My theory is this:
Fascism was already an attempt to what I would describe as “return the world to its previous state”. That is to recreate a world in which a group of people make decisions, and rest will follow suit, even if this means that the people a starving while this small group of people keep living their extreme extravagances. The human brain has some habits. Jung calls this the “collective subconscious”. So some people will always have some sort of nostalgia for the past even if they consciously know that the past would be an awful place for them to live in.
Today these people are left with very few tools. Literacy is reaching 99% in the developed world and 80% in countries like India. Even if it has many defaults we have free and independent media channels that are informing us on world events 24/7. If any country decides to block some newspaper or TV channel, we still have the Internet. So even kids in china know how to reach free media channels if they want to. So while the power of oppressive regimes seems to be increasing thanks to technologies like mass surveillance or the permanent monitoring of internet activities, it is quite the opposite that is happening because of many other developments.
So there is only one tool left in their toolbox: Dis-information. That is:
- Whatever you learn. I will make you unlearn. Whatever you hear, I’ll make sure you don’t believe it. Whatever reality you observe, I will create an alternate version to it. Wherever there is a debate, I’ll make sure that debate turns into a mere play of words. No matter how educated you are, I will surround you with so much “true” information that you will end up believing what I say.
/ And this isn’t something to laugh on. There is a whole set of technologies that are being used to achieve this aim.
- Does it really work?
- I am not sure. I mean I have talked to some supporters of far-right parties etc. But what I am not really so sure of is if these people are truly believing the things that they are saying or if they are in some sort of self-deceiving state of mind. I’d go for the second option in about 80% of the cases because one thing you can observe in such people is that they will always be looking for some sort of approval by other people. For instance you will be hearing them reaching to their friends and say things like “Hey, did you hear what these Zionist westerners have done?”. And the remaining 20% are mostly fanatics who have some sort of hatred buried in them that is the subject of Freudian psychology rather than political science.
Yet one thing is for sure: The younger the generations, the less open they will be even to this kind of distortions. As methods of distortion are growing. The speed in which we are reaching information is also growing. So again, the effectiveness of this method is also limited by time. But I think it’s still very dangerous so I think it is also important to know how to block contents (by yourself of course) when this becomes necessary. By this I mean in any type of media. I think there has to be skill that I would define as “media literacy”. I think it should be taught in schools.
Fascism was already an attempt to what I would describe as “return the world to its previous state”. That is to recreate a world in which a group of people make decisions, and rest will follow suit, even if this means that the people a starving while this small group of people keep living their extreme extravagances. The human brain has some habits. Jung calls this the “collective subconscious”. So some people will always have some sort of nostalgia for the past even if they consciously know that the past would be an awful place for them to live in.
Today these people are left with very few tools. Literacy is reaching 99% in the developed world and 80% in countries like India. Even if it has many defaults we have free and independent media channels that are informing us on world events 24/7. If any country decides to block some newspaper or TV channel, we still have the Internet. So even kids in china know how to reach free media channels if they want to. So while the power of oppressive regimes seems to be increasing thanks to technologies like mass surveillance or the permanent monitoring of internet activities, it is quite the opposite that is happening because of many other developments.
So there is only one tool left in their toolbox: Dis-information. That is:
- Whatever you learn. I will make you unlearn. Whatever you hear, I’ll make sure you don’t believe it. Whatever reality you observe, I will create an alternate version to it. Wherever there is a debate, I’ll make sure that debate turns into a mere play of words. No matter how educated you are, I will surround you with so much “true” information that you will end up believing what I say.
/ And this isn’t something to laugh on. There is a whole set of technologies that are being used to achieve this aim.
- Does it really work?
- I am not sure. I mean I have talked to some supporters of far-right parties etc. But what I am not really so sure of is if these people are truly believing the things that they are saying or if they are in some sort of self-deceiving state of mind. I’d go for the second option in about 80% of the cases because one thing you can observe in such people is that they will always be looking for some sort of approval by other people. For instance you will be hearing them reaching to their friends and say things like “Hey, did you hear what these Zionist westerners have done?”. And the remaining 20% are mostly fanatics who have some sort of hatred buried in them that is the subject of Freudian psychology rather than political science.
Yet one thing is for sure: The younger the generations, the less open they will be even to this kind of distortions. As methods of distortion are growing. The speed in which we are reaching information is also growing. So again, the effectiveness of this method is also limited by time. But I think it’s still very dangerous so I think it is also important to know how to block contents (by yourself of course) when this becomes necessary. By this I mean in any type of media. I think there has to be skill that I would define as “media literacy”. I think it should be taught in schools.
