Harnessing the Power of Vagueness to Spread Propaganda
What’s waiting for us out there in those mysterious, fog-shrouded hills? Islamic fanatics? Social Justice Warrior Grrls? Deep State operatives? Gun grabbers? Who knows. There is truly no way of knowing, so whatever story you want to tell is just as good as anyone else’s story. Whoever is supposed to causing whatever social problem Activist Group X cares about, well, they can be found up there in the mist. Or can they?
Social Problem Con Games
What’s not obscured by the fog is this — the answer to whatever social problem someone claims to be interested in solving. Anyone who fogs up the known facts with fuzzy language is probably selling something we should not be interested in buying.
Consider Islamic fanatics. How many are there in the United States? How often do Islamic fanatics attempt to launch terror attacks in the United States? How often do those attacks succeed? The government does keep some, probably incomplete statistics, that can help people answer those questions.
But does that matter? If some activist group wants to peddle fear of Muslims they just have to make vague claims about Islamic terror plots being broken up all of the time? But what does “all of the time” mean? You aren’t meant to think about that. Keep things vague so you can make a social problem seem as serious as possible, without doing any research. Playing on our fears of death and dismemberment and rape makes it even easier to miss the sleight-of-hand here.
Something Happens “All of the Time”
Why even bother pointing out the obvious? Empty and meaningless phrases produce vague and muddied thinking. Vague and muddied thinking makes it easier to accept propaganda and pseudoscience and harmful public policies.
Individuals who write online about issues from gun control to species conversation to sex ed seem to like telling us about things that happen “all of the time” or “all over the place” instead of talking about rates and frequencies and trends. Who wants to read a table of numbers anyway? Tell a couple of scary stories about armed home invasions, vaguely claim that these crimes happen “all of the time” or “more and more” and you can convince some voters that gun control is a bad idea. The Left doesn’t deserve a pass when it comes to this kind of borderline dishonest writing either. They want to suggest that the United States needs more gun control because there was a school shooting or a mass shooting at a mall.
What we need to talk about is kind of dull. Has gun violence gone up or down? Why? And by ‘why’ I mean what quantifiable things have happened to potentially increase or decrease gun violence. The Left and the Right often have a vested interest in avoiding that kind of analysis.
Policy Failures and Policy Successes
Conservative commentator and author Thomas Sowell made an important observation about how activists discuss social policy. To paraphrase, any social policy can be proven to have failed if the standard is high enough and any policy can be shown to be a success if the standard is low enough.
For example, if there are some shootings were the gunman used an AR-15, then the “assault weapons” ban failed. If some girls who got comprehensive sex ed get pregnant in their senior year of high school, then the sex-ed program failed. If some women are propositioned at work by their bosses, then anti-harassment training was obviously a waste of time.
Those examples illustrate an important truth about both social science and social activism. If you don’t define what success looks like, in advance, anything can look like either a success or a failure. A state allows pretty much any adult to carry a concealed handgun and violent crime goes down. Did that change in the law “work” or not? No one can say. Oh, they will lie or misunderstand, but they don’t know.
Pundits on the right and left both use this kind of fake logic to bash policies they don’t like. This conservative policy allowed a domestic violence victim to be killed. That gun control law left the victim disarmed and defenseless. Neither statement has any practical value because no one explained, in figures, what that policy or that law were meant to accomplish.
Maybe, as software engineers would put, vagueness is a feature, not a bug. Whatever the truth is, no one who studies social problems in a serious way can deny that precision is critical.
The Power of Precision
Well, you may remember that one of the core features of science is the focus on measuring things that can be observed. In the social sciences, you want to know if this personality test is reliable or if that social program does more for homeless people than another program. We want to measure and compare things. How can you do that if you can’t define success in terms of numbers. How can you say a social policy is helping or hurting if you can’t measure teen pregnancy rates or drug arrests or whatever.
If you think the Muslims or the Aryan Nations or the Deep State are coming out of that fog to get us, you need to arm yourself…with some science literacy. Everyone, yes I do mean everyone, who peddles these narratives is scamming you. Perhaps they honestly don’t know better. If they have a university education and they have a stake in pushing one narrative instead of another, maybe we shouldn’t extend the benefit of the doubt.
