On the necessity of a fact-based reality

Right now, the world is in a right state. To quote the poets: Wars going on across the seas / street soldiers killing the elderly. The causes of these conflicts are complex and nuanced. There are varying degrees of blame to be apportioned. Wars don't often slot themselves into nice and neat little categories which give partisans absolute moral clarity.

However, one can learn about proximate causes. One can come to grips with reasons and justifications. The literature is out there.

But here's the problem: too few of us want to do that work. Too few of us want to do the hard slog of reading primary sources, of listening to impartial voices, to go down the road where you can gain a sense of the reality of the situation.

Part of this is mere human laziness. The same people who will go into great and intricate discourses on the failures of their favorite sports team will not give anywhere near the same level of thought and dedication to things which are much more affective to their daily lives. They will go to YouTube or TikTok or Facebook, read or watch a few posts, and suddenly declare themselves "experts" on conflicts which have raged for decades, centuries, millennia. If they do even that bare minimum.

There is, however, something more pernicious at play.

As we see with Gaza, a great plurality of people has a fixed view on the causes, triggers, and solution to the Arab-Iraeli conflict. They have a "reality" which is locked in. Nothing will sway them from that view. Not bullet-riddled children. Not raped women. Not kidnapped grandmothers. Those people deserved what they got, because of their previous crimes. Those people deserve what they will get, because they haven't broken free from the thugs who rule them. 

We are in an age where many of us are not inhabiting the same reality. We don't accept the same facts. We don't operate in the same logical sphere. Someone who believes that the world is ruled by a Satanic, pedophilic clique is not going to accept information which contradicts that. Their reality gets reinforced by the bubble in which they live, reified continually, where anyone who contradicts what they perceive to be utter truth is in on the conspiracy at worst, or a blind sheep at best. They are the red-pilled, the scales having fallen from their eyes, awake to the world's grim reality. If you are not in their sphere, you are an enemy.

Humanity sits on a precipice. More than ever we need cold, solid facts. We don't have to agree on the solutions or the next steps; that's what debates are for, to achieve the best possible outcomes based on available evidence. But when a large segment of our population doesn't even agree that there's any evidence to debate, we are in perilous times. 

Social media and our 24/7 news cycle are not the causes of this. But they are the accelerant. They are the arsonist's dream, being able to reach those who are already on the path and then pouring on the lighter fluid. 

The explosion of global antisemitism we've seen since October 7th shocks me but should surprise no one. It was always there, waiting for a spark. Hamas lit that spark with its pogrom, knowing that Israel would respond as would any nation-state. Hamas knew that the initial sympathy for Israel would turn to opprobrium, because Jews are the eternal outsiders, the eternal Other, that peculiar tribe which belongs nowhere and is suspected by everyone. Hamas' paymasters in Iran and Russia knew that a Middle Eastern war between Israel and the Arabs would divide citizens in the West, causing dissent which redounds to their aims. And it works because we as a human community don't live in the same reality. We've crafted and been fed our own bespoke truths, regardless of observable, testable facts. 

I, of course, have no immediate solution to this. Were I to have one, I could probably make a killing as a cult leader. But we must realize that this is the informational battleground on which we stand. Good and bad information operate at the same time, with a lie going around the world before the truth can get its shoes on. We can have no debate worthy of the name when we can't agree on the terms of that debate. Without a baseline we are doomed to stumble blindly in the night. This is how civilization dies.

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