.68% = 1 million global deaths).

It was strange, therefore, to hear the head of the WHO suggest recently that as much as 10% of the world’s population, five times as many, had been infected. This suggests they believe that the actual IFR could be five times lower, about 0.13%, and that we’re looking at a maximum of 10 million CoVid-19 deaths, not 50 million. Indeed, assuming that the current reported deaths continue at a 180,000/month rate, ie 2 million a year, then it would be a surprise to hit even 10 million deaths before a vaccine is perfected, even assuming a third to a half of CoVid-19 deaths remain unreported. And indeed, some studies in India, which has many CoVid-19 deaths but surprisingly few deaths per million people, suggest that as many as a half of the people in parts of that country have been infected.

Many are not convinced. The IHME continues to use the 0.68% IFR and projects that by the end of January global reported deaths will hit 2.5 million, and the daily death rate will be 16,000, three times the current rate, which, if it continues unabated, would lead to 6 million more deaths next year until and unless an effective virus is implemented. Without sustaining at least some social distancing and masks restricting the spread, they say, the daily death rate will soar to 50,000 by January, an annual rate of 18 million more reported deaths. On this basis, it is easy to understand why public health experts feared that as many as 50 million might die without restrictions in place, if an effective vaccine was still years away.

But suppose they’re wrong, and the analyses that supported the 0.68% IFR were flawed, which is possible for a host of perfectly understandable, benign reasons. Suppose the antigen and other tests done to date have missed most infections, and that as the WHO is now proposing, 10% of the world’s population has already been infected and the actual IFR is hence only 0.13%. Suppose too that an effective vaccine will have been universally administered by December 2021. And finally, let’s suppose that by the end of this year, with death rates flat and hospitalizations manageable, pandemic fatigue has set in and we allow the disease to more or less run its course, continuing to ease restrictions in most of the world.

If herd immunity cuts in at 70%, that would mean the final death toll is likely to be 0.13% x 7.8B x 70% = 7 million deaths. That corresponds to about 300,000 deaths in the US and 35,000 in Canada. If the 0.13% is correct then that means already nearly half the US population has been infected, so it would be 2/3 the way to herd immunity. It would mean that about 20% of Canadians have already been infected, so it’s less than 1/3 the way to herd immunity. Another 25,000 deaths may well be unacceptable to Canadians (only 10,000 have died here so far, mostly in Québec), in which case the US may shrug and return to business as normal, while Canadians may well keep restrictions in place.

But if we do reach a consensus that this disease spread five times faster and farther than we thought, and is hence much less lethal than we thought, what does that mean for our assessment of public health’s performance to date, and what to do next?

To the conservatives and libertarians who think the whole exercise was overreach, the knee-jerk reaction is that the economy was shuttered unnecessarily, and putting public health in charge of decision-making, instead of the usual corporatist clowns, was a mistake. I think most public health leaders and organizations (except in the US, where absurd underfunding and political interference has seriously undermined the credibility of most of its public health institutions) has performed masterfully throughout this crisis. If you look at the chart at the top of this post, you can see that they were led (by the best data available at the time) to believe that the choice was between scenarios (1) and (2) shown in blue — ie between a “herd immunity” strategy (1), with 20 or 50 million likely to die, or a severe restrictions strategy (2), with a worst-case outcome of around 8 million deaths. Their choice was obvious, and responsible.

But suppose we now find out that the IFR is actually 0.13%, one fifth of what everyone thought it was, and that nearly half of Americans (except in isolated places like North Dakota, which this month has the highest daily death rate per million in the world) have already been infected? In that case we set scenarios (1) and (2) aside and look instead at 0.13% IFR scenarios (3) — “let herd immunity stop it” — and (4) — “let’s keep the restrictions on to save unnecessary deaths”. That’s a 7 million versus 3.5 million deaths choice. I know what my choice would (still) be. A lower IFR would be great news, and it would change nothing insofar as what should have been done and what we should continue to be doing.

I’d like to go further and see masks made mandatory everywhere — not as a criminal offence for the non-compliant but as a global social convention, a small sacrifice to tell the world we care about each other’s health and lives more than we care about a minor physical discomfort. That could save another million lives, and if it were universally accepted it might well stop this disease cold in its tracks — new cases reduced to zero, virus extinct — in a matter of weeks or at most a few months. Would that ever be a lesson for when (not if) the “big one” (the pandemic that is both highly virulent and highly transmissible, with deaths potentially in the billions) inevitably hits us. If we’re not careful, we now may end up becoming more complacent about pandemics if this one turns out to be “not so bad”, and that could prove disastrous in preparing for and addressing the next one.

A few other points that I’ve made over and over that still bear repeating:

1. We still don’t know how this disease kills and sickens us. We’re still too busy fighting the fires to address how much damage they’ve done — how much damage the virus has done to our lungs, brains, hearts and other virus-susceptible organs. Even asymptomatic infected people have shown signs of concerning organ damage whose long-term effect is unknown. In a recent study 88% of CoVid-19 patients hospitalized showed permanent “lung abnormalities” and 75% were still struggling with serious symptoms three months after admission.
2. Viruses can mutate, and new ones thrive among overcrowded breeding grounds like our cities and residential institutions (like prisons), especially when the inhabitants are chronically or acutely unwell. The second wave in 1918 did far more damage than the first, despite preparedness, and it mostly killed the young and healthy. We must be much better prepared for the viruses to come. It’s not that expensive.
3. Pandemics were rare before 1918, and back then depended on ignorance and unsanitary conditions. They are common now, for three reasons we show no willingness or capacity to address — (1) factory farming, which has been the likely breeding ground for most recent “novel” virus strains, as well as being the source of poisoned, toxic foods that cause many times more human deaths and chronic diseases than pandemics; (2) the plundering of the planet’s last wilderness areas, which house untold numbers of viruses and bacteria to which humans have zero immunity; and (3) the exploitation, for food and quack medicines, of exotic creatures (like bats and pangolins) with very different immune systems from ours, which likewise expose us to all the viruses and bacteria to which they’re immune, when we “consume” them. Until we deal with these causes of pandemics, we had better damned well be ready to sacrifice convenience and profit to deal with their consequences.
4. Much has been made about the “trade-off” between health and economy. In case anyone hasn’t been paying attention, our industrial growth economy is killing our world, poisoning and exhausting its life forms, its soils, its air and its water, to the point it’s precipitated the sixth great extinction of life on earth. And all of it — all of it! — accrues to the benefit of the richest 1%, simply to keep their stocks, land, products, options and bonuses growing in value. A temporary halt to that madness isn’t a sacrifice; it’s a chance to take stock of whether the way we live our lives is part of the solution or part of the problem, and hopefully start to remedy it.

Our public health and health care workers are doing their best under terribly trying conditions, and using very, very imperfect information. Let’s please give them the benefit of the doubt and stop with the blaming and shaming and second-guessing of ulterior motives. Nobody knows what’s going on. We’re just trying to figure it out, with everything we’ve got.

Thanks for reading. Please vote — British Columbians Oct 24th; Americans Nov 3rd, if not before.

faked “bible burning by BLM protestors” video produced by RT, a Russian propaganda agency, rebroadcast by Trump Jr and others

I got holy children to show me the light, singing “hallelujah, brother how about you”?
Yeah, we got holy scriptures here that prove us to be right,
in believing out loud what we wish to be true.

I got stoned out neighbors to take me in tow, singing “close your eyes”, singing “open wide”.
Watch the world fall away below, let the winter wind blow,
and where will we hide when it comes from inside?

— James Taylor, “Hymn”

Much has been written about the role of craven, manipulative misinformation, disinformation, and fabricated conspiracy theories, in election results, and on a larger scale in the seizing, consolidation and protection of political and economic power.

Such deceptions have long been essential to the functioning of our societies. Advertising, marketing and PR are, in essence, the art of using misinformation and propaganda to persuade consumers that crap is better for us and worth far more money than is actually the case. That crap now includes political candidates, their parties, and their positions.

Without them, stocks and real estate would be worth a small fraction of what they are valued at now, and most “consumer product” companies and politicians would be out of business. Without them, many wars, including the Cold War, that cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars could never have been successfully launched or sustained. Having invited misinformation to the party more than a century ago, we cannot now say it has no place in a healthy society. Though it has no place in a healthy society.

In a recent article by Joshua Yaffa in the New Yorker, the Russian correspondent analyzes what effect Russian propaganda has had on US elections, and on Americans’ political beliefs in general. Basically he concludes:

• • There are concerted efforts by Russia, China and other governments to influence political opinions, debate and elections in other nations, though they have had on the whole a rather negligible effect. Just as the decades-long messages of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and similar US propaganda agencies and programs have had a negligible effect on other nations. It’s mostly wasted money done mainly to impress the propagandists’ domestic bosses.
  • Deliberate and unintentional domestic misinformation campaigns, sites and programs have been far more effective in playing on citizens’ fears, unsupported beliefs and biases. Though mainly they have entrenched beliefs among the ‘bases’ already inclined to believe what they do, facts and truth be damned, rather than convincing the unpersuaded one way or another. They may get those already inclined to drink bleach as a CoVid-19 cure to do so, but they won’t persuade others, not so inclined, to do so. “To activate anything, [misinformation has] to hit at preëxisting tendencies and pathologies in society: disaffection, inequality, prejudice, aggression”, Joshua writes.
  • There is of course the danger that such polarization will produce more violence among and between different factions of citizenry. Taken to an extreme, if enough of the population is incited to violence, it could produce civil war.
  • The ability to use technology to create very convincing fake audio and video amplifies this polarizing power of misinformation.
  • So the cleverer foreign powers focus their misinformation on trying to seed their lies and nonsense to domestic dupes, which is often not hard to do, and let the domestic dupes do the heavy, and more effective, lifting.
  • It would be essentially impossible to regulate media and social media to significantly reduce domestic misinformation. That genie’s long ago left the bottle.
  • There is a long history of deliberate misinformation that predates modern and social media. The obfuscation of the truth to sell products, politicians and wars is not new. What is new is the democratization of the capacity to obfuscate, so now it’s not only rich and powerful liars, shills, haters, warmongers and psychopaths who have the tools and resources to exploit our ignorance and propensity to believe misinformation. Any fool can do it.

There are no simple solutions to this very old problem. Misinformation in the form of advertising and doctored research is, after all, the cause of our ingesting the many toxic products of modern industrial agriculture, which directly cause the vast majority of deaths and chronic illnesses in this world. If we’re OK with propaganda that kills most of us and causes almost everyone horrific suffering, all 7.8 billion of us, why would we not be OK with a bit of nasty political obfuscation, especially if it helps us engineer more profitable wars and more ‘defence’ spending on which our economy now depends, or helps “our side” win an election we deserve to lose?

“The real solution lies in crafting a society and a politics that are more responsive, credible, and just”, Joshua writes. Yeah, and how’s that going? Who exactly has the power to “craft” a whole society and politics? Us, collectively? IMO that’s just as naive as a lot of the proffered “solutions” to climate collapse.

Joshua cites US Cold War architect George Kennan (who coined the term “political warfare” in the 1940s) as saying that the only defence against “foreign” propaganda is a “healthy and vigorous” domestic society. That may be correct, but it’s cold comfort.

What we can do, and probably the only thing we can realistically do now, is to work to undermine the advocates of personal violence, and the means to incite violence, where it is unproductive and detrimental to the health of the domestic society. Arresting the perpetrators of personal violence against their perceived “enemies” after the fact just makes them martyrs and gives their advocacy even more publicity.

What we can do is disarm them before they can inflict death and suffering — give up trying to change their minds and instead disrupt their armed confrontations and other acts of violence in the streets, ideally at the planning stages but if necessary by standing between opposing groups and disarming them of guns, knives and other weapons, and safely decommissioning bombs, poison letters, and other instruments of public violence. This is what “homeland security” is supposed to be about, and why they supposedly need so much intelligence and money. It’s time they did their job, instead of just serving as recruiting agencies for racists, white supremacists and other right-wing white male hate-mongers.

As for the rest of us, we can only hope that, over time, our societies will become more “healthy and vigorous” and more “responsive, credible and just”. Dramatically reducing inequality of wealth and power would help. The outlook for that happening is, I think most would agree, dim. But it has happened before, when things got bad enough that governments had no choice but to intervene to support the poor, powerless and oppressed. If history is correct, it’s at least as possible as descent into civil war and fascism. We are all doing our best, after all, and there are some good signs that we’ve had just about enough misinformation overload.