(In)Eloquence May Set Fire to Reason

(1) 5G was the cause of SARS-CoV-2. 

(2) COVID-19 spread through the installation of 5G masts. 

(3) Bill Gates implanted microchips into vaccines to surreptitiously track his inoculated victims. 

(4) COVID-19 was a hoax. 

(5) School shootings in the United States are orchestrated by tyrannical big government Democrats using "crisis actors" to push through gun control legislation and eviscerate the Second Amendment.

(6) A Cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic paedophiles conspired against President Donald J. Trump during his tenure. 

(7) The armed insurrection against the U.S. Capitol on January 6th 2021, was staged by: (a) FBI; (b) Democrats; (c) Antifa; (d) it was just a "tourist visit"?

(8) Joseph R. Biden, Jr., despite his reputation of being a "Sleepy Joe", executed the most sophisticated subversion of American democracy, with help from Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro from beyond the grave; imported bamboo ballots from Asia; midnight dumps of hundreds of thousands of manufactured votes; scores of dead people's votes (universally for him and not a single one for his cheated and magnanimous opponent); using the U.S. Embassy in Rome and Italian satellites (in cahoots with the Vatican, perhaps) to remotely switch votes. 

To quote John McEnroe: "You Cannot Be Serious." 

I like a good conspiracy theory just as much as the next idiot (okay, maybe not that much), but I'd like a kernel of believability. Was JFK really assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald? Was the moon landing faked? It's a possibility. Is it a certainty? No, not quite willing to go that far. And I'm going to need much more concrete evidence before I stake my all on any beliefs or even wear the hat and t-shirt. Show me the receipts; not just what your uncle said on Facebook, or a meme shared by a "smart friend". Tragically, the laughter dies down upon the realisation that millions of American citizens fervently believe such incomprehensible, stupefying nonsense. If a few crackpots wearing tin-foil hats believe that they are ruled by shape-shifting lizard people or that the Earth is flat, we can safely ignore them. We can have a chuckle and move on. But what happens when over 30% of the population, over 100 million Americans, believe that the incumbent President is illegitimate and that he orchestrated a fraud on his citizenry that would have surpassed even the wildest expectations of SPECTRE (re: the super-evil, super-shadowy, super-secretive organisation that is the thorn in James Bond's side)? It's hard to laugh at that unless done in a fatalistic way. The proportion of individuals believing something bears no relationship to its truthfulness. But there is strength in numbers. Especially if those numbers constitute angry, disenchanted, disillusioned and oft-armed individuals. 

The maintenance of any democratic order is premised on the widespread acceptance within the polity of elementary ground rules. We allow, indeed we must encourage, the most robust and uninhibited public discourse, free from governmental control and social intimidation. Disagreements, even profound ones, must be resolved peacefully within pre-existing legal frameworks. Those who exhaust legal remedies must learn to live with the outcomes. That is what it means to live in a Republic where the rule of law is king; not the pathological desires of one man. However, systemic denial of reality and a total mistrust in any institutional processes make the maintenance of civic order impossible. Any system of government, even one as brilliantly designed as the U.S. Constitution, with its structural protections and carefully delineated separation of powers is ultimately as good as the living, breathing mortals operating under and within such a Constitutional order. 

What is the remedy to such febrile climes? What is the antidote to such seizures of delusion and fantasy? What the hell do we do to quell the tides of misinformation? The answer is both disarmingly simple and frighteningly discomforting. Sovereignty lies with the people and the people alone. The whole experiment either survives or collapses by the aggregate choices of the rulers of the Nation; the citizens. Enlightenment cannot spring forth from self-serving and craven public officials if those very officials dance to the hysterical and unreasoned tune of those who back them. The Founding Fathers knew that the Republic could not survive both ignorant and free. As Thomas Jefferson noted over two centuries ago:

"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."

We cannot expect talismanic corrections from social media corporations to protect us from misinformation or even the crushing power of the law to silence the peddlers of falsehood by handing the State a freewheeling authority to criminalise falsehoods simpliciter. Such naive avenues will not open the eyes of people when the truth is staring them straight in the face. If you adamantly believe that two plus two equal five, no moderation policy or governmental censorship will convince you otherwise. In fact, such attempts will usually have the obverse effect. 

In 1925, in an epoch of calamitous intolerance, the United States Supreme Court decided a case called Gitlow v. New York. A majority of the Court upheld the conviction of Benjamin Gitlow under a New York Criminal Anarchy statute for nothing more than publishing a document called the "Left Wing Manifesto" in a radical newspaper entitled The Revolutionary Age. Imbuing the revolutionary ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution for America's socialist to embrace, the document called for "accomplishing the "Communist Revolution" by a militant and "revolutionary Socialism", based on the "class struggle" and mobilizing "the power of the proleteriat in action", through mass industrial revolts." Mr Gitlow's exercise of his First Amendment rights to speech were brushed aside by the Court. In a legendary dissent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., vigorously protested the rubber-stamping of Mr Gitlow's conviction. Mr Justice Holmes rightly embraced the proposition that if the people are embarking on the road to hell, the First Amendment will not stand in their way:

"Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us it had no chance of starting a present conflagration. If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way." 

This is a remarkably bold passage. It is bold because it speaks a truth that is both deeply unsettling and profoundly powerful. There is no safety valve from which democracy can be saved from itself. If a noxious idea will, in the long run, take hold and infect the population, the only "check" is the competition of other ideas and the hope that reason will eventually prevail. Today, there may not be much eloquence; we are mainly stuck with redundant discourse. One can only hope that the American people will survive this cataclysmic turbulence. As Lincoln said during the depths of the Civil War, "We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth."