[Ivan_R]

The first thing we need to look at is the causes of this acceptance of truthiness instead of actual facts.

Those actual facts are themselves problematic, in my view. They get interpreted and textualized too quick, before we even could perceive them as such. We are getting tired of long reads, getting used to fast carbs. Any raw food should be preprocessed. The fact should walk like a duck and quacks like a duck to be devoured as a fact.

The problem of new tribalism is worth to be considered anyway…

[late]

This saying is a good illustration for the lack of critical thinking we discuss here.

Speaking of critical, is Putin still throwing people that annoy him in the gulag? Or out a 4th story window? Or...

[Ivan_R]

Speaking of critical, is Putin still throwing people that annoy him in the gulag? Or out a 4th story window? Or...

Oh, what a crying shame for him! Was that really you who suspected me of trolling just recently?

Anyway, let’s try to get back to some more fruitful way of talking. So am I right, that you would rather defend and retain the status quo? We cannot easily change our Brave New Worlds, however imperfect they are. Since we cannot guarantee that if we begin changing something in our post-truth narratives, some malicious forces would not take advantage of that possible change. So we should always be on guard. Is that right?

BTW, you talked of science as of an activity related to some purest kind of critical thinking. But do you happen to know about social constructivism in science (e.g. Knorr Cetina et al.)? They say that even scientific facts may become social constructs. So there seems to be no conflict between critical thinking and constructivism of any sort. What do you think?

[late]

So am I right, that you would rather defend and retain the status quo?


BTW, you talked of science as of an activity related to some purest kind of critical thinking. But do you happen to know about social constructivism in science (e.g. Knorr Cetina et al.)? They say that even scientific facts may become social constructs. So there seems to be no conflict between critical thinking and constructivism of any sort. What do you think?

I hate the status quo. If you are familiar, I'm more of a Soft Power guy.

Kind of, that fits in with current thinking, but I am not familiar with that particular philosophy. The guy I like is Ronald N Giere.

But it sounds to me like you are using it to dodge the reality that disagreeing with Putin can have very unpleasant consequences.

But you really quite good at this, which I appreciate, you see so many dreary punters.

[anna]

What I would like to convey is that some societies (large groups) may display qualitatively new type of behavior, something we have not seen before. The murmuration seems to us something quite unusual, since it may rather look like some one living thing instead of myriads of birds we cannot even discern individually.

Hmm. Well, murmurations do indeed look like one living entity, I'd agree with that, it's what makes them so fascinating to watch, but they aren't something we haven't seen before.

Have you ever heard of mob mentality? Where a mob of people seems to surge all of a sudden into some kind of what seems like organized movement? The individuals can go through a process of deindividuation and allow their natural judgment to be subsumed by their emotion and willingness to let their will be transiently guided by the crowd - and so the crowd seems to act with one mind. But if you break down the crowd, you will find there will be agitators and organizers who know how to tap into that mob mentality, so can you really compare that situation to murmurations? I don't think so.

If you're looking for a society-wide "qualitatively type of new behavior," look at something like cellphone behavior. Now that truly is something we never, as humans, saw before the 21st. century. If you've ever walked across a plaza and seen everyone bent over something in their hands, or seen an event which causes multiple individuals to hold up their phone and start taking video... new behavior.

So I tend to regard those networked societies as absolutely new type of entities, which might behave much smarter and in a much more complex way, than any individual within them. That is why I said they might be dealt with somewhat differently.

Networked societies are a new type of identity in that you can have instantaneous conversations with many other minds that don't require you to be in the same place physically, only digitally. So yes, this is a new and a historically different kind of communication not comparable to sending messengers or smoke signals or writing letters or making phone calls. So:

At the moment I see two possible ‘trends’ in this topic:
1. The post-truth era is not something we can just get rid of, so it’s not easy to even conceive some post-post-truth condition. It is part of our evolution. So instead of opposing it in any way, we should just choose some ‘right’ entity and/or ‘culture’ to be a part of. E.g. we should agree this entity/culture is nothing but a set of memes (Dennett?) or ‘narratives’. We should therefore reproduce right narratives, fight some wrong ones et cetera et cetera.
2. The post-truth condition is not part of some natural evolution and should be overcome. E.g. Bar-Yam’s arguments in favor of ‘networked communities’ had at least one major flaw. When the complexity of such new ‘entity’ becomes much higher than the complexity of any individual within it, that might actually be a bidirectional process. That is, the ‘entity’ might become more complex and effective, while the individual at the same time may become more and more simplified and dependent on the ‘entity’. So we may never achieve any kind of ‘China brain’ condition, but will rather end up as some form of Frankenstein's creature. Which will not be something new sub specie aeternitatis...

People already are continually choosing what culture they want to be part of, both online and in real life So I'm seeing your 1. as more an illustration of what already exists.

I hadn't heard of the China Brain but when I looked at your link I'm definitely of the mind (sorry for the pun) that there's no possible way to overcome the lack of human consciousness in such a concoction and I reject the idea entirely.

The networking you speak of is the connection of many minds, not the interconnectedness of one mind. Thus it will always come back to the individual, and individual agency.

[Ivan_R]

Have you ever heard of mob mentality? Where a mob of people seems to surge all of a sudden into some kind of what seems like organized movement?

You are right, there is nothing new in comparing groups/societies/mobs to some organisms (Hobbes, Spencer, etc.) or even studying them as a whole (beginning with Le Bon…)…

Well, murmurations do indeed look like one living entity, I'd agree with that, it's what makes them so fascinating to watch, but they aren't something we haven't seen before.

You are also right, that the flock-metaphor is still a metaphor. So you might say, yes, they may look like one living entity, but that is just an illusion: they are still only a flock of birds even if you do not see them. And thus any society is first and foremost a group of individuals, whatever you compare them to.

Here is my answer. Ok, let it be just a metaphor, but I could suggest at least one case, which would be not a metaphor, but a pure scientific fact. Siphonophorae, the most astonishing kind of living entities. It may walk like a duck and quacks like a duck have tentacles, kind of a mouth, a digestive system, etc. However, it is still just a large colony of individual organisms! So here we are much closer to some ‘heap paradox’. How many such ‘individuals’ would be enough for us to regard this colony as ‘one living entity’?
This I believe is the transition from quantity/complexity to quality, which Bar-Yam hints at when talking of ‘networked entities’ as something completely new.

there's no possible way to overcome the lack of human consciousness in such a concoction and I reject the idea entirely

It’s not that easy to argue with Dennett (I actually tried)). If you accept that consciousness might arise in some material substrate, e.g. our neural networks, then you will have to accept, that it might as well arise in any material substrate, e.g. not only ‘natural’ neural networks, but whatever networks there might be.

Regardless of whether you accept all of this or not, you might probably agree, that even now there are many examples when there is no need in ‘getting down’ to the level of individuals to solve some problem at the group level. The so called ‘target audience’ in both mass media and marketing is just an ‘entity’ with certain properties, which either already has some certain behavior, or should be conditioned to behave in a certain way. The social/semantic networks just make it much easier and affordable.

So I'm seeing your 1. as more an illustration of what already exists

Yes. The question is whether we should regard it as a natural evolution or rather something we should be beware of. I find it at least ridiculous, if we have to regard all those ‘systems of narratives’ as some ‘fortifications’ we should bravely defend. When we do not even know what kind of thing we defend exactly. What is hidden behind those walls, etc…. Should we still do that to prevent some real clashes or even wars? Or nothing is going happen, if we decide to just stop...

with Putin

OMDG, you seem to leave me with no other option except wishing you good health…

[Wellsy]

@anna and @Ivan_R
This is a big read but I hope a worthwhile one with a quick run of resources with good ideas to help conceptualize the issue that I see that you're tangoing with. The issue of the dichotomy of the individual in relation to a larger whole. I would like to offer a methodological approach that doesn't exactly present a final answer but I think is a fruitful path in not making a one sided absolute of the individual entity but doesn't consider the individual abstracted from the whole or at least real-world relations. The focus is on humans but I think still presents useful ways of thinking. Ultimately such a system of ideas does not give answers as mentioned further below, such things still must be investigated empirically, but the conception is a useful one to avoid certain pitfalls criticized in some types of thinking which repeat the same errors of old.
The approach in the Marxist or Cultural Historical Activity Theory tradition is that individuals act within larger social arrangements as mediated by cultural/material artifacts.
One can see how the individual level relates to the larger whole while not being identical to it, the point is to see their relation while not subsuming one under the other. The social ontology here is that individuals are part of projects or activities which are a series of actions by individuals mediated by objects that have meaning within the project.
The unit of analysis as suggested by Andy Blunden is that of Project, projects constitute the simplest unit of social life which make up individuals but also gives meaning to their actions within a context which isn't boundless/endless. IN this way we can note how the individual's motive for their particular action relates to the intention of the larger project. My motive to put a letter in the mailbox is distinct from the intention to submit a ballot vote through the mail for example. My motive to break a window is distinct from my intention to destroy it which can then be deepened by a larger context of why I did it.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Article_on_Teleology.pdf

To understand how a social practice, made up of millions of individual actions, can be
‘self-conscious’ entails the distinction Hegel makes between the general and the
universal. In general, not all the individual actions in a social practice are motivated by
the exact same purpose or intention, not every action implies exactly the same object.
For example, the aim of a capitalist firm is to expand its capital, but to do so it pursues
various subsidiary aims (services) and provides wages to its employees. Thus there will
be a variety of concepts of what, say, James Hardy Ltd., is aiming at, but an analysis
will show that it is neither the provision of building material nor the welfare of its
employees, but the accumulation of capital which is its aim, its intention. (Hegel
distinguishes between ‘purposes’ such as asbestos production or wage-earning) and
‘intentions’ which provides the motivation for the diverse purposes (Hegel 1821, §§
114-128).
So, a ‘collective subject’ is not a group of people but a social practice. An entire
community is seen then as an aggregate of social practices. A social practices is an
aggregate of purposive actions, united by their sharing of a common intention or
motivation. From this standpoint, it is self-evident that social practices are autonomous,
self-conscious and teleological.

The individual is nonsensical when abstracted from the larger social context/projects, but it is inadequate to follow a structuralist view in which institutions are made static and represents a conservative fucntionalist view.
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=phi

It is true that actions are carried out by individuals, but such actions are possible and only have meaning in so far as they participate in sociocultural practices. There are two important questions here, Westphal suggests: (1) are individuals the only bearers of psychological states, and (2) can psychological states be understood in individual terms? Individualists answer both questions in the armative, and most holists answer both questions in the negative. Hegel, however, answers the rst question armatively and the second negatively. In other words, it is only individuals who act, have 108 intentions, construct facts, and so forth. Nevertheless, such acts, intentions, and facts cannot be understood apart from sociocultural practices—their meaning can only be understood as interpreted in a sociocultural context.

We can also see how nonsensical things become if we abstract people acting without the mediation of cultural artefacts also.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Brandom.pdf

This is essentially the same position Brandom takes when he seeks to render Hegel as a philosopher of Recognition, taking the unmediated interactions between two individuals as the ultimate reality and unit of analysis. This makes history look like a game of billiards with nothing but one-on-one interactions on a perpetually level playing field

The metaphor of judge-made law cited above, which is a pragmatic rendering of Hegel’s conception of sprit, by disposing of the need for a pre-existing principle governing the development of new propositions, seems to justify the idea that the whole process of cultural and historical development can be rendered as interactions between individuals. But this does not stand up. The process depends essentially on the availability of the precedents, the body of enacted law and all the legal principles which exist in the form of documents. These documents are crucial mediating artefacts which regulate the development of the common law. The idea that the judge is able to make explicit what was merely implicit in the previous decisions is an attractive and eminently Hegelian idea. But it presupposes that these documented decisions act as mediating elements in the development of law, not to mention the entire material culture which supports the way of life in which the decisions are made by judges and enforced by a state.

A proposition appears to be something created and enacted in the moment when two people interact, but neither the language used in the interaction nor the concepts which are embedded in the language are created de novo in that interaction. The words and concepts relied upon in any interaction “are always already there in the always alreadyup-and-running communal linguistic practices into which I enter as a young one” (Brandom 2009: 73). Through the provision of these artefacts, every linguistic interaction is mediated by the concepts of the wider community.

If Hegel’s idea of Recognition is taken out of the context of his whole method it is easily misunderstood, and taken to be an unmediated binary relation between two individuals, but this is never the case; interactions between subjects are always mediated. As Hegel states at the very beginning of the Logic: “There is nothing, nothing in Heaven, or in Nature or in Mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation” (Hegel 1816/1969: §92). Analytical philosophy, and all varieties of interactionism and recognition theories, systematically ignore this maxim of Hegel’s, which characterises his entire corpus. Mutual understanding even between strangers, apparently unmediated by common language or custom, is possible provided that each person can produce something which the other person needs. As participants in a shared culture there are concepts which are “always already-up-and-running.” This mediating element is something not created by the interaction (although every interaction maintains and modifies the culture). The mediating structure exists independently of any single interaction and is a ‘larger’ unit, being a property or aspect of the entire community of which the partners to interaction are a part. Concepts belong to this larger unit, and are evoked in the interactions and thinking of individuals as mediating elements. This stands in contradiction to Brandom’s efforts to found his inferentialism and his reading of Hegel exclusively in actions. It is as if actions and interactions (such as uttering a proposition, recognising another individual, committing oneself to a concept, etc.) can exist prior to and independently of the cultural constellations and social formations which mediate individuals’ actions and from which actions draw their meaning.

In this approach there is no making absolute the whole nor the parts but emphasizing their relation.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch02-s07.html

An overabundance of particulars may obscure the whole. This is a characteristic feature of empiricism. Any singular object can be correctly understood only when it is analysed, not separately, but in its relation to the whole. Each organ is determined in its mode of operation not only by its internal structure but by the nature of the organism to which it belongs. The importance of the heart can be discovered only by considering it as part of the organism as a whole. The methodological fault characteristic of mechanistic materialism is that it understands the whole as nothing more than the sum of its parts.

In medicine, exaggeration of the independence of a part in relation to the whole is expressed in the principle of localisationism, which stipulates that every organ is something isolated in itself. This gives rise to the methodological principle of looking for the seat of the illness. This narrow, localised approach is just as harmful as the approach to the organism that ignores the question of which particular organ is sick. In any organism there are no absolutely localised pathological processes or any processes that affect only the whole. The disease of one separate organ is in some degree a manifestation of disease in the whole body and vice versa.

In rejecting the so-called summative approach, which mechanistically reduces the whole to the sum of its parts, we should not make a fetish of wholeness and regard it as something with mystical power. The whole does owe its origin to the synthesis of the parts that compose it. At the same time it is the whole that provides the basis for modification of existing parts and the formation and development of new ones, which, having changed the whole, help to develop it. So, in reality, we have a complex interaction between the whole and its parts.

There are causal models that are sensitive to this in recognizing how the whole and the parts that make up much of the whole are in a constant interaction such that there can be a reciprocal feedback from the structure onto the parts and vice versa.

So what is needed is a synthesis of different schools of thought to overcome their one sidedness.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/the-individual.htm

Even though the Universal, culture, is lifeless until used by an individual, it is the universal which mediates all human activity. Culturalism overestimates the independence of the Universal in governing social life, because for all sorts of reasons the practical activities which gave life to an element of culture may cease and what was a powerful ideal become nothing but a dead lump of matter or an ‘empty word’. Constructivism overestimates the element of free will in the use of culture because it forgets that the universal is not only ideal but also material. Culture imposes itself on those who would disregard it by the hard force of dead matter.

To show that this or that current of theory takes a one-sided standpoint is not to discount its achievements. Rather, this observation facilitates the appropriation of the insights of the various schools of social theory. The problem of the individual cannot be resolved by theory alone, but requires concrete investigation, but I argue that the concept of subjectivity is the key notion to resolving this problem.

This even relates to the issue of consciousness as being a social product based in the individuals activity within a division of labour such that their consciousness isn't to be understood by abstracting the differences or similarities of all people.
And nor is the development of consciousness intelligible outside of material and cultural development.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/les-treilles-talk.htm#:~:text=A%20subject%20has%20to%20be,conscious%20human%20being%20at%20that.&text=It%20is%20by%20defining%20the,a%20given%20fact%20or%20entity.

2. In particular, the idea that consciousness is an emergent property that arises out of the increasing complexity of a nervous system may, I believe, lead to mistaken conceptions.

It has been clearly established that the human body, and in particular the human brain, has properties which allow for the development of language, self-consciousness and moral responsibility, properties which cannot be ascribed to any other species. This is despite the fact that the human brain appears to differ only quantitatively from the brains of other primates. As Merlin Donald (Donald 1991) has pointed out, more than 4 million years of evolution separate us from our nearest extant primate relatives, during much of which hominids adapted to an ecological niche of which their own culture was the predominant feature. This is a huge discontinuity.

Consciousness arises, I would contend, in and through the construction of a material culture, without which there can be no consciousness. Thus, the idea of consciousness arising in the single organism, as an emergent property of the complexity of its nervous system, leaps over the critical mediating process, a unique achievement of human phylogenetic evolution, of the modification of the entire body in and for the production of a material culture, without which the individual human organism cannot survive. This position, argued for so strongly by Merlin Donald (Donald 1991), is implicit in the work of the cultural psychologists (Cole 1990). Rather than emergence of the kind which has a rational basis in chaos and complexity theory, we have an already-completed process of phylogenetic development which brought about a qualitative change in the organism and its behaviour.

3. The brain does not ‘cause’ consciousness. A working brain is the essential pre-condition for consciousness, but how do we move from possibility to realised possibility?

If we consider a system from the point of view of how a given possibility can be realised, we hypothetically insert ourselves into the system in question, asking what intervention is needed to realise the relevant possibility. ‘Cause’ can be understood in a practical way only by this kind of thought-experiment. To say that something is a cause is to point to how a given possibility could be realised by a hypothetical intervention in a system. To say that consciousness is caused by the brain is to say that an intervention in the nervous system can bring consciousness into being. As John Searle has pointed out, such interventions can be shown only to change consciousness, but not to bring it into being.

From the phylogenetic point of view, Merlin Donald and others before him have shown convincingly that it was development of culture and behaviour, which introduced consciousness into a pre-human hominid species, not the other way around.

The ontogenetic evidence is that under all but the most adverse conditions, human infants with healthy brains will develop language and consciousness. However, no answer has yet been given as to how consciousness could be introduced into living tissue which was not already capable of consciousness. Thus, the ‘cause’ of consciousness has no coherent meaning in the ontogenetic context. Further, if consciousness is a feature of the brain, an organ like any other, “a system-level, biological feature in much the same way that digestion, or growth” (Searle 2004), then the origin of free will remains a mystery.

[anna]

@Wellsy and @Ivan_R

Thanks for both your posts, I need to consider them for a day or two before replying.

[Ivan_R]

@Wellsy, thank you, this is really important.

The topic as I see it might be summed up in three questions:

1. What is the post-truth condition?
2. How is it related to the changes/processes in our society/culture?
3. What should we do with that?

My own answers to (1) and (2) may seem to be a bit weird. Since I think most of phenomena we observe as the post-truth condition are almost completely new. Since they might be related to some completely new changes/processes in our society/culture. And by ‘completely new’ I mean almost literally new in all respects. That is, in some nearest future we might find ourselves in almost literally new living entity, a colonial organism, whatever we might call it.
This view is mostly based on (but not limited to) the works by Yaneer Bar-Yam. I find them interesting, since he is not a philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, etc. He is a mathematician. So his idea is quite simple. The more complex the environment is, the more complex the living entity should become to survive in this environment. So we might conceive some kind of a threshold, when the complexity of a large group of individuals might become higher than the complexity of any individual within the group. Thus, it might become something completely new. So he tries to describe some features of such transition. E.g., lateral connections within such entities might appear to be much more important than the hierarchical ones, etc.

While @anna, as I understand her, tries to show my view is much exaggerated (I am ready to acknowledge that in some respect)): There is little new in what we observe. And even if our society/culture has changed, that does not imply any qualitative change. Neither at the group, nor individual levels.

Now you seem to hint that there are some theories and methodologies, which might be much more appropriate to explain what we have. Of course, I do agree there a lot of social theories: some of them lay more stress on the individual, while others pay much more attention to all aspects of collective behavior. I also agree that Marxist theories might be good at explaining many aspects of modern societies. I believe many branches of knowledge in China and Russia are still influenced by Marxism, and this at least does not always harm them.
However, all of such theories will remain appropriate until we stay in the traditional paradigm of what we call societies and/or large groups. If that changes, we will have to look for something different. So turning back to Bar-Yam, he seems to believe he has almost discovered some new type of (utopian)… well… social being, which might appear to be kind of a Hegelian ‘Aufhebung’ for the opposition between any ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’. So here is what he says:

In the context of considering human civilization as an organism in relation to individuals, we should revisit the traditional conflict between individual and collective good and rights. This philosophical and practical conflict manifested itself in the conflict between democracy and communism. It was assumed that communism represented an ideology of the collective while democracy represented an ideology of the individual. If we accept the transition to a complex organism, we may consider this conflict to be resolved, not in favor of one or the other, but rather in favor of a third category—an emergent collective formed out of diverse individuals. The traditional collective model was a model that relied upon uniformity of the individuals rather than diversity. Similarly, the ideology of the individual did not view the individual in relation to the collective, but rather the individual serving himself or herself. It should be acknowledged that both philosophies were deeper than their caricatures would suggest. The philosophy of democracy included the idea that the individualistic actions would also serve the benefit of the collective, and the philosophy of communism included the idea that the collective would benefit the individual. Nevertheless, the concept of civilization as an emergent complex organism formed out of human beings is qualitatively different from either form of government.

(Dynamics of Complex Systems, p. 822)

I should confess I strongly disagree with him in almost all aspects, but still I think it may be of some interest. And I regard this as a very preliminary draft for some new (possible) social theory upon which the post-truth humanity might depend.

[Wellsy]

tl;dr the modern condition is in need of an ethics of collaboration that prompts people to act together but also to not force people in an oppressive manner, thus mobilizing collectives while being able to respect individuality. SO the quote from that author isn't entirely off the mark as far as I can tell, the thing is to provide a concrete analysis showing what he speculates.

@Ivan_R
I wonder if you distinguish what you're calling post-truth condition from postmodernism.
Where postmodernism seems to be an extreme form of skepticism such that what it reflects is the break down of the social fabric and leaving only market relations. The point is to create human relations in resistance to the increasing invasion of markets into social life. To communists, capitalism and the invasion of market conditions across the social fabric is a precondition to the possibility of the actual human life. FOr example women's liberation as a movement only occurs after industrialization and the value of women's labor and their struggle for better pay and thus correspondingly a better status in society. It's not that the commercialization of women's labor is a great thing in of itself, it has many destructive effects, but we must push through out.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/social.pdf

Sidewalk culture. Jacobs says that the essence of the experience of having strangers looking out for you as a kid on the sidewalk is that they have not been hired to do so. So, if the neighbours are paid for the job they formerly did for free, the essence of the practice has been lost. If caring for sidewalks is privatised, transformed into “real” capital, then the so-called “social capital” is not “realised,” it’s destroyed! The insurance/litigation/regulation dynamic has exactly the same effect. It is no longer acceptable for a teenager to mind their smaller cousins, and they are replaced by paid childcarers. Good news for the valuation of women’s labour, but bad news unfortunately for social solidarity.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/flourishing.pdf

When economists build their science on the utilitarian assumption of an independent, individual economic agent who makes rational decisions to maximise their own utility, they take it that the norms of utilitarianism are universally adhered to by the economic actors. In the event that the subjects of a community do not act as individuals maximising their own utility, then the science fails. Corrections such as including delayed or incomplete information do not change the underlying ethical problem. More importantly, governments and firms which make policy on the basis of economic science, and therefore utilitarian ethics, are acting so as to foster this ethos in the community, with all the consequences in terms of inequality and social disintegration.
...
We also take ‘projects’ rather than ‘social groups’ as units of analysis. That is, rather than seeing a community as a mosaic of groups of various kinds – ethnic groups, age groups, occupational groups, voters, consumers, etc. – we see the social fabric as woven of projects.

The modern condition is one of plurality in which there really is such a diversity of people that they can't be subsumed under one project as they might've in the past such as with a workers vanguard party or what ever.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/SP-talk.htm

But secondly, while proletarian class consciousness is very fragmented and weak, capitalism has become absolutely ubiquitous, it covers the entire globe and penetrates even the most private and the most communal of relations. As a result, the potential for an anti-capitalist formation, based on the social conditions of all of us suffering under capitalism, is really there. But when I say ‘formation’ I mean that it cannot be a ‘movement’ like the social movements of the past. I'm sorry, but I think the social conditions for such movements, which gave the communists the opportunity to contest for leadership of the people, have gone.

This is not a bad thing. It just means that the social conditions for socialist revolution and for socialism itself are coming about in a somewhat different way than we envisaged. The Manifesto envisaged:

“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” [Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2]

The communist ideal has always been connected with the modern wage labourer insofar as he or she thinks in and for his or her class. The task of Marxists today is to figure out how to translate that vision into forms of social consciousness which make sense in today’s world, in a form which embraces the irreducible diversity of modern society. The writings of Karl Marx and the experience of millions who have fought the good fight over the past 150 years remain a priceless resource, ... so long as we are prepared to find new solutions to new problems.

There can't be such hegemons to displace others but instead needs to be a change where we have an ethics that really does respect people as equals in actuality but has the basis for people to collaborate upon the 'good life'.
There must be a basis on which people collaborate that transcends any of one of them. In this way one doesn't force others but there is a voluntary commitment to something which is seen as a good for all.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/amphictony.htm

The remarkable success of the amphictonies must cause us to reflect on their significance for our own times. The establishment of an amphictony recognises that the relevant subjects do not intend to make an alliance or union, but are prepared to deal with each other as moral equals and make common sacrifices in order to protect and maintain something of common value to them all, and are prepared to continue doing that even when at war with one another. Participation in an amphictony in no way sacrificed the sovereignty of the participating states, since maintenance and protection of the sacred site was the only responsibility of the amphictony, even though that duty could have profound repercussions for any state.

The inclusion in the scope of an amphictony of the inviolability of water sources gives us a clue as to what a modern amphictony would mean. It is the institutionalisation of the recognition by subjects, that there is something which transcends them and whatever may separate them. The nearest thing to a modern amphictony would be a league of independent sovereign subjects which accepted the responsibility to protect the environment or a particular feature of the environment relevant to them.

Amphictony provides for bonds with other subjects with whom we would not form an alliance or even make a peace, but which is in many senses stronger and more long-lasting than an alliance. An amphictony can be exceptionally long-lasting because the object to be protected defines its continuity, rather than the parties.

An amphictony differs from a hegemony because the controlling entity (on one hand the hegemon, on the other the sacred site) is outside, and it is not a subject. Amphicton, the mythical founder of the Great Amphictonic League was born of the soil of the sacred site. The maintenance of shared festivals (like May Day) and institutions (the unions) are possible examples, but above all of course, protection of the environment, create opportunities for the establishment of amphictonies.

At a deeper level, what the amphictony represents is the collaboration of mutually sovereign and independent subjects in a common project, itself a sovereign and independent project outside or above the life of each participating subject. The shared religious rituals and beliefs of the Greek people provided this opportunity, just as do shared religious beliefs and institutions today, though it is stewardship of the environment which is more paradigmatically modern.

Linguistically, amphictony means the existence of signifiers in different languages which all indicate what is known to be the same signified, that differing ideologies share at least one common conception, maintenance of which makes common cause between them.

The embryo of such a thing is already existing in 'alliance politics' where the political landscape of modern 'movement's are characterized by many disparate people coming together not around a shared ideal (a non-patriarchial or racist society) but do work together. People remain as independent subjects rather than one whole collective.
I follow a social theorist, Andy Blunden who suggests that Alliance politics offers the prospect of an Ethical politics, such that everyone is respected as an equal but there is the imposed, ought in how one should live and act.
So instead of trying to achieve state power, it is more grass roots or ground up in which one rejects relativism and does assert there is a right way to do things and contests other claims on how to act. It isn't simply live and let live, I recycle but you don't have to, but instead argues that you ought to. And it differs from fundamentalism in that it aims to develop new ways of acting based on emerging social relations rather than adhering to principles from conditions already gone.

What comes from this is theorizing about how do independent projects collaborate? The form of collaboration come through exchange (mutual instrumental use), colonization or philanthropy in which one project saves another on their terms, and solidarity in which one helps another on their terms. And the modes of collective decision making within groups tend to fall along counsel, majority vote or consensus. COunsel being like people advising the leader, king, majority vote emerging from the capitalist class organizing itself against the fuedal state and has become normative to liberal democracies and workers organizations. Then the most recent is consensus which emerged from quakers and influenced movements in the US.
The issue I see is how to situate majority vote with consensus decision making such that it can appropriate the values which underpin each.
Majority vote values equality (everyone's vote counts) and the principle motivating it is solidarity, people working to support one another even if they don't entirely agree with the end as they might have been outvoted. The saying goes dissent in discussion but unity in action. Such an ethics is also the basis for such derision for those who do not act in unity with the group to the detriment of all i.e. scab, traitor, turncoat. Then there is tolerance in order to secure loyalty of the minority in their dissenting views.
Consensus however focuses on inclusion and respect for others. ALl views are heard but against solidarity, the individual is free to leave and not participate. But instead of tolerance there is respect for others as discussion continues until there is consensus/agreement, dissent is absorbed into the goal. Any attempt for a hegemonic colonization of others would be strongly opposed as oppressive.
There are limitations to each but they reflect successful movements such as the workers and modern social movements.

Examples of how this plays out are quite interesting, for example.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/arena_ethical_politics.htm

What actually takes place with the radical alliances of today?

Generally speaking consensus decision making predominates and protocols are strictly enforced. Discussions are for the purpose of achieving the basic practical goals of the protest, who will be where when, or for providing relevant information; egotism and pedantry are not tolerated. The events are generally triumphs of organisation. The whole is always considerably greater than the parts ... at least until there is a change of plans.

For example, at a recent blockade of a refugee detention centre, a number of detainees took the opportunity to make their escape and took cover amongst the ranks of the protestors. This generated a huge crisis, as no-one had anticipated this eventuality, far less had the alliance made a decision about how to respond. The protestors met right through the night and when dawn came they were no closer to arriving at a consensus about whether to hand the detainees back to the authorities or facilitate their escape. In the meantime a small group of old hands had resolved the problem informally and the escapees had slipped away.

Because there is no shared ideal, issues which arise from an unexpected, or at least, unplanned turn of events, can never be resolved by consensus. At the same time, they cannot by their nature be resolved by majority decision either; firstly because most of the protestors see the imposition of majority decisions as unethical, but secondly because the transitory nature of the event does not justify sacrificing one’s principles to a majority decision with which you may be in fundamental disagreement.

There is no discussion of the ideals which motivate the different participants in an alliance, because such discussion is deemed hopeless. Some alliances have endeavoured to identify shared ideals; “democracy” is sometimes identified as a candidate, but as Naomi Klein demonstrated, if people cannot agree at any level on how to practice democracy, what does it mean that everyone values democracy?
...
The factors which block the path of alliance politics are not its fatal weakness however, which need to be fixed by finally getting a consensus on the meaning of life; these problems are the problems of the modern world, problems which currently leave neoliberalism as the dominant force on the world stage. In tackling the problems of decision-making within radical alliance politics, the young protestors are tackling the essential crisis of modernity: how can free and equal human beings who are strangers, collaborate? Although discussion of ideals is verboten, alliances are very amenable to discussion of ethics, mainly because such an ethical discussion is inescapable if people are going to collaborate.

So the prospect of an ethics together is based in an awareness of different projects collaborating with one another and deciding together how to go about it. Ethics which doesn't consider the mediation of different projects between individuals is nonsense as individuals do not directly relate to one another as strangers in a jungle-independent society. That is more akin to indigenous people first meeting Europeans, not knowing how to interact with one another with entirely different cultures on how to interact. I remember a great example of how some folks in Australia were lucky or unlucky based on how they approached an indigenous group, one approached too quickly and were killed, another were close but maintained their distance and luckily replicated the respectful way that tribe initiated contact with strangers which was to not engage directly until some time passed.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/collaborative-ethics.htm

‘What we do, is decided by us’.

That is, by default, I take another person to be a collaborator in the project which is implicated in the moral problem raised between us, and that includes those who are participants by virtue of being or claiming to be affected. Conflict is an essential moment of collaboration. The aim is seek consensus on what we do, that is, taking us to be joint participants in a project. If no such shared project is conceivable, then the supposed moral problem is void.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/subject-position.htm

So we end up with two universal imperatives:

(1) Participants in a project decide amongst themselves what they will do. (Participation is decided by opting in opting out, and participation includes conflict and opposition.)

(2) It is wrong to conduct any project in secrecy from anyone who could be affected, or without reasonable measures to give anyone who could be affected the ability to make relevant judgments about the project.

Moral discourse which is based around events, dilemmas or relationships in which the participants in the discourse are not participants in a relevant common project, is meaningless. What should the French government do about the hijab? What position should a socialist take in Iraq today? How can there be sensible answers to these questions for someone who is not French or not in Iraq?

The above ethical obligations arise solely from the dictum: “What we do is decided by us.”

[anna]

You are right, there is nothing new in comparing groups/societies/mobs to some organisms (Hobbes, Spencer, etc.) or even studying them as a whole (beginning with Le Bon…)…

You are also right, that the flock-metaphor is still a metaphor. So you might say, yes, they may look like one living entity, but that is just an illusion: they are still only a flock of birds even if you do not see them. And thus any society is first and foremost a group of individuals, whatever you compare them to.

Here is my answer. Ok, let it be just a metaphor, but I could suggest at least one case, which would be not a metaphor, but a pure scientific fact. Siphonophorae, the most astonishing kind of living entities. It may walk like a duck and quacks like a duck have tentacles, kind of a mouth, a digestive system, etc. However, it is still just a large colony of individual organisms! So here we are much closer to some ‘heap paradox’. How many such ‘individuals’ would be enough for us to regard this colony as ‘one living entity’?
This I believe is the transition from quantity/complexity to quality, which Bar-Yam hints at when talking of ‘networked entities’ as something completely new.

Okay, well I’m not a biologist so I’ll enter into this with trepidation, but two things stood out to me from going to your link: “Each zooid is produced to be genetically identical” and, in reference to its order, “in some cases the specialized individual animals cannot survive outside the colony.”

So here you are comparing genetically unique humans to genetic clones and animals that in some cases cannot live alone.

At some point the metaphor has to fall down.

It’s not that easy to argue with Dennett (I actually tried)). If you accept that consciousness might arise in some material substrate, e.g. our neural networks, then you will have to accept, that it might as well arise in any material substrate, e.g. not only ‘natural’ neural networks, but whatever networks there might be.

With all due respect, no, I do not have to accept that consciousness “might well arise in any material substrate” simply because it arises at some point in human development. Human consciousness is a relatively uncharted marvel that has more to be learned about it than has been learned to this point. I think most would agree that a rock cannot attain sentience.

Regardless of whether you accept all of this or not, you might probably agree, that even now there are many examples when there is no need in ‘getting down’ to the level of individuals to solve some problem at the group level. The so called ‘target audience’ in both mass media and marketing is just an ‘entity’ with certain properties, which either already has some certain behavior, or should be conditioned to behave in a certain way. The social/semantic networks just make it much easier and affordable.

So then are we are talking about two things, 1. humans in some kind of new, single-entity neurodynamic network, and 2. targeting a group audience, but again, things fall down.

The kind of targeted marketing you’re thinking of (if I’m following you correctly) is actually broken down by individual through tracking them across social media and micro-targeting ads specifically to what the marketer knows about that one, distinct individual. Consider the story of Cambridge Analytica:

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly.

More about CA's (now known as Emerdata) micro-targeting here:

“They were using 40-50,000 different variants of ad every day that were continuously measuring responses and then adapting and evolving based on that response”


So again, in my view we’re back to the individual. The individual has their own mind, shaped by their own unique genetic makeup AND their own unique environment/experiences. They can and do, instinctively, form and belong to a multitude of groups based on where they live, what they know, what they like, don’t like, are familiar with, are afraid of, want to know more about, have experienced, have read, have seen, have… want… fear… need… Think Maslow’s hierarchy.



It's a very simple thumbnail, but you get the idea. Yes we form tribes, yes, sometimes just the right person will come along at just the right time in history and unite a group, but it's fickle, and transitory. Nothing stays the same.

Yes. The question is whether we should regard it as a natural evolution or rather something we should be beware of. I find it at least ridiculous, if we have to regard all those ‘systems of narratives’ as some ‘fortifications’ we should bravely defend. When we do not even know what kind of thing we defend exactly. What is hidden behind those walls, etc…. Should we still do that to prevent some real clashes or even wars? Or nothing is going happen, if we decide to just stop...

Unfortunately the vast majority of us humans aren’t in a position to start, end, or avoid wars. We have limited power, and even when we rise up (Hong Kong 2019 comes to mind), the powerful have always and will always crush or allow. They have the power. Revolutions can change things from time to time, but who can predict the revolution? Ultimately the ethical consideration in a post-post-truth age from someone like me who has no power: find the truth wherever I can. Not my truth. The truth. Perception is the only reality to the perceiver, so we come back to the age-old question of objective truth.

[anna]

@anna and @Ivan_R
This is a big read but I hope a worthwhile one with a quick run of resources with good ideas to help conceptualize the issue that I see that you're tangoing with. The issue of the dichotomy of the individual in relation to a larger whole.

I have to chuckle, Wellsy, because this is indeed a big read, inclusive of all your links - but it's definitely not a quick run!

I read through the entirety of your first two links and am saving the second link for future use. Perhaps some/all of the rest of them as time goes on, but I'm going to be upfront in saying you've got more going in in one post here than I can manage to respond to. I'm going to offer a few excerpts from Projects and the Problem of Context as a start (NB I'm not a marxist and I'm seeing this through the lens of psychology more than philosophy).

Here they are, chronological but discrete:

But the point surely is not just that we have to think of everything! How do we form a concept of psychological development which is sensitive to context? How do we form a concept of the context? I put it to you that “joint artefact-mediated action in context” is not a unit of analysis or a unit of anything else, but an open-ended totality. Context must be taken account in research as a major determinate of results, but to include it in a “unit of analysis” is a misconstrual of the notion of “unit of analysis.” The research subject and the relevant context must be conceived together by means of units of analysis, the relations between which are open to analysis. Thus, “the context” is not necessarily a single coherent entity, but may be itself an aggregate of diverse units. . . .

We all participate in a myriad of intertwining projects, which together make up the fabric of society. As Mike Cole pointed out, the word context derives from the Latin word contextere, ‘to weave together’. We can see society has a fabric woven together of millions of overlapping and intertwined threads. The unit for understanding a person’s psychological development then is a ‘joint artefact-mediated action in some collaborative project’. The collaborative project participates in mediating the action and the relation between people in and through the artefacts used in the action. The project is thus implicit in the words, images and other tools used. The project is also a unit of social formations: not social groups or institutions or individuals, but projects, realised narratives. . . .

The fact that collaboration is both an ethical and a scientific concept means that it provides a means to both understand a social situation from the outside, objectively, and from the inside, as a participant. Collaboration is not a norm which can be justified by appeal to religious beliefs or science, but is a rational norm which rests the basic principle of the moral equality and self-determination of all human beings. For a scientific concept to have ethical purchase as well as having scientific insight gives the concept additional strength. Most concepts in the domain of the human science do have ethical content, but this is usually implicit. In the case of collaborative projects, the ethical content is explicit.

Collaborative projects are also the source of identity for the participants, and a form of identity which is neither individualist nor communitarian, but places the individual’s identity as an agent within the social process. Collaborative projects are also the only way of making sense of agency. No individual is an agent as such. Only by means of engaging others in their project can a person exercise agency. . . .

The fabric of society, woven with the warp and weft of community and agency, open-ended. Can we work with this concept?

[Ivan_R]

I wonder if you distinguish what you're calling post-truth condition from postmodernism.

Of course, I do. Postmodernism is quite an established trend in the modern philosophy. As you rightly mentioned, it is mostly related to skepticism, which itself is rather old tradition of thinking. While the post-truth condition is a state of affairs in our society and culture we observe in the recent years (‘post-truth’ was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year 2016).
That is mostly related to our understanding of what ‘truth’ is, to our perception of ‘facts’ and so on. Postmodernism and especially its reception in pop culture might probably be regarded as kind of a precursor or feeding ground for this state of affairs. Social constructivism might probably be helpful as a theoretical framework, though I am not sure.

I believe, it is somewhat obvious, that this modern condition is mostly the result of the onrush of new types of media. You might have noticed I left my third question without any answer. It’s because I am not sure there is one. Since there are some trends which might make the problem way more difficult. E.g. @wat0n rightly observes that if deep-fake technologies gain some popularity, there is a chance we might be left with no possible ways to either verify or falsify ‘facts’. This seems to be an absolute impasse for me.

Now, you seem to believe you know some answer. What you describe is somewhat similar to the rise of left-wing political trends we observe right now. This alone is problematic for me. Since I might have agreed with you wholeheartedly, if this rise were not in line with what Bar-Yam predicted in the early 00-s. Again, he said ‘laterally organized’ groups would inevitably grow in numbers and sizes, actively using any networks possible. Just because they would be able to solve their ‘local’ problems (fighting for rights etc.) much more effectively than any other groups.
The main problem here is that they would be able to solve their problems if and only if the solutions do not contradict in any way to the aims and scopes of the network owners. It is especially problematic for communists, since the owners are mostly huge corps.

I wonder if you distinguish what you're calling post-truth condition from postmodernism.

So then are we are talking about two things, 1. humans in some kind of new, single-entity neurodynamic network, and 2. targeting a group audience.

Exactly. Nothing may prevent us from regarding any networked society both as a (stand-alone) subject and as an object (e.g. of possible manipulations). Both aspects are quite interesting.

So again, in my view we’re back to the individual

I’ve just realized you seem to be trying to refute something I’ve never claimed. I do not want to say that the individual should somehow cease to exist at some point, should loose its uniqueness and so on. I do not want to say we would never be able to get back to the individual at any stage or level whatsoever.
What I think is nothing prevents a set of any individuals, from zooids and ants to people, to turn into something completely new under certain circumstances. And even gain its own subjectivity. I also think it is not always necessary to get back to the individuals once we have got to some higher level in our analysis. It has been obvious from the times of Plato/Aristotle to Linnaeus and further.

So let us go back to ‘targeting’. Any media today is first and foremost a database, including this forum. Social media (unlike this forum) always have a very sophisticated type of databases at their core, namely the so-called ‘graph’ databases. Those latter allow their holders to do things, which might seem almost impossible at first sight.
Let us imagine an admin of such large database/social media, who is quite engaged politically. Let us imagine he has a wild dream. He wants to make all his party fellows happy. He also wants all the opponents to feel sad and depressed. This Dr. Evil does not even imagine any certain person suffering. He just wants all of those enemies to always feel grief and despair. One morning he wakes up crying out: “Why not! When I have the whole wide world at my fingertips. Literally!”.

Now, you might say it is sheer nonsense. It is not only possible, but also inconceivable.
I say, it is not just possible, but it is what took place at least once (except the ‘political’ part). Just recall the so called ‘facebook emotional contagion study’. For me it is kind of a quintessence of what ‘post-truth’ actually is.

[late]

When the printing press was invented, a 'side effect' was a century of war.

The medium is the message here, social media technologies are going to be profoundly disruptive.

What we need to do is to try and limit that disruption, as much as we can.

[anna]

I’ve just realized you seem to be trying to refute something I’ve never claimed. I do not want to say that the individual should somehow cease to exist at some point, should loose its uniqueness and so on. I do not want to say we would never be able to get back to the individual at any stage or level whatsoever.
What I think is nothing prevents a set of any individuals, from zooids and ants to people, to turn into something completely new under certain circumstances. And even gain its own subjectivity. I also think it is not always necessary to get back to the individuals once we have got to some higher level in our analysis.

You said:

"So I tend to regard those networked societies as absolutely new type of entities, which might behave much smarter and in a much more complex way, than any individual within them. That is why I said they might be dealt with somewhat differently."

And you said:

"Siphonophorae, the most astonishing kind of living entities. It may walk like a duck and quacks like a duck have tentacles, kind of a mouth, a digestive system, etc. However, it is still just a large colony of individual organisms! So here we are much closer to some ‘heap paradox’. How many such ‘individuals’ would be enough for us to regard this colony as ‘one living entity’?

It sure seems to be an idea you're working towards.

To quote the Sesame Street School of Social Theory: "One of these things is not like the other..." This really should've been two threads. One, a discussion on how to combat "post-post-truth" and the other on the thought experiment of a network which has a different identity than the sum of its individuals.

Back to targeted advertising (I mentioned Cambridge Analytica) and now you bring up FB's emotional contagion experiment with a predictable outcome. It's no surprise that online contagion works, how do you think online outrage, online anger, online aggression, online propaganda is amplified? In the case of propaganda, it's well understood that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. The truth has to be made bigger and stronger than the lie. In some cases, the truth has to fight dirty to win, or at least, leave some of the niceties behind. This is why The Lincoln Project was so successful. These ex-Republicans knew the Democrats didn't have it in them to fight dirty, so they did it. And they were good at it.

[Ivan_R]

This really should've been two threads.

As I’ve already said, I believe both aspects of networked societies are important and relevant to the post-truth politics. However, I realize the conception of a society as a weird colonial organism might be somewhat extravagant. So I am not going to insist on this
Let us get back to the post-truth. The Wiki article is more than enough here:

Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics and post-reality politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of facts by relegating facts and expert opinions to be of secondary importance relative to appeal to emotion. While this has been described as a contemporary problem, some observers have described it as a long-standing part of political life that was less notable before the advent of the Internet and related social changes.

Here is why I mentioned the FB's emotional contagion experiment. Bombarding people with ‘facts’, ‘ideas’ and ‘memes’, ‘repeating lies often enough’, etc.: that is what traditional propaganda has always been about for thousands of years. Now, if there appears a possibility not only to control what people think of some ‘fact’, but also what they believe and feel about it, that would be the whole new era.
You might say again, there is nothing new under the sun. That people knew how to control the audience’s emotions since the birth of the theatre or even earlier. I’d say no, because here we have the possibility to control certain emotions of certain groups of people about certain facts in real time.
Being familiar with this field (not what you might think, @late), I can assure you it is more than possible.

[Wellsy]

Hmm, shifting from the relationship of the individual to a broader whole and to the other emphasis noted by @anna, my first thought is how much influence and control do you think these top-down entities have? And this isn't simply a skeptical question but an actual wondering about how we conceive of the influence of say a particular person such as Mark Zuckerberg rather than the entity he is the boss of, Facebook.

Because looking at your last wiki quotation it makes me think of a summary in the context of Alisdair MacIntyre who asserts that modern ethics has lost it's telos and resorts to a kind of emotivism which sounds in line with the summary of politics not of reasoning but of emotions.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=rel_fac_pub

In September of 1995 the Associated Press released a wirephoto showing Russian lawmakers of both genders in a punching brawl during a session of the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament.' Is this behavior an ethnic idiosyncrasy? Do only government officials duke it out over matters of great importance? Or have fisticuffs suddenly become politically correct? No, on all counts.
Pick a topic, any topic-abortion, euthanasia, welfare reform, military intervention in the Balkans-and initiate discussion with a group of reasonable, well-educated people and observe the outcome. Chaos ensues. Of course the volume of the debate may vary according to how "close to home" the issue hits the participants. But any moral discussion, given a group of sufficient diversity, has the potential of escalating into a shouting match ... or worse.
An even more striking feature of moral debates is their tendency never to reach resolution. Lines are drawn early, and participants rush to take sides. But in taking sides they appear to render themselves incapable of hearing the other. Everyone feels the heat, but no one sees the light.

Many thinkers are inclined to see shrillness and interminability as part and parcel of the nature of moral debate. But Alasdair Macintyre begs to differ. In After Virtue he offers the "disquieting suggestion" that the tenor of modern moral debate is the direct outcome of a catastrophe in our past, a catastrophe so great that moral inquiry was very nearly obliterated from our culture and its vocabulary exorcised from our language. What we possess today, he argues, are nothing more than fragments of an older tradition. As a result, our moral discourse, which uses terms like good, and justice, and duty, has been robbed of the context that makes it intelligible. To complicate matters, although university courses in ethics have been around for a long time, no ethics curriculum predates this catastrophe. Therefore, for anyone who has taken ethics courses, and especially for those who have studied ethics diligently, d1e disarray of modern moral discourse is not only invisible, it is considered normal. This conclusion has been lent apparent credibility by a theory called emotivism.
Emotivism, explains Macintyre, "is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically aU moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling .... "2 On this account, the person who remarks, "Kindness is good," is not making a truth claim but simply expressing a positive feeling, "Hurrah for kindness!" Similarly, the person who exclaims, "Murder is wrong," can be understood to be actually saying, "I disapprove of murder," or "Murder, yuck!" If emotivism is a true picture of the way moral discourse works, then we easily see that moral disputes can never be rationally settled because, as the emotivist contends, all value judgments are nonrational. Reason can never compel a solution; we simply have to hunker down and decide. Moral discussion is at best rhetorical persuasion.

But I quite enjoy a recent work from the thinker I was spamming earlier on Opinion Formation and the emphasis of how the individual subjects commitments to different projects reflects an important process, one which isn't so directly controlled and dictated by things like facebook memes and misinformation necessarily as much as it preys on a kind of tribalism/politicization which need not prevail to such a strong extent that we experience in the polarization of politics today.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Opinion-formation.pdf

This ‘tribalism’ is a societal pathology and is far from being a rational or necessary outcome of citizens forming commitments. The formation of ‘tribes’ has been called ‘politicisation’. To explain politicisation and the range of possible alternatives to tribalism, I will introduce the concept of ‘trust networks’ and in particular ‘expert-trust networks’.

By expert-trust network I mean a network of people, linked by relations in which a person A trusts that person B to give good advice with respect to question Q in which A evidently deems them have expertise. Each link is a expert-trust vector: A←B(Q). A church provides an expert-trust network for matters of faith; a university provides an expert-trust network for matters of science; a political party or movement provides an expert-trust network in matters of public political policy. ‘Politicisation’ means the collapsing of all networks into a single network of trust which leads to the phenomenon of tribalism, toxic to the rational and constructive formation of opinion and belief. I take it that this process of politicisation is a major social problem which this research ought to shed light upon.

This example seems quite illustrative to me in the context of the breakdown of social trust and relations in general due to the invasion of market relations as the intermediary of public life.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/cult-safety.htm

The question is: what is underlying cause of today’s heightened generalised anxiety? I think it is above all else, the insecurity of employment and career. This insecurity at work originates in the micro-economic reform and global restructuring of capitalism beginning in the late 1980s, involving privatisation, out-sourcing, casual employment, deregulation and in short, the commodification of all human relations, economic, domestic and political, including the conception of government as a kind of business. It is commodification which is the prime source of anxiety and key to understanding the ethos of this period, affecting every aspect of life without exception, even though it is rarely the target of fear, and is frequently the chosen remedy!

These processes have undermined or destroyed the safety nets which protected people in the post-war decades, the fabric which people saw as threatened by the bogeys of that time. Increasingly, the only safety net a person has is their own bank account.

This can be illustrated with the reaction to the introduction of University fees. Students tend to believe that if they have paid their fees, then they ought to be given their degree. The idea that passing their exams is their own responsibility is increasingly unacceptable to students. If they are failed, then they have been swindled.

Commodification of a relation pushes responsibility out to the supplier. When you buy a service, then you absolve yourself of personal responsibility for it. The process of corporatisation, out-sourcing and privatisation acts in exactly this way. Likewise, deregulation makes it “worth your while” to act in a certain way, rather than criminal to act otherwise.

Further, we live in a period when authorities and institutions in general are not trusted. Institutions know they will be the targets of blame by people who are injured or otherwise suffer through their dealings with the institution; but they do not have the option of “closing ranks” as no scandal is more readily believed than a “cover-up.” Consequently, all institutions now devolve responsibility outwards and downwards. Base-level supervisors are responsible for the health and safety of employees, teachers are responsible for the health and safety of students, etc..

Likewise, professionals tend to be blamed for less than satisfactory outcomes of their services: paediatricians are held responsible for birth-defects, and so on. Knowing that you will not be supported by the institution, the only rational response is to take out insurance. The cost of insurance is calculated mathematically and passed on to the customer in the price of the service.

Through these and similar processes, safety has been privatised, accumulated and distributed according to the laws of political economy, and social consciousness aligns itself to this new terrain. However, no bond other than that of mutual manipulation binds the buyer and seller; each is vulnerable to the calculation of the other. The decline in full-time employment and “standard hours” is a typical manifestation of the extension of the commodity relation and increased uncertainty and vulnerability results, even as wealth and convenience are increased.
...
The claim that determination of truth is reliant on trust, notably trust in the source of information, is compelling. As pointed out above, Science and the Judiciary are institutions founded on procedural rules designed to make information reliable without making unwarranted judgments about the character of informants. Here trust is embedded in institutionalised practices, such as peer review, juries, rights of appeal, documentation, publicity, and so on. The editors of The Lancet may never have met or even heard of the author of a submission, but they have a list of peer reviewers qualified to judge the paper and the institution in which the author is employed is well credentialed. So much for for the problem of trust in these age-old institutions, but how is the ordinary citizen to determine the trustworthiness of the source of a specific piece of information? And irrespective of how they should, how do people determine the trustworthiness of their sources?

The lack of trust necessarily underpins a skepticism in which such facts and knowledge also becomes suspicious because how can one trust anyone to accept their claims to facts and knowledge? Well one doesn't rely on the experts who are faceless no ones of institutions, one trusts the people one actually knows more directly.
And this is what underpins some of my skepticism about any sense in which the top down are the master manipulators of the world, they do hold great influence through controlling the discussion on things or using their wealth to shape policy and so on. But things on the ground level aren't simply enthralled by ideology and nor are ideas simply forced onto people from above (Hence Gramsci's distinction of hegemony, in which ideology isn't so totalizing as to be inescpable or unchallengable).
TO help emphasize how a top down approach can be quite impotent in fact because of the very basis of needing to be trusted I present these examples listed by Andy Blunden:

1. HIV/AIDS. The Australian government was successful (Power 2014) in promoting “safe sex”
among gays and prostitutes by handing control of the publicity campaign over to existing
community organisations. Messages were received by gay men and prostitutes from individuals
known to them or in publicity designed by members of their community and circulated in their
own venues. The US government was less successful with its top-down advertising which was
more or less hostile to the target communities, but it was in the US (Epstein 1996) that HIV/AIDS
activists made a success of the medical science project to develop medicines by forcibly
intervening in scientific conferences. Scientists were persuaded to abandon double-blind trials
only by the direct intervention of AIDS activists, and involvement of activists in research led to
willing participation by vulnerable groups.
2. Asbestos. Efforts to eradicate asbestos production and use in Australia had been thwarted ever
since the principal manufacturer took steps to protect itself from legal claims in 1935. Regulators,
legislators and medical science had been nobbled. Like in the US, where the EPA was ‘public
enemy number one’ in asbestos towns, the workers themselves denied its deadly effects even as
they died in numbers from asbestos disease. In the end it was an alliance of their own union with
self-groups of those dying of asbestos disease, who gathered legal, scientific and media allies and
forced the government to ban asbestos (Beaton & Blunden, 2014). No amount of scientific
evidence or media exposés had been able to break through for 60 years, before this collaboration
was successful.
3. Foreign fighters. Governments were concerned that young Muslims were being recruited to
fight in Syria by ISIS internet campaigns but ‘counter-narratives’ broadcast over the internet
proved a dismal failure. No wonder. Closer investigation showed that fighters in the Middle East
were simply using the internet to communicate with their friends back in the European suburbs in
which they had grown up. This was illustrated by the observation that almost all of Norway’s 60
recruits came from the same street (Neumann, 2015; Blunden 2021a). Against this personal
communication between friends, government propaganda broadcasts were less than useless.
4. Vaccine hesitancy. Public commentators frequently point to antivaxxers spreading
disinformation over the internet or blame alternative therapists. Blume (2006) however showed
that neither of these groups could explain the rise of vaccine hesitancy, and were better
understood as products of the same process which produced vaccine scepticism. He found that
vaccine hesitancy was an integral component of, a disposition that was suspicious of authorities
and advocated individual responsibility in health choices. According to Blume, only 2% of parents
consulted the internet in making their vaccination decision, and only a proportion of these would
even have read an anti-vaccination website, let alone trusted it. He found that 85% of parents
usually had accessed expert advice whether or not they followed that advice, while few had seen
antivaxxer websites. For the majority it was information from trusted peers which was most
decisive in forming their opinion. The great majority of antivaxxer publicists were people who had
unfortunately had personal experience of rare adverse vaccine side effects.
5. Political persuasion. The broadcasters, ‘This American Life’ (2017) interviewed professional
political campaigners on how they had changed people’s mind on abortion and gay marriage.
These professionals agreed that mass communications could ‘get out the vote’ but never changed
anyone’s opinion. Successful pollsters had to be able to establish empathy with a voter (e.g., the
pollster has a gay son or had had an abortion) and be prepared to spend several hours of careful
listening and conversing with a voter to establish rapport, before they could be successful in
changing a voter’s mind. The cost of this method of campaigning is prohibitive unless it is already
at work spontaneously in the community.

This very point that no one changes their mind unless they trust you is crucial in the spread of certain things as true. And if the institution which one accepts facts from is totalizing over one's life rather than a specific facet, then its easy to develop a kind of tribal identity where ones allegiance to the group encompasses one's commitments even while one may in fact agree with people from other groups they do not yet trust. Even the simplest act of trying to teach someone is futile without trust because no one will listen and respect the view of an untrustworthy person. But the networks of informational spread themselves only register to the extent that a people are already susceptible to certain ideas due to the things they are already committed to in practice and is then reflected in their psychological disposition to those views and values.

The above summary points to three problems: (1) the formation of the expert-trust vector for a
given individual, (2) the shape of the expert-trust networks for any given issue and (3) the
correlation between trust-expertise networks on different issues. Falcone & Castelfranchi (2007)
have developed a ‘theory of trust’ as a mathematical model of trust networks. The important
finding which bears on my aims here is that they confirm the observation of Blume and the
‘American Life’ program mentioned above that it is not the activity of a few ‘influencers’ which can
explain the rapid spread of ideas which is frequently observed; rather it is the presence of a large
number of people who are, in the given circumstances, easily persuaded, or perhaps it would be
more appropriate to say, disposed to be persuaded of the given idea.
...
Everyone knows that misinformation circulates on the internet. False information is also
published in mass circulation newspapers. That ‘traditional media’ have known curators may not
be as significant as some believe, if one accepts that it is the disposition to trust a messenger is
more significant. The impact of social media is that people receive interpretations from people
they know and trust, frequently without asking after the original source. It is undeniable that these
media have a role to play in disorienting opinion formation. However, it is far from proved that
falsehoods circulating on the internet changes the mind of someone who was not already disposed
to believe the falsehood and would have heard of the falsehood by other means if it had not been
delivered on the internet. In other words, it remains to be proven that the internet ever persuades
anyone.

In summary, while research has identified the significance of an expert-trust vector, there has been precious little research exploring the shape of this vector

[late]

Being familiar with this field (not what you might think, @late), I can assure you it is more than possible.

I'd love to hear that.

Partly because I'm not sure what you meant by it. My thought is simple enough, social media turn manipulative techniques into political dynamite.

The printing press set off a century of war, I am concerned this could be worse.

[anna]

I realize the conception of a society as a weird colonial organism might be somewhat extravagant. So I am not going to insist on this

Okay.

Let us get back to the post-truth. The Wiki article is more than enough here:

Here is why I mentioned the FB's emotional contagion experiment. Bombarding people with ‘facts’, ‘ideas’ and ‘memes’, ‘repeating lies often enough’, etc.: that is what traditional propaganda has always been about for thousands of years. Now, if there appears a possibility not only to control what people think of some ‘fact’, but also what they believe and feel about it, that would be the whole new era.
You might say again, there is nothing new under the sun. That people knew how to control the audience’s emotions since the birth of the theatre or even earlier. I’d say no, because here we have the possibility to control certain emotions of certain groups of people about certain facts in real time.
Being familiar with this field (not what you might think, @late), I can assure you it is more than possible.

I don't think we disagree to any great extent on this. Yes propaganda is more easily amplified today than ever before. More than radio, TV, pamphlets handed from one to another or dropped from the sky. You may be familiar with the maxim that goes something like "A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes." Variations of it go back several hundred years, long before instantaneous news (true or fake). But even in the days of hard-copy newspapers, the story would be on the front page and any correction was likely to be a tiny info box buried on page 24.

How to get back to a post-truth truth is a good and vitally urgent question, something I've been following myself for several years, which is why your OP caught my eye in the first place. One idea I've been thinking about is the gap between successful dissemination of misinformation and and then successful disconfirmation of it - this is what fake news exploits - the percent of people who will believe the disinfo and then not see or not believe the correction.

"And then we estimated the odds that if you present misinformation, people will actually believe it. And their results show that the alternative quite high, 266 to one.

So, that means that 99.6% of your attempts to misinform will actually be successful. So this is by far the strongest effect ever estimated in my career. So is it to misinform? Yeah, it's extremely easy if you present misinformation, it will take a whole of your mind and it will stick. Can we actually correct that misinformation that we introduced? Yes, but it's not as easy as when we introduced the misinformation the first time. The odds of correcting properly is quite actually six to one. That means that 86% of the time, the correction will succeed. But remember that the success rate of the misinformation is pretty close to 100%. That leaves you with a gap."

Speaking of Psychology: How to recognize and combat ‘fake news,’ with Dolores Albarracin, PhD

@Wellsy, you may be interested in that link as well, since it references trusting sources.

[Wellsy]

Thank you @anna, that article is an interesting read and is in line with what I was interested in the last post.
It is interesting also as the researcher concludes that the trust in the source is more important than the expertise expressed.

So the other point is you need to be using trustworthy sources. This could sometimes be expert sources, but actually trusting the sources is even more important than expertise. So are you having Fauci telling you when you should be hearing about the coronavirus and is he a trustworthy source for you. This and you need to encourage the audience to counter-argue and be active when the information... The more people produce their own counter-arguments both ahead of time and the point in which you introduce the correction, the better your results will be.

Here it emphasizes one aspect that is important about the trust placed in a source, although when it comes to considering what networks of trust exist, many people may not get their information directly from a source but from someone else relying on that source. As such, the trust in the source is a subset of trust in the person relying on a the source is a more pivotal case in terms of influencing someone's views.

I have not explicitly included the source of the text because I take the source to be part of the text, but we could express this idea as A←B(T,S) and A←A(T,S) represents the case when the person A interprets the text having in mind the source. But A←A(T,S) is better taken as A←S(T) where the expert-trust vector points to the extent to which the subject trusts the source with respect to the context of the text. But given our expectation that it will be people known to the subject who are decisive in opinion formation, A←S(T) is a derivative case arising from A←B(S), the opinion which the subject A forms of the source, S, with advice from B. All this said, A←B(T) remains the key unit of analysis.

Albarracin: And this is the same type of problem that we have in the health domain and especially areas that are so polarized like vaccines, right? You're not going to introduce persuasive messages on social media to try to change the parents who are leading the anti-vax movement, right? You have absolutely no chance of producing changes. Can they change? Yes, they could change maybe if they married a Liberal or really alter their lives, which would take years and that could produce a change. Because you're not going to change them through an actual message or a correction. But you have a really good chance when people who are on the fence, who are certain, who might have seen something, but they are not positive of what it was or where it came from and therefore they are persuadable in that sentence

It'll be interesting to see such an area of research develop to really test the boundaries and influence between people we trust and a trusted expert.

That trust is key to opinion formation is widely recognised, but I have not found research which distinguishes between a trusted source and a trusted adviser. That there has been a loss of trust in expertise and authority has been widely recognised for some time. Studies which look at the intersection of trust in expertise with partisanship have shown that people will differentiate between experts and authorities on a partisan basis. But I have found no research which explores the limits of this tendency or the extent to which inexpert but trusted advisers can override the advice of an expert who is less trusted or vice versa. All rational opinion formation relies on trust. However, for anyone not a part of a reliable system of institutionalised trust, there is grounds to believe that people may trust peers who do not have the required expertise in the relevant question. Further, a person may quite rationally trust a scientist but not a politician, trust a judge but not a policeman, trust a nurse but not a doctor. Loss of trust in authorities is not a homogeneous process. Which authorities are trusted and which not would appear to be itself a product of expert-trust networks.

However, I tend to think that the best way to resist some of this stuff would be to have trust worthy community leaders mediate communication that is authoritative.

Distrust of public authorities and corporations is an historical product which is now well established in certain sections of the community (See Beck 1986) and generally had quite rational foundation at the time it first arose, but continued to circulate long after it had been disproven or corrected. ALLEA (2018) discussed at length how governments could regain this trust which has been lost. In their conclusions they emphasise the role of statutory advisory bodies independent of government and industry which include members from a wide array of cultural locations. But this is not the question at hand at the moment. The experiences in HIV and asbestos described above point to the need for authorities to mediate their communication through community organisations and leaders.

And when I worked with something called Project ECHO in the correctional system, their goal was to train inmates to be peer educators so that they could disseminate expert information through a peer which people trusted more than they would the institiont's staff, someone who was one of them. This is the avenue in which propaganda is most effective, not simply a news story itself but because we have family and friends who tell us such stories.
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-do-some-people-not-understand-Jacques-Ellul.php#:~:text=Ellul%20argues%20that%20the%20university,this%20propaganda%20and%20its%20dissemination.&text=This%20is%20the%20essence%20of%20what%20Ellul%20says%20in%20his%20Propaganda%20book.

One of the ironies of propaganda to work is that its population must be educated. Ellul argues that the university education forms the next generation of propagandist to manipulate its society. In other words, the more highly educated you are, the more integrated you are in this propaganda and its dissemination. Remember Ellul is not talking about the obvious Nazi or Communist propaganda during the Second World War which was for a short term campaign using a vertical process (top down approach easily countered by a competing top down approach). No, Ellul is talking about the horizontal process similar to how viruses infect adjoining people around them. Imagine an intellectual virus which spreads itself similar to a biological virus, through contact and multiply this with mass media technology as a delivery system.

So the more educated you become, the less aware you are that you are a victim of propaganda and the more you are ready to spread your ideology to others who will in turn reinforce you and be reinforced by you in a horizontal process. Leaders aren't telling you what to think (directly), you are being told by your peers what to think and you pass along this information to others to inform them what to think. Then when this ideology has reached a substantial portion of the population, you demand the leaders to comply and they reluctantly do so (which was their intention 30 to 40 years previously, but they won't tell you this). This is the essence of what Ellul says in his Propaganda book.