The Climate of Disinformation
As Putin’s army rolls through Ukraine, bombing infrastructure and civilian areas indiscriminately while maintaining that they are only responding to Ukrainian aggression by targeting specific military installations, a special kind of cognitive disconnect is growing for the 11 million Russians that have family in the Ukraine. In addition to yesterday’s NY Times piece, a BBC piece from a few days ago describes a young Ukrainian woman who couldn’t convince her own mother, living in Russia, that the Russians were bombing civilian areas, even as bombs fell near the daughter’s Kharkiv apartment, making the internet connection spotty. Devastatingly, her mother parroted back the party line about the “special operation” that she had heard 24/7 on the Russian state-controlled TV station, no matter the reality of brutal war that her own daughter was experiencing on the ground. While this particular example is illustrative of the cumulative power of Putin’s propaganda machine, one that has been perfecting its mendacious messaging for the last couple of decades, it is far from an outlier in our disinformation age.
We have lost our baseline of reality, of trusting in science and believing in facts. We now have opinions that masquerade as facts and facts that, when inconvenient, are replaced by “alternative facts.” It’s being dispensed to a willing public through both traditional media channels (whether controlled by an autocratic state like Russia or by an insatiable opportunist like Rupert Murdoch) and non-traditional social media platforms that provide a bottomless rabbit-hole of fact-adjacent or fact-free reporting (in the form of both rampant misinformation and active disinformation).
This elevated level of disinformation currently being consumed in our wired world is undermining not only the continuity of our democratic-leaning, post-WW2, neo-liberal order, but the very ability of our global civilization to survive by self-correcting off of our unsustainable trajectory (i.e., act on IPCC reports to limit catastrophic warming at 1.5 degrees). Whether it’s the ecocide engineered by the global oil cartels as the “Merchants of Doubt” via their decades of sustained disinformation sowing uncertainty about the climate crisis until it is too late to avert catastrophic geophysical changes to the earth systems or it’s one of the two major U.S. political parties and their leader actively undermining Democracy and fomenting insurrection by falsely claiming election fraud — this is the world in which we now live. One that is not geared towards truth, justice and the welfare of free peoples, but one that, in the least-worst case, passively allows these travesties to continue and in the worst case, actively promotes and abets them.
Perhaps you, like I, have friends who would rather believe in simplistic conspiracy theories about U.S. government sponsored “chemtrails” changing the weather, than to accept the scientific consensus (on par with consensus on laws of gravity) that our carbon-intensive, high-consumption lifestyle has exponentially increased warming on our planet. And then there’s the Russian mother who can’t accept the objective reality of her own daughter being bombed by the country that she’s loyal to, a country whose leader brainwashes her to believe that up is down and down is up.
The Russian war of aggression in the Ukraine, the Jan. 6 Insurrection resulting from the “Big Lie” about the 2020 U.S. election, the COVID-19 Pandemic “Hoax” and accompanying “Anti-Vax” hysteria and last, but certainly not least, climate change denial — these on-going, casualty-accumulating and largely preventable tragedies all have one thing in common: they were initiated, grew and ultimately metastasized due to active disinformation. They are all extremely dangerous, but it is only in the case of inaction on climate change that the outcome cannot be resolved on human timescales. We can stop a war, reboot a democracy, develop vaccines and change the way we disseminate information, but we cannot recreate glaciers, Antarctic ice-sheets, Artic sea ice, old-growth forests, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or the existing flora and fauna that provide ecosystem services that allow us to live on this earth.
We need to stop listening to what we want to hear, cut out the bullshit and start paying attention to the facts that we need to hear — that is, if we want a future on an inhabitable planet where mothers and daughters can peacefully share one objective reality.
