Clickbait Citizen a place to read and talk about histories, politics, democracies through a cultural lens
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist. (Hannah Arendt - The Origins of Totalitarianism)
Our world is moving at a break-neck speed. Our economies are globalised, our communication systems instantaneously confirm, question, or lie to us. Our institutions, our identities and cultures are in a seemingly permanent state of liquidity and fluidity. Our ability to talk to one another across the planet has never been easier or cheaper. Yet, whether we are aware or not, agree or not, we still depend on stable and trustworthy facts and lines of communication for our safety, health, our economies, and collective futures. What we are told we can believe still matters. Without trustworthy facts and information we are unable to act in the real world, our personal and collective ‘agency’ diminished or extinguished. When we lose faith in our ability to identify facts, when reality is turned into a haze of confusion, our ability to make decisions about our personal and collective futures become paralysed. Without facts the future is cancelled; we enter a mode of pre-apocalyptic survivalism.
Clickbait Citizen draws a distinction between debates about ‘free-speech’ and the precarious position of ‘facts’. Calls for ‘free-speech’ in our contemporary world is often used by libertarians and the far-right to advance ideas and ideologies which dismiss the importance of facts. This is a dangerous and disingenuous path to walk. But there is something else going on too. It is embedded in the quote by Hannah Arendt above. While there is a distinction between fact and fiction, and an obvious need to be able to distinguish between the two, we need both. We use stories to tell one another about what we imagine the future holds. And politics and politicians are as dependent on this as any of us.
For the full article, visit Chris Baldwin on Substack.
