The Cyber Show Says Truth Always Requires a Fight, a Struggle
"Truth-tellers always face struggle and run risk"
Andy has a new article about being in forces or workforces where lies and dishonesty prevail. Some portions:
Truth is what must be fought for against forces of ignorance and deceit. For people with professional integrity, or conscientious, agreeable personality, truth is the centred disposition (even if your bum really does look big in that dress). An environment steeped in lies and tactical dishonesty is torturous.Working in such an environment is also extremely inefficient, because so much of our energy is wasted being embattled with negative systemic encroachment. The constant cognitive dissonance is stressful. Having your work towards truth be ignored, undermined or reflexively disputed is demoralising. Is there any TV cop story where justice doesn't have "just 24 hours to triumph against impossible odds", against corruption, treachery and a disbelieving boss? The chief of chiefs, who knows the dirty truth, dares the hero to speak and prove it.
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Truth-tellers always face struggle and run risk. A democratic creed of free-press, investigative journalism, then the Internet, brought us to a society that seems "open". We collectively believe that the arc of history will tend to justice and peace if we give flight to the truth and allow people with minority knowledge to share it.
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Today, a plethora of derogatory labels like whistle-blower, Luddite, decel, activist, or shrill, are hurled against more thoughtful, sincere scientists and thinkers. Amidst all our scientific achievements there is a strong note of hooliganism, anti-intellectualism and a celebration of recklessness. Industrial technology has been hijacked by a cadre of xenophobes, eugenicists, authoritarians, neurotics, and unhinged fantasists.
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Let's be clear, in a positive way, that figures like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange are not Cassandras. They courageously revealed truths about abuses, got their messages out loud and clear, changed the world a little, and paid a heavy price. Crucially, "the world believed them" (their exile and imprisonment are proof of that). Indeed, many commentators say that everybody already knew these awful things; torture and massacres by the US military, widespread infiltration and spy programmes, communication back-doors… This was hardly news.
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Whistle-blowers (like Snowden, Drake, manning, Winner and scores of others) make great sacrifice to provide hard evidence, but what they change is actually subtle. Rarely in such cases is there ever a triumph of justice. The bad guys generally get away with it. The victims get cancer from the water supply or whatever, and some settlement money is thrown down. Indeed this total lack of real justice lies behind the epistemic trauma in the world today.