The Evidence-Denial Complex

In politics, in business, in everyday life, there have always been people who try to take advantage of others by conning them – with lies, distorted reports, cunning misdirection, etc.  What they fear most is being exposed for their dishonesty. But in recent decades, they have been able to access support from an increasingly powerful network of misinformation – the Evidence-Denial Complex.

The rise of the Evidence-Denial Complex can be traced to two late 20^th/early 21^stcentury development: the undermining of public interest journalism in conventional media; and the spread of ‘social’ media that is relieved of all public interest duty.  The first has happened through a mix of takeover of media outlets by those allied to the Right, and the persistent and deliberate weakening of impartial public broadcasting (e.g. reduced funding for and heightened attacks on the BBC, privatisation of Channel 4).  The second has come about because governments grant commercial operators of internet platforms the right to host any information posted by participants, without any responsibility to check its veracity.

The net result is that while there are fewer and fewer opportunities in conventional media to carry out in-depth investigations (because they generate relatively little money for the media owners, or worse, they threaten the interests of those owners or their associates in politics and business), systemic liars can use conventional media owned by their plutocratic allies as well as troll farms working across social media platforms, to pump out false and misleading stories to displace warranted beliefs by groundless ones.

At the most pernicious level, they work in concert to attack the credibility of objective evidence.  Since evidence – scrutinised by scientific procedures, gathered by impartial investigators, assessed by experts – is critical in separating out credible assertions from unfounded claims, the fostering of a culture of irrationality becomes an underlying goal.  The very notion of ‘evidence’ is treated as fake.  

For the sake of profiteering from economic chaos, promoting attachment to authoritarianism by fuelling a sense of insecurity, or diverting attention from plutocratic iniquities by attacking vulnerable scapegoats and liberal ‘do-gooders’, evidence-denying campaigns are launched to deceive as many people as possible to win political power.  

Familiar faces can be found amongst those who declare there is no evidence that the climate crisis requires radical action; that racism is still widespread and harmful; that safety measures are necessary to protect people in the midst of a pandemic; and that withdrawal from strategic partnerships with neighbouring countries is damaging politically and economically. They cluster around these lies because their preferred tactics is the con, and their con only works if people can be routinely nudged into looking away from the evidence.

What can be done about the Evidence-Denial Complex?

There are three courses of action that should be taken forward:

·      Education: ensure teaching at all levels helps to develop a good understanding of evidence – what it means, how it is gathered and assessed, its use in different practices, and examples of its collection and false evidence being refuted.

·      Regulation: effective rules and enforcement must be brought in to stop large scale deception continuing. See, for example, ‘Five Categories of Irresponsible Communication’: https://henry-tam.blogspot.com/2018/12/five-categories-of-irresponsible.html

·      Publication: we must not allow falsehoods to spread unchallenged; so objective findings and analyses should be widely shared and discussed through scholarly works, objective media outlets, civic information networks, etc.