Today I came across a post (A Unified Theory of Recent Political Strife) which predicted “a period of social strife”, which given what we have seen from 2020. with covid, the stealing of the US election by BuyDem, the breaking of the Minsk treaty and stoking up of war in Ukraine, the inflaming of the conflict leading to possible nuclear war in both Ukraine and now with the Wicked Witch in Taiwan, BLM, the culture wars, etc., etc., it does seem I got what would happen right, but, the way it was caused was incomplete.
The theory I proposed, what that new technology like the internet gave a “voice” to new groups that hitherto had not had a voice, because they were excluded or too poor to use previous communication media. The result is that these groups, start to gain political power and influence, and that creates an imbalance in power, which the present elites don’t like.
In the present day, the groups who particularly resented the new voice given to people by the internet, were the journalists and academics who used to have a cosy cartel where they controlled almost all public discussion. Because only the experts could speak, and only the journalists had control over the media to decide who was heard. Along comes the internet, suddenly brexiteers, Trumpeteers and many others could and were heard, with profound consequences.
However, what we then saw in covid, was a new part of the problem, which is what I call “delusional feedback”. Put simply, public discourse has two types of behaviour: one of which is to repeat, regurgitate or reformulate what we hear in a supportive way which amplifies the message meaning “positive feedback”, the other behaviour is to be sceptical questioning and dismissive which is a form of negative feedback.
In a stable well ordered society, public debate has a combination of the two. So that good ideas get amplified, and bad ideas tend to meet the sceptics who repress them.
What however we started seeing as Trump, Brexit, and the climate sceptics became successful, is that Google-You-Censor, Fascist Book, and Tricker, started actively censoring sceptical views.
That created a system, where the sceptics were repressed, and as any feedback engineer knows, if you have a system where there is only positive feedback, the system is unstable. As a result, just a small perturbation can cause the signal to grow and grow and grow.
This appears to be the critical part in the delusions that develop as part of Totalitarian government … which seem to thrive after these information revolutions (the early part of the 20th century being the obvious example, with Hitler, Stalin’s five year plan, likewise the Chinese, likewise Pol Pot. All of these developed delusional behaviour that changed the socially accepted behaviour to allow totally appalling atrocities to become accepted as normal.
Here, I suggest that the key change, is that there is a general repression of scepticism.
