It's a fact

Facts; tricky buggers, aren’t they? Because what are facts when we are talking not about what they describe, but what they imply? And all facts are not equal: while the number of feet in a mile, or how many buns in a baker’s dozen are undebatable certainties, other fact-like nuggets, especially statistics, are often used to illustrate contrary positions in an argument. And while I naturally scoff at supposed evidence for your aberrant beliefs, I gleefully embrace equally shaky verification that my god is bigger than your god. I am no better than you.

Also to be taken into account is the plethora of fake facts, mistaken facts, incomplete facts, wishful thinking and downright fraud perpetrated in the name of fact and its unhappy bedfellow, truth. Your truth isn’t the same as mine and while mine may – I believe – be grounded in experiential events, your truth may be derived from beliefs which have little or no facts to substantiate them. I cite, as I often do, the absolute fact that not one piece of ‘evidence’ has ever proved the existence of god. You, naturally, counter that no evidence has been offered for his/her/its non-existence. I quote the scientific method, you rely on faith. I have faith in the scientific method… and so it goes.

When arguments are exhausted and the brick wall you have been banging your head against refuses to yield you, we – all of us – resort to other explanations. The other side has been influenced by dark forces, fallen for propaganda, been taken in by the elites who are feeding them well-rehearsed soundbites, attack rhetoric, posing as objective truths. Then, when the enemy captures those positions and turns the same words against us, we fall back, regroup and find some different words. The events have not changed and the full facts are never known – even when a think tank calls itself ‘full fact’ – but our perceptions shift. All the time.

How often have you been ‘Indecisive Dave’ watching a debate as if it were a tennis match, your head swivelling from left-to-right and back again as you nod and agree with each participant in turn. And then, when no convincing thesis wins the day, reverting to the comfort of your original position. It is little wonder, then, that mankind has embraced the frankly ridiculous notion of a magic man – or woman - in the sky who somehow orders everything so that the most deserving, the most devout, will see their reward in the afterlife.

Well, bollocks to that; I want my loot now. And so do you. Which is why the ‘facts’ about ‘the elite’ are so deliciously, egregiously deceitful. The elite, or ‘the elites’ are manipulating your every thought in order to make you slaves to the market economy? Oh, come on, people. If anything the manipulation is being done – deliberately or in ignorance – by those who use envy and a sense of injustice in the guise – deliberately or in ignorance of equality – to mobilise sentiment against those who have succeeded. Or maybe you are just manipulating yourself?

Which facts do you prefer?

I’m not yet a citizen of a post-fact world and I have a great deal of time for evidential investigation, but I am also hyper cynical and assume that ‘your’ facts are tainted. In my more self-aware moments I admit that the same applies to mine, but I just don’t see how blaming society’s ills and especially individual difficulties on those who have managed to buck the trend and make something of themselves is helping. Instead of trying to bring down the successful maybe, just maybe, we should be copying them. At the very least we could start trying to think for ourselves and not be so easily led by pipers playing our favourite tunes.

It's all true!

One week in and 2018 shows no sign of newly turned leaves in terms of the endless social media spats around Trump, Brexit and any issue which divides opinion on roughly left/right lines. Those happy few who cleave to neither creed tend not to use social media in the same way, posting up recipes, family anecdote and pictures of kittens; heaven knows what they must think of the raucous cacophony that rages all around them sitting as they do in the calm eye of the Twitter storm.

Why do we do it we should ask ourselves? Why do we put ourselves up for ridicule, as we all do when we try and use spurious facts and ill-reported slander to bolster our claims? And what are facts anyway? Government statistics; can they be trusted? And opinion polls, what of them? What, apart from trying to prove a partisan point drives people to poll in the first place?

I used to naively believe in facts as indisputable truths, science as unpervertable veritas and the evidence of my own eyes as crystal clear. But no, because one person’s indisputable evidence of increased NHS spending is another’s cast-iron proof of cuts. One person’s free speech is received as hate in another’s ear. And like illusionists performing their tricks even unedited video footage can be used to portray ten different truths to ten different minds.

Add to this the Photoshopped versions, the misleading ‘memes’ and the plethora of fake accounts set up especially to promulgate untruths and propaganda and it is little wonder that – and here comes the ‘L’ word – literally nobody can claim ownership of the unvarnished truth. Even just retweeting something that strikes a chord with you, right or wrong, makes you part of the problem. It drags you into the morass of lies and deceit and simple misinformation that seems to be the only constant across mass communications media today.

What’s the alternative though? Stay silent with all the frustration that not having a voice brings? I have noticed that even only slightly controversial tweets will get a dozen ‘likes’ to each retweet, as if people wish to register approval without drawing attention to themselves. I can’t blame them for it, but it does seem a mite timid when you have the power to nail your colours to the mast and broadcast to the world.

How about applying the reasonableness test? What is more likely do you think – that the Tory government colludes with rich offshore individuals to directly increase their wealth by systematically robbing the poor of what should be theirs by right – or that in creating a business friendly culture which employs millions it incidentally enriches some to an extent that can be seen by some as morally wrong? Or that socialism, in seeking to create a fairer world, inadvertently deters people from becoming wealth creators thus, as a by-product of good intentions, produces bad outcomes?

Comparing political conspiracy theory to simple coincidence is like comparing divine design to evolution. One requires an omnipotence and omniscience so powerful that it cannot be fathomed by humankind, the other a simple theory involving imperfect copies, mutations and millions of years of trial and error. Our understanding of the human condition itself is still evolving and you’d think we might learn from our mistakes but it turns out we don’t. At least not from one generation to the next.

So until we reach that nirvana of enlightenment we will just have to stumble along and make the best of it. Perhaps not being so quick to condemn those who use ‘the wrong facts’ or draw the ‘wrong conclusions’. If a piece of news seems too good to be true, the chances are it’s not. Do you want the difficult truth that life is hard and there are winners and losers, or do you want the miraculous truth that Saint Jeremy Corbyn will cleanse us of all our sins? Do you believe the other side’s delusions are lies and your delusions are true? It’s a tricky old game.

Nobody knows

Honestly, when it comes to how it all slots together, nobody knows. The news is manipulated, we are told, by the guvmint, the Vatican, the mainstream media, the illuminati (Mwuhaha!), the Freemasons, the BBC and by every political party ever heard of it. At least the politicians are sort of open about what they call ‘spin’ and it’s a very human thing to want to show your principles in the brightest possible light, but we have quickly gone from the so-called Information Age of the nineties to the post-information age… the age of anti-information. Everything you hear, everything you read and everything you see, online especially, could easily be wrong.

Perception has a big part to play; bloggers, photo-shoppers, prankers, polemicists, street-preachers, biased reporters, converts, apostates and plain old deluded fools (How many of those boxes can you tick?) abound, bringing with them the most potent and prolonged campaign of disinformation ever seen. Once it was common to leaflet-bomb enemy troops, spreading uncomfortable lies to shake their resolve. Now we do it to ourselves; for fun. Manipulating online personas to reveal their hidden bigotries is practically the raison d'être of social media at times.

It is said that that religion of nothing-to-do-with-peace practices taqiyya, a deliberate use of deception to disguise its true intentions. But that itself may just be a manipulation of the reality of avoiding religious persecution; although right now there does only seem to be one religion doing the persecuting. Where, they say, are the imams condemning the violence? Why do you not hear us, say the imams and then declare islamophobia. I’ve never liked islam but that was long before the current open barbarity and more to do with its dull, dour monotonous insistence on submission by its adherents and the blandness of life in the strictly muslim countries I’ve visited. Or is it?

But while deliberate misinformation is undoubtedly a real thing the sheer volume of verifiably true bumf now available makes it near impossible to sift fact from fiction. So even if the mountain of particulars is built on factual foundations how can we possibly process it in an enlightened way? Even when people are using real numbers to illustrate their case, other people can use the same set of facts to illustrate the opposite. So while the current government is trumpeting measures the opposition calls ‘austerity’ it is apparently the case that welfare spending rose by £28 billion under the coalition. The truth, it seems, is relative.

When I watch a movie I want deep, dark cleverly interwoven complexity. I want to be taken on a roller-coaster, who-dun-it ride with my expectations foiled as the goody turns out to be the baddy and then turns goody again. I want to be exhausted, challenged and entertained by the sheer thrill of not knowing who to trust. In real life though, I just want to put my money in the slot, press the button and get the Smarties.

Licensed to kill or thrill?

Thus I employ Battsby’s Ambiguity Principal (BAP) to state that for every fact there is an anti-fact, for every truth an anti-truth. Whatever you believe, from whatever source or sources, somebody will infer an opposing conclusion from that same base. Employing good old Occam’s razor and based on my infallible and verifiable truth that we’re not as clever as we think we are, the simplest explanation is usually the best. So remember folks, on budget day if you want to get to the truth, get your BAPs out.