Andy Farnell
Overview
Not with a bang but with a whimper. The "Western" world we know is rotting. The disease is "epistemic mistrust". Right now, it can't be cured. Its root is in the technology, systems and organisations we created to make life "easy".
Dr. Kate Brown and I have been discussing AI and human attachment. In this article we consider societal disorganised attachment as a product of repeated epistemic trauma.
Figure 1: "There is no greater evil than men's failure to consult and to consider" – Sophocles, Antigone
Societal epistemic trauma
So what is epistemic trauma? In a nutshell it's being lied to, let down, gaslighted, betrayed, and dicked about… constantly. In particular the failure of authority figures, especially in the formative stages of childhood, cause us to fall into "radical doubt". This shows up as disorganised behaviour. It's a post-traumatic symptom that includes things like insecurity, fear, low esteem, and the inability to make plans, think positively about the future, enjoy work or build relationships.
Epistemic crisis might seem like depression in its effect on motivation, but it is different. Sometimes it comes without the lows and can even express as giddy callousness, nihilism, detached unconcern about others, or being clingy and afraid of abandonment. An affected person might seem very confident, but really just doesn't care. As in the final line of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody; "Nothing really matters much to me". To suffer epistemic crisis is a learned helplessness, not to believe in anything any more.
Our argument here isn't that individuals are being damaged, rather that our entire culture is. A societal epistemic crisis is emerging from a context in which we just can't trust or believe in anything any more. This will become an ever greater concern with "AI" and changes in communications technology. It is of course a thesis that Nietzsche, Freud, Camus and other philosophers tackled. Here we're interested in how it intersects with the work of Ellul, Mumford, Postman and other 20th century philosophers of technology since a huge acceleration connected to digital technology is occurring in the early 21st century.
Scientists have tried to explain the evident decline in youth mental health as a result of using smartphones and social media. Despite efforts of those like Jonathan Haidt to collect research and raise awareness there are other scientists - and of course a whole well-funded technology industry - that dispute these effects. It seems that we may need to consider a much wider set of causes and cultural variables such as;
- nature of the content being consumed
- normative social expectations
- 'techno-socialsation'of kids into use
- factors like pandemic and social decline
- parental attitudes and behaviours
- school and workplace influences
That is why we're trying to synthesise ideas from psychoanalysis with those from computer science and digital-rights research to get a bigger picture.
Epistemic crisis on the street
BBC reporter Marianna Spring has extensively covered trolling. In particular her coverage of "disinformation" and "conspiracy theories" around victims of terrorists bombings is worth thinking about. In the fashion of Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux, she lets victims and perpetrators speak honestly of harms and feelings. There are cohorts of people who, despite seeing the horrific scars and hearing first-hand accounts, still refuse to believe the victims. They are fixated on fantastic explanations involving "crisis actors" and "government fit-ups". We note this is congruent with disorganised post-traumatic symptoms exhibited by victims of severe abuse and as such can be considered a form of dissociation, or loss of touch with reality commonly associated with psychosis. Psychosis is linked profoundly to our attachment relationships (see this article). The ability of our earliest caregives will shape our sense of reality, or lack thereof. Bowlby describes it as 'Knowing what we are not supposed to know, and feeling what we are not supposed to feel.'
Returning to the societal scale for a moment. Radical contestation and incredulity are ancient phenomena. Historians call them "interregnums". They follow big upsets like great wars, pandemics or major shifts of religious norms, scientific perspective or political might. These are times when old values and truths are put on trial. Socrates, often taken as the exemplar of sceptical enquiry, lived in the shadow of the Peloponnesian War, a deeply traumatic event in Greek history. Indeed, we take scepticism to be a virtue in scientific enquiry. In the age of AI deep-fakes and "fake news" it is becoming an even greater asset that we want to instil in our children. So when does it become pathological?
Knowledge
It's important to bear in mind that even in a cohesive, well educated society all knowledge is contentious. How do we really know anything? Philosophers of knowledge (epistemologists) speak of justified true beliefs and observed facts. Scientific empiricists want experimental evidence. Rationalistshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponnesian_War prefer logic and imagination. Social constructionists are all about networks and travelling memes. Pragmatists want "whatever works" while post-modern relativists want "whatever works for you". Authoritarians trust in "whatever you say, Sir!"
We also know that psychological personality plays a part. Some of us are more or less agreeable and open according to 5-axis models. This is a big topic in cybersecurity where we look at how easily persuaded people are by fraudsters, social engineering scams, advertising and state propaganda.
Meanwhile, all of us double-think, hide difficult beliefs behind a mask, create acceptable intimate and social versions of our truths. We are each capable of learning, with varying degrees of openness to accepting new ideas or rejecting them. It is natural to have suspicion, to know that nothing is quite what it seems and to accept ideas in degrees. Some people are even very flexible, able to cope with complex ambivalence, be fallible and hold themselves to the same scepticism they apply to the world.
Growing Fringe
Knowledge has always been under attack. Like trust, it is hard won and easily destroyed by the forces of ignorance that Emma Goldman called "The most violent element in society". Synthetic "truth" can be made, bought and sold for a few dollars. If you don't mind fudging the graphs and maths you can be a respected, tenured professor these days. Scientific research is undergoing an extraordinary crisis. Patent fraud and extortion is massive. Academia has arguably imploded in the West, becoming a deeply corrupt gravy-train, certificate racket and bonfire of intellectual wealth. Search engines are no longer reliable and publishers have locked away the world's scientific papers so nobody can examine them. An exodus of good teachers and researchers from universities find they can make better money running a YouTube channel!
Hallucinating "AI" is able to pump-out torrents of plausible fantasy. Nobody knows what is real any more, especially the tenured professors. Nothing sells so well as crazy, amusing ideas, which fuel the engine of puerile social media like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. Conspiracy theory - which is now a term that simply stands in for "implausible and unfalsifiable ideas" (no actual human conspiracy needed) - is a modern form of entertainment, much as Chindogu is a fun distraction in the field of design.
Herbert Marcuse thought science marked off so small a terrain that outside it nothing important existed that it could explain. For biological reasons of survival we choose to focus on the novel, the inexplicable and arcane, rather than what is certain. We prefer dubious news to a well researched textbook.
The Enlightenment paradox Marcuse saw was that if expanding scientific truth created a light that grew bigger and bright, so did the darkness around it. Instead of modernity bringing more psychological security through knowledge it had the opposite effect. The straws we clutch at in fear have got wilder each year as knowledge and meaning diverge. We have more interest in ley-lines, crystal bothering, shadow governments, aliens, cover-ups and X-Files type silliness than ever.
Greed and pressure for money created widespread fraud in science while lust for political power made outrageous propaganda perfectly normal. Scandals have collapsed the credibility of all major institutions, from the church to schools, police, health and now most of our civic infrastructure falls under the mark of suspicion. Computer security is a complete joke. We carry around devices that are treacherous and insecure, made and controlled by "surveillance capitalists" who exploit or personal data. The ecosystem of knowledge we now inhabit, the "noosphere", has become toxic and hostile. Satirists, fiction writers and comedians say they can no longer do relevant work in a society where reality outpaces them.
None of the goods or services we depend on are reliable. Customer service is absent and companies tell us bare-faced lies. High street shops and bank branches have closed. Money has become unreliable, even cash. One is never sure if it will be possible to pay for something, whether the goods will be delivered, or whether public transport will run or whether the roads will be open tomorrow. Bait and switch tactics known in the tech world as "enshitification" are now normal. The law seems silent and impotent on all these matters, jounalists fear reporting truth and our politicians are openly corrupt and shameless.
So, we must consider peoples relation to truth and trust within this environment.
Today there is no end of alternative explanations for anything, and you can always find a group who will support your beliefs. You can also change your beleifs as whim and fashion dictate, a left-wing environmentalist this week, a far-right industrialist next week… consistency and integrity are obsolete. By continuously changing your mind you can "always be right".
Fifty years into "the information age" we see it's led to a complete collapse of communications technology to support consensus and harmony. We've fragmented the world more than ever. As Douglas Adams joked about the Babel Fish "it lead to more and bloodier wars than anything in history", we can probably expect exactly that from "AI" real-time machine translation. We're now beyond mere "post-modern relativism" into a full breakdown of the way we obtain, encode and share reliable knowledge. If anyone doubts this spend an hour on TikTok.
Culture, Cohesion And Technology
So the conditions for knowledge are also set by culture. Societies that value long-term, stable and coherent knowledge are different from mere "information societies" like ours, that dance across the surface of ever changing data. In 2024 we live "in the moment". This week a breakthrough scientific study says that eating bananas is a cure-all that extends your life. Next week a new study says bananas will kill you. Nobody cares, because to do so would send you mad. We all know that "everything is bullshit" and as with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four "Newspeak" the correct response is to nod along in acceptance.
We understand how echo chambers and AI cause positive feedback that poisons society on its own intellectual excrement. But there are certain social conditions necessary for this technology to arise, and find enthusiastic favour amongst users. We've created those conditions by destroying the value of truth. Even if technically possible, ChatGPT and Twitter cold not have existed in a society with a strong consensual reality like that of the 19th or 20th century. They would simply be dismissed as "mindless jibber-jabber machines".
Consider the role radio played in times of world war, national isolation and common struggle. While the Churchillian mythos of "Blitz Spirit" is probably overplayed, there was a time in the 1930's and 1940's where families gathered around the wireless, afraid and hungry for news from the front. Broadcast media sintered culture into a heterogeneous rock. Of course there were pacifist dissenters, Nazi apologists and even sincere supporters as depicted in Kazuo Ishiguro's powerful Remains of the Day, but few dared stick their heads above the parapet and declare at the pub, as they would today, that "Hitler is a crisis actor invented by the Jews to cover up a collaboration with the Saucer People".
Such a singular information source as broadcast radio could hardly be further from our echo-chambers of personally targeted emotional slop. Today everyone experiences the same "secret special relationship" with social-media "news", like the victim of childhood sexual abuse. Don't tell anyone about "our little secret".
What you see, hear and read is cloistered and that has a bizarrely damaging effect on your social relations. It's picked for you by an algorithm and has no connection with others around you of similar vocation, IQ, social class or interests. Modern digital media dissolves consensual reality and shared truth.
Disorganisation of the nation
Attachment theory starts with John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott. Disorganised attachment has roots in the absent, defective caregiver who is inconsistent, frightened or scary. Mary Main and Judith Solomon pioneered research into what happens to our working model of reality where there is an absence of reliable ground truth and direction, when there's no one really in charge - no adults in the room. Political scientists recognise this experience writ-large by nations with failed leadership.
Disorganised personality comes from seeing dysfunction as normal. When mother is a heroin addict gouged-out on the sofa, unconscious, or a drunk dad is sometimes kindly and sometimes monstrous, we bake in ambivalent circuits of love-hate. Nobody acknowledges the situation is dire, even brothers, sisters, and teachers may insist nothing's wrong, because that's too much to admit. There's what psychologists like Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann call a spiral of silence or percepticide.
Because no "responsible person" is able to offer help we experience "fear without solution". For example, this is how many feel about climate change; there is a vague notion that "maybe scientists can sort this out", while what we see is leaders and industrialists futzing around blundering from one crisis to the next, at best just making things worse and at worst cynically pocketing opportunistic profit.
That's the leadership my country, Britain, has had for all of my life. Thinking back to the last Labour governments lies on Iraq, the two million protesters made non-existent, erased by complicit media lackeys. Our own government hacked together a plagiarised masters thesis and twisted it into eloquent spin about immanent doom, chemical weapons just forty-five minutes away. Weapons that never existed but justified a war of aggression. Then in came the Tories; derelict, ineffectual piss-taking and lawless. We've grown used to having a government that are nakedly criminal.
The Unites States has a similar traumatised history of buried lies, since the last world war; Vietnam, Kennedy, MK-ULTRA, Watergate, Iran-Contra, WTC attacks, Snowden - a litany of events drenched in lies and "conspiracy" which go forever unresolved, continually ruminated and reexamined, but never grieved and moved-on from. Justice is never reckoned and no closure ever obtained. Echos of these events build up in the collective psyche. The information age does nothing to help us process, analyse, debate and heal these wounds. It simply creates a kaleidoscope of fractal fragments that irritate the soul of a nation. Digital technology prevents us from burying these "bones of Polyneices".
No wonder nobody believes in anything any more. Humans mainly learn by example and experiencing competent care and leadership. For three whole generations that just hasn't been there. There's been nothing credible to emulate. We've been left, as it were to the wolves, of spin doctors, advertisers, fantasists and vain foolish "celebrities" and billionaires to whom no real person could ever compare.
George Carlin nailed it when he said, the face of true existential horror is when you get to middle age and realise that all those idiots you went to school with are now running things.
What happens when people have no reliable authority or ground truth to grip is we fill in the gaps with fancies, fantasies, stories, hallucinations that make us feel whole. We're now building digital "AI" machines to amplify that. Any story that gives sense to fractured, painful madness is better than reckoning with reality - that we are abandoned and alone. Often those stories involve malevolent others, onto whom we can project the abuses of our derelict fathers and mothers (Emmanuel Goldstein). Our fantasy leaders and attachment objects, like phones, cars and other possessions, become so central to our defences that if anyone dares to question them, to prick our comfort bubble, then we'll attack them instead.
Conclusions
Disinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda and fake news are much more complex than we think. Certainly there are malevolent outsiders who want to "attack or way of life", to sap liberal democracy and sow seeds of division. And certainly there are mischievous elements within society who profit from discord. But we also create toxic narratives and ideas for ourselves, to meet a deep psychological need. A traumatised and psychologically disorganised society seeks to lick its wounds with whatever comforts it can conjure. Right now one is that "AI is going to solve it all at the eleventh hour". It isn't. A permenant polycrisis keeps us shopping as usual to numb the anxiety.
We live in a society in which solid truths are few and far between. We are losing epistemic security. It is mainly ourselves who have created those conditions, seeking easy profit, efficiency, the path of least resistance to cold comfort. Digital technology has made almost every facet of this problem worse, yet we keep giving our children smartphones and social media instead of history books and explanations, and we continue to think technology will magically provide the answers. That is just one more comforting disorganised fantasy we cling to.
Let's remember that security of our nations, institutions and individual lives is a composite. It includes social and psychological security. Knowing that systems and experts can be relied on not to bullshit and betray us is the core of a society. To build a genuinely secure society we must deal with those who undermine our epistemic security for their own ends, through greed, misunderstanding, negligence and malice.