The Age Of Total War
You Will Not Find The Answer Online
The internet, more specifically the two-way scalable communication network of social media, is as transformative a technology as the printing press. Both of these served as technology that sowed dissent and opened an expansive epistemological (and in the case of the 16th century an actual) battlefield.
When communication networks change, the power that be no longer holds a monopoly on truth. Collective illusions that provide stability get shattered and one arrives at a point of epistemological crisis. Throw in endless data sets and 24/7 streaming of conflicts of different kinds, and the result is a society that reduces nuance and thrives on emotion.
This is how technological progress can degrade social cohesion as the collective becomes more primitive, even if the individual’s ability to attain and express knowledge is greater. It is a form of scale transformation property; greater optionality on the individual level leads to increased loss of social cohesion at the aggregate level.
As the individuals cannot cope with the newly found freedom, their minds get hijacked by algorithms that optimize for conflicts. And as the majority of discourse becomes confrontational and the overinformed mind cannot verify truth in the sheer amount of noise, the ideology becomes a decisive criterion for navigating the world.
In such a society, the majority becomes Wittgenstein’s ruler. What people say and think tells you nothing about the subject debated but merely informs you about their own beliefs and ideology. The “global village” everybody was thrown into is a very primitive village.
The emergence of the rapid (“hot”) media, television, and then the internet, made every topic an everyman problem. The internet provided additional options to engage. If you involve too many people and give them the ability to engage, you sow endless discontent and conflict.
Amplifying Victimization
It seems that everything that has undergone “socialization” online is doomed. Askonas suggests that the invention of hot media potentially lowers the ability to produce and adopt meaningful technological innovation, as there’s always somebody being a priori threatened.
“…the decline of actual innovation and the rise of a digital simulation of it is largely a story of the end of the print era and the advent of instantaneous electronic communication and the environment it generates. Print, a classic “cold” medium, could tell its readers of new scientific wonders, but could not grab their sensorium with two hands and shake them about. The radio, the newsreel, the television, the Twitter bring to one’s immediate presence not just the immediate terror of some technologized violence, but also the equally disequilibrating chit-chattering of the terrorized.”
This is how the victims, albeit only a minority, and perhaps sometimes justified, hijack the discourse, embedding it in a deadlock and potentially lowering our ability to invent, innovate, or truly progress. This is how social media allows the tyranny of the minority on a massive scale.
Taleb’s concept of “tyranny of the minority” suggests that it takes only ~4% stubborn, uncompromising people to force the remaining ~96% to eat, behave, or live according to their rules because the flexible majority will always bend first. And the victims are always the ones motivated to impose their inflexibility on the rest.
Some are victims of bad immigration policy, while others are victims of authoritarian regimes cracking down on immigration. Some are victims of the murderous apartheid regime, and others are victims of a fanatical terrorist nation.
The (social) media constantly streams a story of victims. It is unfortunate, but a reality of not living in a utopia that there always are (potential) victims. It is understandable that the victims are intolerant of their suffering and rush to hijack the discourse. That, however, only embeds the impasse deeper, throwing the state of discourse into a total war.
Problems > Solutions
Problems are simple while solutions always require nuance and usually a great leap of faith. Problems lend themselves greatly to virality; they are often emotionally charged and absolute, while solutions, complex and often iterative, are a product of tinkering (nuanced insight) and require reduction of outrage.
Problems: max emotion and reduced nuance
Solutions: max tinkering and reduced outrage
Another way to frame this is to borrow from Brandolini’s law also called the bullshit asymmetry principle states:
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
In other words, it’s trivial and quick to invent nonsense, make wild claims, spread misinformation, or throw out unfounded assertions. But debunking or carefully refuting them usually requires far more time, research, expertise, patience, and effort (explaining context, sourcing evidence, dismantling multiple intertwined falsehoods, etc.).
There is a related asymmetry in a law that would state:
The amount of energy needed to produce a solution is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to highlight problems.
Hence, the online discourse will always be prone to hijacking by problems and the intolerant minority. Involving more people only means a greater chance of highlighting problems and inviting stalemate into society’s issues.
As the grand topics now invite everybody to express their views, the “hot” social media always emphasize problems over solutions, pessimism over optimism. After all, it’s called doomscrolling for a reason.
Pessimism is a societal-level victim mentality. Our society grew more pessimistic, and pessimism is rewarded as high status. It is more respectable to be skeptical, highlighting the problems and the gloom. Unfortunately, unlike optimism, pessimism is always self-fulfilling. Solving problems, or in other words, employing creativity, is very difficult and rare.
Madness And Mimesis
In the last big epistemological crisis ushered in by the technological revolution, the total war was so exhausting that Europe had to abandon the fundamental question of the nature of God. The Peace of Westphalia was the pivotal moment that resolved the conflict by agreeing to avoid answering the question, as Thiel narrates in the Straussian Moment:
“Where agreement over questions of virtue, the good life, and the true religion was unraveling, the immediate attempt involved forging such an agreement through force. This force escalated in the periods of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, and culminated the paroxysm of the Thirty Years’ War, which remains perhaps the most deadly period in the history of Europe.”
At the end the agreement had become more elusive and the differences were greater than ever. “The violence failed to create a new unity”. Thiel adds a framing of the Enlightenment undertaking a major strategic retreat” as...the question of human nature was abandoned because it is too perilous a question to debate.”
The Enlightenment led us into the 21st century. Perhaps we’re stumbling upon the same question again. In the centuries after Westphalia, it provided a solid ground in which a new scientific reality was nested. But as the knowledge grew wider, in the words of Durant, “the common man found himself forced to choose between a scientific priesthood mumbling unintelligible pessimism, and a theological priesthood mumbling incredible hopes.”
In my interpretation, the theological priesthood of Durant’s era was rapid technological progress. Big ideas were executed: atomic, nuclear, reaching the moon, and beyond. We were not supposed to go that far. This progress was founded on science, but then science turned into a bureaucracy. A bureaucrat is always a pessimist because, in their view, the world cannot get better; it can only be better managed. We lost the counterweight to pessimism.
And Durant goes on with a warning that deeply resonates when assessing the discourse of recent years:
“For if knowledge became too great for communication, it would degenerate into scholasticism, and the weak acceptance of authority; mankind would slip into a new age of faith, worshiping at a respectful distance its new priests.”
There simply is no answer that would satisfy the intolerant minority, the ubiquitous victims, those who cite endless studies or data on data, or those who support counter-movements thriving on conspiracy theories and demagogy. All news is fake news.
It is a total war of narratives and interpretation with no absolute answers. We live in an era of nonstop competition for the right to interpret vast amounts of information to conquer truth. Consensus does not exist. Polarization is a feature, and motivated reasoning is a default method.
Motivated reasoning is the tendency to process information in ways that favor conclusions you want to be true, rather than conclusions supported by the best available evidence. Tribal epistemology takes motivated reasoning and scales it to group identity. The more the tribes fight, the more they become alike.
It’s similar to an industry with excessive competition. The individual companies struggle as profits get outcompeted. In a broader society, there are too many involved in the competition of debate; the solutions die in the heat of it. The solutions are a prerogative of monopolies on which they rise and fall, and tend to be discovered away from the attention.
The more minds involved, the more likely victimization, overoptimizing for problems, and catering to the lowest common denominator. Solutions are rarely visible and clear prospectively. Factor in the cacophony of data and the optionality of its interpretation, and you’re never allowed to solve anything.
Askonas talks about creative problem-solving (paraphrasing Albert Hirschmann’s “hiding hand”) as an individual’s tendency and ability to misjudge risk. This comes with an upside asymmetry while the collective tendency to inhibit this “power of misjudging” kills creative problem-solving.
“In fields of human endeavor which require creativity and invention, no purely rational calculus of costs and benefits based on a realistic assessment of the starting conditions could ever justify taking action. But, in the social aggregate, this would result in a severe underestimation of the transformative power of human ingenuity.”
The understanding of Westphalia as a strategic retreat that followed up by the Enlightenment, reducing humanity to a flattened model of “homo economicus”. The rational economic actor driven primarily by self-interest and material incentives omits that “odd people are commonplace and capable of asserting themselves with explosive force, then the account of politics that pretends they do not exist needs to be reexamined.”
On one hand, as Thiel intends it, this is a warning against threats of fanatic fundamentalism that does not answer the higher truth of economic realities (Thiel alluded to Bin Laden, I’m alluding to ideologies such as degrowth). But the “explosive force” is also an example of a more optimistic and positive inventing capacity of individuals.
This is the true hidden battle. It’s the shackles of collective disillusionment with infinite problems and the individual desire for personal quests that do not reconcile with the dogmas imposed by the collective.
Data proliferating far beyond us being able to reverse-engineer it into knowledge is today’s big challenge. The discourse is hijacked by fanatic fundamentalism, referring to the ultimate truth of science and its high priests. That what calls itself science today does not necessarily practice it despite having the “official” authority to do so.
We are required to reframe what science is. In “Science without Validation in a World Without Meaning” Doughtry summarizes this problem:
“Beneath the surface, however, the ubiquity of science in political debate may be a symptom of its decline, of a loss of confidence and authority. The success of science during the three centuries since Newton’s Principia of 1687 is unrivaled by any intellectual endeavor in human history. But the epistemology behind those scientific achievements is being disregarded on a grand scale. Science as knowledge is increasingly ignored. Data mining looks like science to the extent that it involves mathematical functions and data. What is missing, however, is the connection between mathematics and verifiable prediction—between mind and phenomena—that gives the whole thing meaning. But if meaning is denied a priori, then why care about science?”
What truly constitutes science, as put forth by David Deutsch, is this open-ended, fallible pursuit of ever-better explanations. It is not a credentialed priesthood, nor a bureaucratic accumulation of data points, nor a consensus enforced by peer review or institutional prestige. Science as knowledge means rejecting the idea of authority.
The path forward lies not in collective consensus or in surrendering to the cacophony of competing narratives, but in a deliberate individual and personal strategic retreat analogous to Westphalia: one that cedes the illusion of unified authority over truth to the individual capacity for genuine knowledge creation.
A return to God as a personal rediscovery of transcendent meaning outside the primitivism of “global village”. A rebirth of spiritual individualism, belief in things others don’t, amid secular data overload. It’s easy to care for things that matter.
True heroes fight for things that don’t matter.
Wow, that was a fantastic article! This is one good to store for referencing and re-reading.