The Future of Trust in the Post-Reality World
When Meaning Defies Paradox
Trust is always a bet on the future. It bubbles up from the presumptions of integrity and predictability with which we view the “objects” in the world around us. We trust because we observe regularities, which we attribute to something we call character.
As the predictability of the world diminishes, the idea of trust starts to seem absurd. Against the backdrop of rising epistemic instability, we re-examine our assumptions about the fundamental character of our world. Without a new theory, we withdraw trust from the world as predictably as we recoil after touching an open flame.
Without trust, Dialogue dies. So, what is the future of Dialogue in the post-reality world described in M2D #1 and M2D #2? Specifically:
How do you move forward when “everything that is solid melts Into information”?
How do you play a game set up by “game masters” who don’t tell you the rules of the game because they enjoy watching you squirm with indecision?
How is Dialogue possible when the dominant response to the post-reality world is organized self-censorship? We treat it as an unknown known.
Where, in other words, do we find the “primal trust” to keep moving after we reach what appears as the end of the road?
The Show Must Go On!
I don’t have any grand theoretical answers, but I'll share a hypothesis I formulated a couple of years ago: We scream into the post-reality noise machine, because “The Show Must Go On!” I know this, just as you know this, just as I know that you know this, and you know that I know this, etc. We all know that we can't stop.
Dialogue doesn't die when trust is withdrawn from the world. Dialogue dies when we stop trying to reignite trust. Trust is in the trying.
For example, in simpler times, there was a bond of trust between writers and readers. Writers earned the attention of readers by producing text that purported to offer something of value. Readers invested their attention, reasonably confident that they could gauge the value of the text and quickly correct any misallocations of their attention. Now, in our radically balkanized epistemology, we can‘t easily gauge the value of anything or know when we have misdirected the light of our attention.
Among the readers of the preceding paragraph, some may feel that I am overstating the severity of our epistemic crisis. Others may fault me for understatement or commend me for getting it just right. All these reactions are defensible but ultimately absurd, not just wrong. We can’t measure value in a culture increasingly bereft of standards and stabilities. We can’t know how closely my claim here aligns with reality. However, this untenable status quo hasn’t slowed either the production or the consumption of content.
Other Examples:
We know that our Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are catastrophically obsolete, and they normalize material distortions of risks-adjusted asset values. Still, we participate in GAAP-based capital markets. The show must go on.
We know that we live in the Age of Inversion in which medicine destroys health, finance destroys wealth, and education destroys knowledge. Still, we show up for our next medical appointment, deposit money into the bank account, and send kids to school. The show must go on!
We know that Facebook is now “larger than Christianity and harming people at scale”. Still, 3 billion people are active citizens of Facebook Nation. The show must go on!
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has been convincingly discredited as a product of ideology in the guise of a medical manual, but people and institutions continue to organize their choices in accordance with this falsehood. The show must go on!
The Will to Carry On
As meaning-making creatures, we do what we are even when what we call our “rational minds” run a soundtrack about emptiness and lack of purpose. The will to carry on is neither rational nor irrational. It precedes rationality.
As writers, we write and publish even when no one’s reading or commenting. Even if meaning-making during the meta-crisis feels like swimming through a tsunami, we still do what we are; we secrete meaning. The show must go on!
Who Are We Writing For?
Even for writers who either found their audience or know where to look, the question “Who am I writing for?” never loses its resonance. We may find and lose our audience many times, but regardless of our connection with an audience, we write “for the record”. Like an octopus manifesting meaning through the language of its secretions, we gush inner states into the world we inhabit. The media ecology is our water.
Why We Write
As we surf the wave of thought-destroying, soul-numbing bullshit flooding the pathocratic Attention Economy, we may question the wisdom of defying futility. Why write in this post-apocalyptic wilderness, we wonder. I often metabolize such doubts by turning to the passage that Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper’s magazine, often cited in his columns: