Fake news and reality: when lying is convenient for the powerful

As already written in the past, one of the consequences of the coronavirus epidemic still spreading has been the birth of “verification committees” on the merits or not of the news concerning the pandemic virus: miraculous drugs and remedies, number of infected, sick, of dead, theories about the origin of the virus and so on.

 

The risk is that if a social and political system, especially a democracy, feels the need for certification of the news by committees of experts, who are also certified, this system, this democracy, ends up silencing every possible voice of dissent, any possible opinion different from the current narrative. Why limit yourself to the virus when you can go much further?

 

In fact, if it is all too easy point an accusing finger and indulge in a derisive smile with someone (perhaps in search of a little notoriety that takes him or her away for a while from his or her banal daily existence) who starts talking about reptilians who live a hollow Earth or rattles about a flat Earth, how much more difficult is it to counter the lies of the powerful, be they people of government or of some formidable corporation?

 

It is not a question asked for the first time and attempts to find adequate answers have inaugurated a particularly fruitful strand of studies. Enrica Perucchietti [1], Italian woman of great sensitivity and culture, writer and essayist, agreed to answer some questions on this very topic.

 

 

A) It is an English expression that indicates news erroneous, false, contained in articles and radio and television contents that present invented, deceptive information, created to misinform and make viral news artifacts. Fake news and hoaxes spread because they take hold of the imagination and because the average user does not delve into the news, he stops to read only the title and the anticipation and runs to share it because, in the era of post-truth, what he reads “resonates” with his thought and therefore wants what he is reading to be true.

In good faith, journalists have to make mistakes because they have less and less time to devote to checking the sources and therefore it is easy for false news to spread. The attraction for gossip, insinuations, spicy or rough background, the morbid has always taken hold of the imagination and allows the contagion of even shamelessly false news. Then, part of the mainstream information is deliberately falsified upstream, giving rise to regime propaganda. In fact, the mass media have, over the years, disseminated, and continue to do so, countless fake news (think for example of the notorious Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which later proved non-existent), therefore resorting to sophisticated forms of manipulation that we could compare to war propaganda. In my book “Fake News”, I document countless cases of hoaxes spread by the mainstream media, some of which have gone down in history and are still believed to be true.

 

Because if on the one hand the web is full of absurd news, on the other also TV, radio and newspapers take loud noises as the sounding board of the government line, in this shaping and manipulating public opinion through the fear and emotions that go to hit people's imagination and “belly”.

 

The feeling is that the truth of the facts is increasingly weak, even virtual and illusory and that therefore the increasingly confused and bewildered citizens must rely on a self-declared governmental body that is reliable in order to be informed in the correct way, wary of any “alternative” information coming, for example, from the web.

 

 

That is, the intent is to discredit the truth, explains Alain de Benoist, presenting it as a “great story” that can no longer be believed. Everything becomes “relative”, virtual if it were only for governments and “information professionals” to oversee the “truth”. Counter-current researchers, who place themselves outside this sphere, are branded as unreliable and untruthful, especially if their aim is to show another “side” of history or denounce what governments want to cover up instead.

 

I agree with my friend Marcello Foa, who edited the preface of my book, when in his book “Gli stregoni della notizia Atto II” [2] writes that the controversy about fake news and post truths aims not at guaranteeing better information, but certified information: only news with the sticker will be considered as such. All the others can even be expelled from the web and, with the pretext of fake news, it will be possible to obscure social pages of uncomfortable thinkers or non-mainstream bloggers, effectively introducing censorship.

 

 

A) Because on the one hand fake news has always been combined with propaganda and on the other because in the last three years they have been the Trojan horse, that is, the pretext to propose the introduction of liberticidal laws and the establishment of commissions and task forces on censorship. In other words, they are becoming a pick to unhinge the freedom of information and thought and to introduce a form of Orwellian psychoreate [3].

 

 

A) I think so and that it is unacceptable. The mainstream battle against fake news, taking advantage of the current health emergency, has led to the establishment of an Orwellian Miniver [3] and seems to re-propose a new form of McCarthyism 2.0 [4]: ​​this is an articulated witch-hunt that has the goal of repressing dissent. It exploits the spread of hoaxes on the web to lead to the approval of a censorship of the Net and more generally of alternative information, coming to speculate on the introduction of sanctions. This task force, like all similar initiatives that have preceded it and that will follow, has the objective not of guaranteeing better information, but the creation of certified information accompanied by censorship: only the news with the sticker will be consider OK. All the others can even be expelled from the web and, with the pretext of fake news, it will be possible to obscure social pages, sites and blogs of uncomfortable thinkers, effectively introducing censorship.

 

The risk of legitimizing a new Ministry of Truth [3] that supervises what is true and what is not and which silences “dissident” opinions becomes concrete, as well as the risk that this leads to the creeping introduction of a form of Orwellian psychoreate. 

 

 

A) Yes, an individual completely depersonalized, emptied, filled with the vision and mantras of the system, easy puppet to control, manipulate and heterodirect. It is the basic theory that I developed with Gianluca Marletta in “Governo Globale”, “La Fabbrica della Manipolazione” and in “Unisex”, namely that globalism exploited and indeed induced the depersonalization of the individual to make people a-morph, liquid even in their sexual identity, to be able to manipulate and control them better. The social distancing, which evokes the Anti-Sex League of Orwellian memory, and more generally the politics of hatred, fear and loneliness to which we have been subjected for months, follows the attempt to destroy the intermediate bodies (family, companions, friends, etc.) making people more and more alone, bewildered and afraid, prey to their emotions and more easily plagiarized. For Attali, future generations will be “designed”, will be born in factories within artificial womb and sex will be released from love and a stable sentimental relationship. In short, eugenics will embrace ectogenesis, cloning and even polyamory. In “Lexicon for the future”, Attali went so far as to imagine that a man will in the future become a mother, that is, give birth to a baby on his own, “bringing the embryo into one's belly or making it develop in a non-human uterus”.

What for many is dystopia, for others, those who hold power, is instead a future towards which to hover with spread wings, like the young Icarus. Except that dragged on the “wings” of technological enthusiasm, we risk smashing everyone.

 

 

A) I specifically made the example of Icarus. Because “titanism” (and more generally hỳbris) is a fundamental characteristic for framing the future that awaits us and the transhumanism, the basic vision of most of the architects of globalism. The Greeks spoke of this ancient sin of omnipotence which, as I explain in “Cyberman”, the myth of progress and research in the post-human field seem to have brushed up today: the act of arrogance understood as exceeding the allowed limit that inevitably leads to defeat and catastrophe.

 

The impression is that today Man deliberately tries to humiliate the divine and Nature by placing himself against them with an act of pride, without however thinking about the possible consequences (or perhaps those behind this project know it very well and run at full speed towards a technoutopia). It is as if we were in the hands of young Icarus attracted by the yearning for the infinite or seduced by the singing of the sirens of the technique.

 

Here arises the obsession of Man, to snatch from Nature the privilege of creating in order to become himself creator, of making his own universe, of overcoming the limits imposed by his own species and being himself God. We should instead stop and reflect on those limits that are crossing, examining all the possible consequences of the pioneering adventure in which Big Tech is dragging us. Consequences that will surely affect future generations that the architects of globalism want to shape on the dystopian model of Aldous Huxley's “The Brave New World” which in fact appears extraordinarily similar to the visions reported by Attali: future generations will be “designed”, they will be born in factories within artificial womb and sex will be released from love and a stable sentimental relationship. In short, eugenics will embrace ectogenesis, cloning and even polyamory.

 

 

A) Because the population has been terrified through the shock theory. Fear is just one of the many pieces in the process of social manipulation that power adopts to carry out policies that would otherwise be unpopular but that the perception of terror makes legitimated. In a state of fear, in fact, public opinion feels disoriented, lost and needs guidance to the point of passively submitting to an authority and passively accepting any proposal or intervention from above. In recent months we have been subjected to therapeutic terrorism, to a real health criminology, as the co-author of “Coronavirus. Il nemico invisibile”, the lawyer Luca D’Auria, defines it, in which media kept and continue to keep public opinion under constant fear with the bulletin of the dead and with catastrophic forecasts.

 

 

A) Because they were “dissidents”, they immediately manifested critical issues by questioning the mainstream narrative. This is not allowed: the mastiffs of the single thought take care of bringing back to the sheepfold the black sheep that dare to disagree. Especially those that show a documented, complex and articulated vision of reality. The dictatorship of the single thought pours into the media boycott and online persecution of some thinkers if they are uncomfortable. Certain issues should not be talked about in order not to offend some minorities who seem to have taken critical thinking as hostage. Those who allow themselves to do so should cut out a textile straps, embroider the initial “H” of Heretic and sew it on the clothes. After all, even witchcraft when persecuted was assimilated to heresy.

 

 

A) Exactly, we have been “educated”, indoctrinated and manipulated step by step for decades and in recent months, under the pretext of the health emergency, the seeds of that gradual gentle manipulation have come to light. 

 

 

A) It will depend if we continue to show fearful, frightened, passive and predisposed to obey uncritically the authority.

 

 

A) As I already said in Fake News, journalism will continue to be fundamental in orienting us in the sea of ​​sources and news that threatens to overwhelm us every day, but we must also be learning to hone our discernment and critical sense skills, whether it is of information that comes from the mainstream media or the net. We must be the first to immunize ourselves from hoaxes and fake news, whether they come from the system or from websites that do it. We cannot passively and uncritically rely on an authority or follow with blind obedience whatever news is transmitted to us by a certified media. We must also be aware that we are immersed in propaganda and that if we do not want to find ourselves in a dystopian society such as those imagined by essays and visionary novelists, we are still in time to “wake up” and regain possession of our future, knowing that, still quoting Orwell, «see what is in front of our nose requires constant effort». Freedom, like truth, also requires constant commitment. And today both are at risk. Because we are disoriented by fear and clouded by emotion.

 

Video on YouTube (in Italian): https://youtu.be/qrVGyBQsYho

Video on Yandex drive: https://yadi.sk/i/qLXvum5QagAChA 

 

[1] Sorry, Italian only: https://www.ibs.it/libri/autori/enrica-perucchietti  

[2] Sorry, Italian only: https://www.ibs.it/stregoni-della-notizia-atto-secondo-libro-marcello-foa/e/9788862506793?inventoryId=94041126 

[3] Orwell, 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four  

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism  

[5] Italian only: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Tarro 

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky