If We Don’t Fix This, We Can’t Fix Anything

“The Tower of Babel” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563

We are living through a crisis of historic proportions. The stakes could not be higher.

Here’s the problem: we can’t agree as a society about what is true and false. I’m not talking about the deeper questions of life or the mysteries of the universe or matters of religious faith. I’m talking about matters of basic fact.

Here’s what’s at risk: well, pretty much everything. Personal freedom, American democracy, peace & prosperity for the country and much of the world, the lives and futures of our children and their children, the welfare of the powerless and vulnerable.

So that’s the context for my podcast interview with Jonathan Rauch, because he has proposed a set of solutions for society to address to this problem of knowing, and reaching agreement about what we know.

The internet and technological changes of the last 20 years have created a power vacuum. Why do I say power vacuum when the internet has given a voice and the ability to have it amplified to pretty much anyone? If everyone has a voice, doesn’t everyone have power? And if so, why would there be a vacuum?

Well, I think the answer to that is this: when everyone is talking, no one is listening, and that is a form of chaos.

And it’s obvious that we are living through an age of information chaos. Most people don’t know what to believe, or how to figure out what’s true and false.

That is the vacuum: the lack of clarity about what is real, and what is not.

The vacuum will be filled. The question is by whom and by what.

Much of the information chaos is not an accident, but is rather the result of information warfare. In his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch identifies the two main drivers of information warfare:

1. viral disinformation
2. cancel culture.

Viral disinformation predominates on the right, and cancel culture on the left, but Rauch says both of them do the same thing:

“[They] share the goal of dominating the information space by demoralizing their human targets: confusing them, isolating them, drowning them out, deplatforming them, or…