Of Enrica Perucchietti

Source: Italicum
Interview with Enrica Perucchietti, author of the book “Fake News”, Arianna Publishing 2018, edited by Luigi Tedeschi

1. According to the thoughts of Walter Lippmann, our perception of reality is conditioned by images, concepts, moral values ​​not directly acquired, but transmitted to us by others. Therefore, the narration of facts is necessarily subjective, a representation of reality formed through stereotypes, assumed as interpretative canons of reality itself. In the fluidity of today's telematic communication, therefore, new stereotypes replace old forms of manipulation of reality. It is therefore necessary to conclude that the perception of reality is always mediated by the uninterrupted succession of cultural stereotypes over time, every truth arises from selective parameters of interpretation of reality itself. In this case the post-virtual truths of media technology, they do not end up being equated with the metaphysical conceptions of philosophical knowledge and/or with the transcendent truths of religious faiths?

The risk exists. Yet the truth is one, with its infinite nuances, beyond the stereotypes or cultural archetypes that each of us has inherited or been indoctrinated into. I agree with the philosopher Alain De Benoist according to which the intent of post-truth would be to discredit the truth by presenting it as a "great story" which can no longer be believed precisely because everyone has constructed their own subjective truth. It would be the triumph of relativism: everything becomes “relative”, virtual and therefore chaotic. At this point of collective disorientation, Power guarantees the existence of its own truth through the supervisory action of the mainstream media and the laws introduced to guarantee order. That is, we want each of us to be increasingly wary of the news we can find on the web even if it is documented and true and, more generally, of alternative information to make exclusive reference to "certified" news.: we must only rely on what the Party says and has decided for everyone. The others will be conspiracy theorists, webeti and well poisoners.

1. The overflowing media communication spreads "fake news" in order to censor reality, that is, to provide an interpretation of the facts that is functional to the political-economic dominance of the global class. In fact, today it is not important to spread the reality of the facts, but it only highlights the impact that the news has on the emotional perception of reality that can be aroused in the masses. It is therefore necessary to provide the response that the public expects. The public does not demand knowledge but demands narratives that conform to their beliefs, to one's emotions. This irrepressible need for dogmatic faiths, However, it involves the same counterinformation, often generating fanaticism and extremism. Counter-information therefore does not risk being criminalized and/or made functional to institutional media post-truth, as a representation of the necessary absolute evil to be exorcised and destroyed?

He hit the point. In the book I show the two extremes which can also be understood as the two factions created and used by the Divide and Conquer method. On the one hand, the single monolithic thought with which we must align ourselves and the repeated fake news of the system, both aimed at standardizing, leveling and depersonalizing individuals according to the diktats of Power; on the other, counter-information which often becomes fanaticism, adopting extreme form and content, thus making itself an easy target for mainstream attacks. Counterinformation also seems to increasingly offer quick and easy solutions, excessive theories that are impossible to verify on which, if anything, we should suspend judgment but which are instead believed uncritically because they are liked or "resonate" in people's bellies. There are people who need to have someone to follow blindly, that require dogmatic faith in something and someone. This too will be prey to manipulation, by another form of power, not the “classic” one. It is useless to think of being "free" because you convince yourself that you have emancipated yourself from the old belief system if you then end up blindly embracing someone else's theories. The success of New Age and keyboard conspiracists lies here: offer simple solutions, apparently effective and above all fast to those who are looking for something.

1. Single thought created its "newspeak" through the corruption of the word. In fact, you state that "the use of ever new artfully created neologisms allows us to ensure that we are no longer the ones thinking with words, but let the words do the thinking for us". However, technological progress in media communication has made human life dependent on highly specialized forms of technology, whose procedures cannot be accessible to the masses. Therefore media information is also based on technical terms, mostly Anglo-Saxon, impossible to understand by the common man. Language manipulation techniques can be implemented, as reality is no longer subject to the verifiability of facts, nor can it be judged critically by the individual. Media information is therefore not perceived by the masses as a product of technology developed by specialists, which does not require consent, it is not susceptible to ethical evaluation, nor does it require a shared thought but only unconditional assent like a chemical reaction?

This suggestion is also the result of a gradual and widespread process of social manipulation. On the one hand, the idea has been induced that everything that technology allows us to accomplish is positive and necessary, the sign of the "progress" towards which Man must strive, on the other hand, that the mainstream media always tells the truth. The use of English and technical terms serves precisely to confuse and not allow people to easily understand the concepts that are conveyed, thus leading the "spectators" to be increasingly passive before the will of Power.

1. Media virtuality, in accordance with the neoliberal ideological dogma of individualism, it has produced false forms of emancipation, on the contrary generating a generalized subalternity, an all-encompassing uncritical conformism, an alienating homologation of the masses. However, the global people of the dominated have also proven to be conniving and responsible for their state of subordination to the dominant oligarchies. The fake news of the dominant media communication can impose itself on the reality of the facts, by virtue of a passivised state of consciousness of the masses defined by Costanzo Preve in his book "The ethical bombardment" as "will not to know". Costanzo Preve identifies this "will not to know" with a form of collective removal of historical memory, a form of general consciousness that generates the dulling of the critical sense. In fact, the critical evaluation of the facts could lead to conflicts of conscience, to the assumption of a sense of responsibility specific to the ethical dimension of man, not reconcilable with current morality, to the marginalization or criminalization of the individual in the society in which he lives. For the generality of individuals, the uncritical adhesion to the post-truth of this eternal present, it does not therefore seem preferable to the search for a truth that can potentially explode the latent conflicts in contemporary society?

Certainly, but it is also worth considering the fact that, as Lippmann explained, the formation and survival of the stereotypes with which we interpret reality also function as a defense mechanism. Stereotypes help people to orient themselves in the world although the grid with which they move has in fact been inculcated by education and subsequently "welded" by entertainment and the media. The categories that were transmitted to us, even if not necessarily true or “ideal”, they serve as our moral compass. Let's think, we act and behave based on the environment in which we grew up and on the categories that they passed on to us. Stereotypes offer the individual "the charm of the familiar, than normal, of the safe" and every attack that is launched on a critical basis against stereotypes can only take on "the appearance of an attack on the foundations of the universe; in fact it is an attack on the foundation of our universe, and when big things are at stake we are not at all willing to admit that there is a distinction between our universe and the universe". Precisely because if you destroy a reality, albeit virtual, false, instilled in a person or a community they will experience a form of disorientation, chaos and anger at being torn from the previous “comfort zone”. In fact, if someone were to try to demonstrate to us the falsity or limitation of the stereotypes with which we have interpreted and experienced our reality, we will even react violently by rebelling: no one actually wants to discover that they have experienced a deception and have been manipulated. Therefore, as a form of defense, our attention turns to the facts that validate our system of stereotypes and turns away from those that contradict it.

1. Fake news is not just fake news, but they revealed themselves as coherent elements of an institutional information system rooted in the American-led capitalist West. In reality, post-truth has established itself as a technique of domination for the ruling class. The "politics of post-truth" in fact imposes a narration of events in which the truth of the facts is postponed to the influence that information can produce on consciences, on beliefs, collective emotions. It seems to me that Giorgio Gaber effectively defined the post-truth in the song "Everything is false, false is everything". It is therefore a manipulation of reality functional to the global oligarchic-capitalist system. Post-truth cannot therefore be defined as the superstructural culture of the Western neoliberal system?

Post-truth offers us the illusion of being free to believe what we want, while in fact we are increasingly manipulated and continue to be a disoriented flock that cannot find its way. The ghost of this liberation, the illusion of having access to all the information thanks to the web and the saturation of pleasure that have been dropped from above have given life to a new human being, a perennial adolescent who exclusively follows the compass of his own emotions, using his critical conscience less and less and eluding reasoning. Thus he ends up believing what he prefers and likes, to what “sounds” best, to those who convince him because they manage to leverage his emotions, to those who reassure him by repeating the same slogan until exhaustion. He lives on empathy and relies on the mantras of do-goodism and political correctness that reassure him. Do what he wants, improperly quoting the English magician Aleister Crowley, but thinks what he has been indoctrinated to think. Power is not interested in "emancipating" man or making him "adult" but rather in controlling him better and better., directing his choices after penetrating his soul, in his imagination. Relativism and the resulting sense of precariousness serve power because the spread of news initiates that process whereby the truth now seems like an unknowable and unattainable Noumenon, a distant monad: you might as well not believe anything anymore or believe what you prefer. Or blindly rely on a principle of authority that represents the father figure that is now missing in our society: this is how the Orwellian Miniver was born. It and its ministers do not lie and cannot lie, they represent Orthodoxy and watch over us, they protect us from thought crime and protect us from the shadow of the Enemy. Indeed, we need new laws to orient ourselves in the world: laws that tell us how to live and die and above all how and what to think. Laws that punish those who deviate from a single thought and a body of diligent psycho-policemen who are ready to report anyone guilty of thought crime. The truth of the Miniver ministers is absolute although they have led us to believe that everything is virtual and subjective: simply another form of doublethink. And us, perfect products of neoliberalism, we are increasingly passive, simple spectators and consumers of this reality: we have been so manipulated that we have started to love our chains.