The Trust Deficit – Part II
So how did we get here? Where did the trust deficit come from? It stems from a combination of things.
First and foremost, a well funded effort to obfuscate any claim at all that threatens to upset the interests of those who hold wealth and power.
That effort has been frighteningly effective. Take climate change. It really is the perfect example because it demonstrates the impressive scope that the obfuscation effort is capable of spanning. It’s one thing to take credible science or some sort of quantifiable data that people accept as trustworthy and flip it on its head by providing contrarian science and data. That’s not too difficult. You just need to find or hire dissenting scientists. Finding a dissenting voice isn’t tough; there are always those who go against the grain. Take this numb nuts with the impressive sounding credentials and substitute a flat Earth for climate change skepticism.
“In 1956, Samuel Shenton, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Geographic Society took over the Universal Zetetic Society and helped to found the International Flat Earth Society, which he ran, as "organizing secretary" from his home in Dover, in Britain. When satellite images taken from outer space showed the Earth as a sphere rather than flat the society were undaunted; Shenton remarked: "It's easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye."
Or, you hire them. Like big tobacco did/does, and pay for junk science. Again, easy. All you need is money.
And both are very effective means of providing the contrarian “evidence” needed to obfuscate a debate based solely on data. Once you have contrarian data you feed it to the pundits who saturate the airwaves with the new data, and only the new data. You never hear Hannity or Beck reference any piece of information that doesn’t support their narrative, infinite as that information may be.
If you’re successful in poisoning the data reservoir, the objective is to sway the general public, now completely befuddled by which facts it can trust – the real ones or the manufactured ones – towards your side of the aisle by reinforcing the contrarian data that you’ve manufactured with “common sense” talking points. Once again the pundits are called in, and since nobody can be sure which data is accurate, an appeal to common sense is made.
But what if common sense is overwhelmingly and inherently aligned against your cause as it is for the conservatives in the so called climate change debate? Is it possible to influence people’s minds to the point that they’ll not only reject trusted data – like consensus amongst the scientific community that include esteemed groups like the National Academy of Sciences - but reject common sense as well? You bet your ass.
Think about it. What makes more intuitive sense?
• That climate change consensus is the result of a broadly organized and centralized international conspiracy amongst money grubbing scientists or…
• An epidemic of group think has suddenly begun plaguing a group of people (scientists) who have been trained their entire lives to reject group think and established theory, and who use doubt as a fundamental pillar of methodology within their discipline or…
• That entrenched wealth and power - big oil in this case - are intentionally obfuscating the issue in an attempt to maintain wealth and power?
It’s utterly ridiculous. And there’s plenty more.
We can see the effects of fossil fuel emissions every day with our own eyes in the form of smog above our cities. A simple Google search will provide you all the video of melting glaciers you can handle. It makes intuitive sense to infer that the giant plumes of smoke we see shooting into the sky from factories cause the giant clouds of smog we see hovering over Mexico City, Los Angeles, and industrial China, places with tons of factories. And it makes sense that the dramatic increase in carbon emissions as a result of rampant global industrialization is the cause of increasing temperatures and melting ice caps. It doesn’t require a leap of faith. Pollution wasn’t a problem, but then we started burning tons of shit, and as the population exploded we burned even more shit, and low and behold the planet got sick. A child could put these things together.
The experts reinforce such obvious and natural conclusions. It makes sense to trust our experts; we trust them with our lives every single day. This is the same group of people who using the exact same methodology have figured out how to put a man on the moon and fight disease. If the top ten thousand doctors in the world diagnosed you with cancer would you ask for another opinion or start treatment?
It all adds up. You have to be taught not to reach these conclusions because not reaching them is counterintuitive.
But here we are. Day by day less and less Americans are convinced of man made climate change in spite of the facts. We’ve just learned that the last decade was the warmest on record. We’ve just learned that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, the first was 2005, and all of the next warmest years have occurred since 1998. The Greenland Ice Sheet is going bye-bye, which means I’ll probably have to move because the ocean is estimated to rise 21 feet once it’s all melted away. Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire just broke a record that’s stood for 132 years when the ice melted earlier than ever before, a result of temperatures in Concord seven and a half degrees higher than normal. These aren’t wing-nut sources of science straddling the fringe, this shit comes from NASA.
If all of the data coming from the sources we have historically trusted are saying the same thing, and if what’s being said is directly in line with what we witness with our own eyes, and if every fiber of common sense engrained in us is aligned with the data and the visual evidence, then why are we increasingly skeptical?
Why does increased skepticism seem more prominent amongst conservatives than among liberals?
And why is this increasing doubt a phenomenon unique to Americans? (We don’t even register on the poll. Only 49% of Americans believe that global warming is the result of human activities according to this Gallup poll. South Korea and Japan top the list at 92% and 91% repectively.)
Poll
Is it a coincidence that the people whose skepticism has increased most dramatically are those most likely to frequent American conservative media outlets? Of course not.
It’s the obfuscation stupid. Contrarian data bought and paid for by entrenched wealth and power and drilled into our skulls by the pundits they hire, whom we trust. It’s how political capital is purchased in America today, plain and simple.
Maybe the overwhelming data supporting man made climate change is just the result of a global conspiracy amongst the nefarious scientific community or perhaps it stems from a worldwide epidemic of group think suddenly plaguing a discipline historically rooted in doubt, and maybe burning shit really doesn’t cause smog, and even if it does maybe smog isn’t dangerous to humans or the environment, and maybe the ice caps melting is just a coinciding correlation of exploding industrialism and not the result of it, and maybe the planet getting warmer is just the planet cycling, and maybe all of the scientists have gone collectively stupid at the same time.
Makes sense I guess and I hope it’s true because I don’t want to move. But on the off chance that there is such a thing as man made climate change, I’d like to suggest that we set up filtration systems in the homes of those promulgating the skepticism and funnel all carbon emissions through them before environmental exposure. If it really is harmless, they shouldn’t mind.
Part III to be posted soon.
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