To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism. As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.
The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.
The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.
The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.
Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.”
The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.”
Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.
Post-truth is pre-fascism.
Author: Ryan Boren
Non-compliant neurodivergent. Passion-based learning, neurodiversity, social model of disability, design for real life, inclusion, open web, open source. he/they
I added selections from THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM: Autism, Transmasculine Identity, and Invisibility to Neurodiversity and Gender Non-conformity, Dysphoria and Fluidity.
The intersection of being both autistic and transgender is more common than one might think. While the dialogue around autism and gender identity is expanding, I have a bit of trouble figuring out where I fit into the whole picture. So, I decided to do my own research, and while this subject is a fairly new field of study, I found some pretty astounding statistics:
In 2014, a U.S. study of 147 children (ages 6 to 18) diagnosed with ASD found that autistic participants were 7.59 times more likely to express gender variance than the comparison groups. Another study, conducted in the UK in 2015, involved 166 parents of teenagers with Gender Dysphoria (63% were assigned female-at-birth.) Based on parents’ report of their children on the Social Responsiveness Scale, the study found that 54% of the teenagers scored in the mild/moderate or severe clinical range for Autism.
The relationship has only begun to be explored in research in recent years, but I’ve come to realize that there are a lot of autistic trans people out there in the world. As someone who very much values human connection and simultaneously struggles with it, I have to say that looking at those figures provided me an amount of comfort. I discovered that there are a lot of people just like me.
Being autistic and being transgender certainly each has their own respective challenges, though one that they share is a lack of societal acceptance due to stigma. Many people still believe that who I am as a transmasculine person is inherently invalid, just like many other people still believe autism is some kind of tragedy that is to be cured. In contrast, I feel very strongly that who I am as a person is heavily dependent on both my trans and autistic identities, and that they are beautiful things.
Source: THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM: Autism, Transmasculine Identity, and Invisibility
I updated “Compassion is not coddling. Design for real life.” with a selection from “Dear Developer, The Web Isn’t About You | sonniesedge.co.uk”.
“Edge case” is, to be frank, a phrase that should be banned from all developer conversations (and then tattooed onto the forehead of anyone who continues to use it).
When we say “Edge Case” we mean “Stress Case”. In their book, Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher point out that what we glibly call an “edge case” is normally an enormously stressful event for a user.
It often accompanies high emotions, stress, physical problems, financial problems, etc. When we discount and dismiss the “edge case”, we’re actually saying “I don’t care about that particular user’s stressful situation”.
Source: Dear Developer, The Web Isn’t About You | sonniesedge.co.uk
I also dropped in these lines.
Without the social model and intersectionality, we’re just bikeshedding injustice. There is no path to inclusive design that does not involve direct confrontation with injustice. “If a direct confrontation of injustice is missing from our strategies or initiatives or movements, that means we are recreating the conditions we’re pretending to want to destroy.”
Better than before; still need work; slow iteration.
I updated “Anxiety, Ambiguity, and Autistic Perception ” with a selection from “On the Double-Mindedness Developed Among the Different – An Intense World”.
In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois says that blacks have a sort of doubleness in them not found among whites. Blacks cannot just “be themselves,” but must always think about how they are being perceived by whites. This creates a sense that you are always of two minds: that you are not only thinking and doing, but that you are thinking about how others perceive you, and adjust accordingly. Whites never have to deal with this. Being the majority and having the majority power, they can just be themselves without worry about how anybody is thinking about them.
Du Bois would probably not be surprised if he learned that other minorities were put in similar situations in the U.S., but it probably didn’t occur to him that there were people out there with different kinds of minds, and that they too would develop such a doubleness.
I know all about this double-mindedness, because I experience it constantly. I not only have to think about what I’m going to say or do, but I have to think about how others might take it. I can either just say or do whatever I want as I want and hope that I don’t do something that will set people off, or I can always consciously think about everything I say or do before I say or do it, testing against what I expect the expectations are (and hoping I’m getting those right). If it takes me a moment to respond to something, it’s because I’m going through all this nonsense to make sure I don’t say or do something wrong.
Source: On the Double-Mindedness Developed Among the Different – An Intense World
I updated “The Pipeline Problem and the Meritocracy Myth” with an embed of this tweet.
I updated “Design is Tested at the Edges: Intersectionality, The Social Model of Disability, and Design for Real Life ” with selections from “Basic Principles for Equity Literacy”.
The Direct Confrontation Principle: There is no path to equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with inequity. There is no path to racial equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with interpersonal, institutional, and structural racism. “Equity” approaches that fail to directly confront inequity play a significant role in sustaining inequity.
The “Poverty of Culture” Principle: Inequities are primarily power and privilege problems, not primarily cultural problems. Equity requires power and privilege solutions, not just cultural solutions. Frameworks that attend to diversity purely in vague cultural terms, like the “culture of poverty,” are no threat to inequity.
The Prioritization Principle: Each policy and practice decision should be examined through the question, “How will this impact the most marginalized members of our community?” Equity is about prioritizing their interests.
The “Fix Injustice, Not Kids” Principle: Educational outcome disparities are not the result of deficiencies in marginalized communities’ cultures, mindsets, or grittiness, but rather of inequities. Equity initiatives focus, not on fixing marginalized people, but on fixing the conditions that marginalize people.
“Equity initiatives focus, not on fixing marginalized people, but on fixing the conditions that marginalize people.”
I updated “Mindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideology” with selections from “Palo Alto, Day 2 – Teaching Machines”.
despite the popular notion that “Skinnerism” has been excised from education, it certainly has not; indeed, behaviorism is a core feature of almost all ed-tech.
I updated “I’m Autistic. Here’s what I’d like you to know.” with selections from “An Autistic Burnout – The Autistic Advocate”.
If you saw someone going through Autistic Burnout would you be able to recognise it? Would you even know what it means? Would you know what it meant for yourself if you are an Autistic person? The sad truth is that so many Autistic people, children and adults, go through this with zero comprehension of what is happening to them and with zero support from their friends and families.
If you’re a parent reading this, I can confidently say that I bet that no Professional, from diagnosis, through any support services you’re lucky enough to have been given, will have mentioned Autistic Burnout or explained what it is. If you’re an Autistic person, nobody will have told you about it either, unless you’ve engaged with the Autistic community.
Autistic Burnout is an integral part of the life of an Autistic person that affects us pretty much from the moment we’re born to the day we die, yet nobody, apart from Autistic people really seem to know about it…
