“This explains a lot. It explains the rise of mass delusionality, for example. People don’t decide what information sources to consume based on any kind of actual metric of reliability or trustworthiness, but simply based on who is more famous—and in particular, famous within their ideological alignment.”

Of course, long before Giles’ wrote about it, the movie Idiocracy predicted Trump’s America. Even earlier, scholars have made similar predictions, if not exactly about fame, though very much related in terms of the agonism of oral cultures.

Think of Marshall McLuhan’s global village and Walter J. Ong’s secondary orality. It’s framed within what Jeff Jarvis calls the Gutenberg Parenthesis that appears to be coming to an end or else being radically altered. Walter Lippman was already making similar warnings about radio before WWII (Public Opinion, 1922).

Influence and rule by fame would only be one small part of agonism, either within orality or secondary orality. Ong enumerated the features of agonism:

(i) Additive rather than subordinate
(ii) Aggregative rather than analytic
(iii) Redundant or ‘copious’
(iv) Conservative or traditionalist
(v) Close to the human lifeworld
(vi) Agonistically toned
(vii) Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced
(viii) Homeostatic
(ix) Situational rather than abstract

https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/ong-on-the-differences-between-orality-and-literacy

This wouldn’t be the first time cultural and political conflict arose between orality and literacy. That was a central issue in Classical Athens. But in that case it was traditional orality being contested by literacy, rather than literacy being contested by secondary orality.

The orality of agonism (e.g., questions without answers) was what Socrates fame was built upon. And it was the rational literacy of the sophists that was taking hold as the new political power of the democratic demos.

This would fit into religious studies, specifically biblical studies. Before a New Testament canon, Christianity was not a religion of the Book. The first generations of Christians were mostly an oral culture, and the agonism expressed as a charismatic cult.

Jesus being followed around by groupies, as was still common in early Rome, was a lingering characteristic of oral cultures. Such famous men (teachers, philosophers, healers, etc) with acolytes were dime a dozen at the time. These great men would challenge each other in public feats of miracles, demonstrations of knowledge, and such.

But quickly that oral agonism of fame was quickly replaced by a literary culture of rigid hierarchical authority. Then for centuries, Rome became the great ruling power based on that literary culture, with the Catholic Church having merged with it. Only with the fall of Rome did an agonistic oral culture partly return with feudalism.

Literacy, particularly silent reading, tends to promote abstraction, rationality, and individuality (WEIRD bias, Joseph Henrich). Whereas orality elicits concrete thinking, emotional appeal, and communal identities: traditional dividualism, bundle theory of mind, and 4E or 5E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, & extended; + ecological).

That is why the Protestant Reformation was such a potent force of change. It wasn’t merely religious reform but, more importantly, the spread of mass literacy. To think critically about the bible suddenly became more common and that led to skepticism and then radicalism, with revolutionary thought following soon after.

The reign of a literary culture, though, would come crashing down already in the early 20th century. But other than philologists and media studies scholars, few were paying attention to what this change represented. We shouldn’t have been shocked by Trump’s rule of fame. If it took generations to build up to this moment, it certainly didn’t come out of nowhere.

Islam: I couldn’t find that Playboy interview. I found the 1990 interview where he was a ghoul but I couldn’t find him directly saying that in 1991.

Good points.

So critical thinking skills can only solve part of the problem. They could go toward fixing the heuristic that Giles identifies wherein folks use trust as a shorthand and want to read the famous thing more than the non-famous thing. But

1) If that only takes over partially, then even the critical thinking people have to use fame as a shorthand for others in conversation (so in my responses on Quora I frequently need to defend folks like Sanders or AoC or what not and use their versions of arguments because as much as I can shame someone engaging with me to read someone more obscure they often just won’t)

2) Even if that fix takes deep root, our current social media-based culture will mean that the availability of the perspectives of those who take the time to keep their fame will just choke out other availability (so things like Google’s AI overview routinely just take the most popular rendition of an idea rather than the best of it)

And, of course, people need to be convinced through their critical thinking to abandon respecting fame and the idea of the famous being around as a virtue . There’s what I call a Roganite perspective on the world post-Watergate, that because conventional systems failed us, everyone should just make whatever shit up and we can treat it like it’s all equal a priori. (The pretense is that we’ll then sort out what works, but in reality what happens is that people just find their tribes to settle into). Boxing had serious issues of corruption and inflated records? Toss out the idea that people should actually face the demonstrable best and let Jake Paul cherrypick his combatants and still pretend that he’s legitimately good. Critical thinking skills on its own won’t change those values and perceptions.

In any case, implementing critical thinking education are going to be challenging until we can blunt those influences.

Yep!

Let’s repeat that for the cheap seats.

Any Democratic politician who promises, categorically, that they will end the war in Gaza and get Israel under control is lying to you .

That should be their agenda , but they cannot promise that, because it depends on the cooperation of, at least, the Israelis, and in actual reality at least some Palestinians and Republicans.

Now, under the modern ethos of the President doing whatever he wants no matter Congressional rules, a President who was okay with using tools Republicans have left could unilaterally change policy and wait for Congress and the courts to force the issue. But even if we’re all okay with that (and I’m conceptually fine with it but we do need to have a plan to deescalate and get the Constitution working again), that still does not actually guarantee ending the war or getting rid of Netanyahu or anything else.

Dayavar: Being this feckless after you’ve been corrected shows that you’ve put your ego over the issue you are acting like you care about, the Palestinians.

If really all you meant was “Pete visited Israel after a massacre”, with no more context for what the visit was and when it was planned and what happened on it and what was said, then you knowingly said fucking nothing. I hope to God your position is not actually that people should cancel any diplomatic visit to a country after that country committed a human rights violation (or, more accurately, an alleged human rights violation, not because I think Israel didn’t actually do that because I am absolutely sure they did but because at the time you cannot always be sure of the current state of ongoing events), no matter if they intend to actually make that an issue in their diplomacy and push the topic, or use the time on the ground to investigate and see the situation unfolding and its impact, or anything else.

This is just you not liking Pete Buttigieg, for whatever reason (valid or not), and being unable to sort that feeling out from actually assessing his conduct. I’m not the biggest fan of Pete, I find him likeable enough but he just still feels far too toothless for me and there’s a sort of lameness to his presentation that doesn’t work for me personally (since we’re talking about fame – his actual policy has been pretty good, I just read an article about his successes as transportation secretary that was pretty solid, though again firmly within Democratic establishment success), but I can see right through this.

Indeed, now that you’ve read what Pete said about anti-Semitism, you actually should be much higher on him. There are a lot of people in the Democratic Party who are not even trying to fight this battle or, worse, actively making it worse. Schumer literally argued that we should stop assuming that Trump is an anti-Semite despite all the Nazi shit but that it’s totally okay to assume that about pro-Palestinian protesters as Steve Shives documented. There are lots of people who are doing the “Do you condemn Hamas” and “Do you think Israel has a right to exist” games at the moment among Democrats. Pete actually had the courage to explain precisely the very real point: That there are Nazis who hate Israel but also people who have problems with Israeli policy and don’t hate or fear Jews or Israel. I don’t even hate Netanyahu because I don’t hate anyone, though he is morally contemptible.

Fred makes a good point, too.

That’s several levels in analysis down, but the defect of always seeking the “perfect” candidate rather than incremental improvement over time (the “better” candidate; then a slightly “better” one next time; and so on) is a guarantee of always failing to get what you want (you guarantee things don’t change or even get worse), because that’s failing the Trolley Problem. Only incremental change is possible. Those who don’t realize that become the victims of diasimocracy—and thus give us Trump for president, who ruins their every dream and trashes their every goal. It’s like shooting yourself in the face.

But to bring this back around to the topic of diasimocracy: because fame wins elections now (it’s a “popularity contest” and not a contest of ideas or competency), anyone who sells unqualified radical change loses fame (they become “infamous” instead and thus can’t get elected). So to even have a chance at your ideas getting into office, you have to find candidates who know how to walk the rhetorical line so as to not create a “scandal,” and even though they believe in radical change, they are pragmatic enough to openly admit they can’t achieve it and can only produce partial change in that direction. In other words, you can’t “scare off voters” and expect to get elected.

Buttigieg and Ocasio-Cortez have tried different ways of doing that on this issue, to mixed success (and smart Palestinians know this). But no one doubts they believe war crimes have happened there and that Israel needs to GTFO Gaza and the far-right-lock on Israel’s government needs to go away. But what they could accomplish (and thus what they can promise) as president is a different question. They would both block arms to Israel until an actual two-state agreement was finalized if congress would let them, but congress almost certainly won’t. And they know that. The question is: do you know that.

Or are you just going to go around in an emotional rage bitching about politicians not being irrational mirror-images of you.

One of those behaviors is useful. The other is not.

You have to understand how reality works before you are qualified to criticize it.

Yeah, I agree with all that. And it really caps the whole series of points here.

Dayavar, you are falling for false framing. Buttigieg was not commenting on the Gaza attack.

Let me repeat that:

Buttigieg was not commenting on the Gaza attack.

So it does not matter that there was one before his comment. He was not talking about it. So you cannot use his quote as referring to it.

This is how you have been duped. You need to be on your guard against this kind of manipulation. Because. Wow. Look how well they controlled you with it.