Where Are These Angels?

More thoughts on Jonathan Haidt and the theme of America used to have unity, but now social media has divided us and destroyed our trust in institutions.

First, I think that this maneuver is the political strategy of a mediocre elite, with varying degrees of consciousness. The limit to which this may be true has to do with the spectacular loss of historical knowledge, which leaves a big part of the population feeling pretty sure that they’re the first people in the history of the universe who have ever encountered meanness. But the constant recourse to the language of “bullying” in the face of ordinary disagreement is a tell:

If you disagree with someone and only get the response that you’re vicious and a bully, you’re talking to an asshole; currently, it’s close to being the whole argument of the American governing class.¹ The point of this kind of rhetoric is to win an argument by not allowing the other side to have it, and this seems like not really a mystery. See Jonathan Haidt’s reference to the high levels of trust in countries run by a “stable, competent autocracy.” Political elites all over the free world keep panting and sighing about how much they admire China’s dictatorship, and get a room, man.

A related diversionary strategy is the constant recourse to the argument that people who disagree are victims of disinformation, the pivot in which “I disagree with this policy” is met with horror that the peasants have been tricked by the Internet. For example, did you know that some people have fallen for the lie, spread by Russian bots, that the Covid-19 vaccines aren’t as safe and effective as Pfizer and Dr. Fauci said? It’s hard to believe how far we’ve fallen.

Aaron Ginn @aginnt

Let’s go back in time to 3/29/21 “No we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person… The virus does not infect them…It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to get more people.”

But the biggest problem in Haidt’s essay is a giant omission: While Haidt writes at length about what the psychology of social media has done to the public — how it’s eroded our trust, how it’s fomented tribalism and point-scoring behavior, how it’s trapped us in the pattern of confirmation bias, “making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theories,” and so on — he never mentions the possibility that the psychology of social media has had the same effect on our institutions and the people who run them.

And so he asks questions like this: “What is the likelihood that Congress will enact major reforms that strengthen democratic institutions or detoxify social media?” Go look at Eric Swalwell’s Twitter feed: There’s your example of the kind of wise solon who can lead the deluded peasantry out of their social media daze.

The closest Haidt gets to noticing this is a long middle passage in which institutions are acted upon by the mental cancer of social media:

This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.

In this formulation, professors and journalists and politicians know the Truth, but ohhhhh, reader, they dare not speak it! The rabble, their minds reshaped by social media, will abuse them! The argument is that people have had their minds warped, but professors and journalists haven’t. Elites are acted upon, but have no role in the action. The short response to this is “Taylor Lorenz.” We’re all trapped in here together, and the crisis is a social media crisis all the way through.

The very problem, it seems to me, is that institutions have been warped by social media mentality — by the transition to performativity, to posturing and signaling, to an institutional conception of reality as a series of symbols that are performed. We have to pass my Build Back Better plan so we can add trillions of dollars in new government spending to the economy, which will get a handle on inflation!

We’ve lost trust in our institutions because our institutions are led by people who are looking for Twitter points, not effective action; they can’t put the wet stuff on the red stuff.

Social media is the problem, but not in anything like the way Haidt describes it.

1. A few years ago, my small-town city government was bleeding staff, and kept losing department heads. Employees were running away from city hall like the place was on fire; we had five finance directors in two years, and repeatedly turned over the whole planning and finance staff. Our fire department has one fire station, and our mayor posted a picture of herself on Instagram as she proudly greeted “our four new firefighters.”

So I wrote a letter asking the city manager to explain what was happening, and to describe her plan for slowing the losses, and I circulated that letter around town for other signatures.

A few days after I put it in the mail, I started to get phone calls and text messages asking me if it was true that I’m a Nazi. A member of the school board posted on Facebook that he believed I may have been on assignment as a white nationalist secret agent, doing undercover work to infiltrate the community and attack it from within. (I was so upset that I reported that comment to my handler at headquarters.)

And that was the entire response I got to that letter: official silence and a vicious whispering campaign led by elected officials.