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How to Lie About Reality
To create an anti-reality, you must convince people to misplace their trust and outsource their reasoning. This is no small feat—distortions of this scale rely on what Charlie Munger referred to as “Lollapalooza effects”: situations in which several psychological biases compound to create massive directional phenomena. These tendencies can be used to generate de facto knowledge that supports a particular anti-reality and is protected by the pressures of social convention.
A simplified version of this phenomenon can be observed in the frequently cited Asch conformity experiments, in which college students provided patently wrong answers to simple observational tasks in order to avoid defying group consensus. One student, who conformed in eleven of twelve scenarios, stated in his post-experimental interview that while he “suspected” the group to be disingenuous or otherwise incorrect, he “tried to push it out of [his] mind.”[1]
To build an anti-reality, you must first leverage the outsourcing of reason that occurs when people defer to authority. If you can persuade key figures to back your chosen anti-reality, you can begin to distort the thinking of the general public. These authorities must either be aligned with the incentives of your anti-reality or prove easily manipulated at some high level of abstraction (e.g. values, fear, or popular sentiment). In the case of the former, it is not necessary that they believe in the truth of your anti-reality, only that they are driven by the personal gain its prevalence will afford them. In the case of the latter, you must use some microcosm of the larger process to create in them the emotionally driven conviction that your anti-reality is, in fact, the Obvious Truth.
Practically speaking, who are the authorities that you should target? You are looking for those who can lend you intellectual, emotional, or moral superiority by association. Individuals and faceless conglomerates can both serve this purpose effectively. Individuals useful to your cause may derive their influence from personal achievement, notable victimhood, institutional association, or all of the above. Specifically, seek out actors, artists, musicians, authors, athletes, political pundits, business leaders, activists, religious leaders, national figureheads, war heroes, survivors of domestic terrorism, those with degrees from prestigious institutions, those with current or previous positions at powerful organizations, and prize winners (Nobel, Pulitzer, Rhodes, etc.).
You can compound your efforts by packaging the more obscure subsections of these groups into faceless conglomerations of authority. Letters signed by some arbitrary number of pooled PhD-holders and Nobel Laureates are valuable rhetorical weapons. These hodgepodges of authority may become even more useful when taken to the furthest possible level of abstraction. Phrases like “They say that…” and “Experts claim…” are handy tools in the construction of your anti-reality’s defense systems. Your goal is to draw the public’s attention as far away as possible from the fundamental principles of reality so that you can replace ground truth with your own sleight-of-hand creation.
It is equally important to address the mirror image of deference to authority: the demonization of competing realities and their messengers. Your anti-reality exists in an ecosystem that includes both The Truth and all other competing anti-realities. Many of these will be antithetical to your agenda, and you must ensure that the strongest among them do not find or retain footholds. Occasionally, you will come across an anti-reality that proves complementary to your own, and you may choose to conduct some sort of epistemological M&A in order to leverage it.
It is essential that you use ad hominem attacks on messengers of competing realities in combination with the selective evaluation of their claims. These tactics allow you to engage with ground truth only when it is advantageous to you. Ad hominem attacks detract from a messenger’s credibility while diverting attention from the potential validity of his claims. Once you have weakened the messenger, the public will be greedily receptive to your cherry-picked criticisms of his ideas.
There are a few simple steps to conducting this selective evaluation. First, identify low-hanging fruit: claims made by inimical messengers that are irreconcilable with both Truth and your particular anti-reality. Since these claims are fundamentally false, you have much to gain and little to risk by highlighting them for the public. Task your pocketed authorities with the repetitious “fact-checking” and perennial drudging up of such statements. Next, look for claims that can easily be distorted to meet the above criteria. If you echo these distortions with enough force and frequency, the words of your opponents will become like Play-Doh in your hands. This repetition of the forces that bolster your position, and of the attacks that weaken your opponents’, is the key to instilling your anti-reality in the minds of the public.
Throughout this process, you must leverage the power of language, labeling everything according to the lens of your anti-reality. Information that supports your distortion is a “fact.” Conversely, information that weakens your distortion is a “lie.” Those who oppose your proposed version of reality are “radicals” and “extremists”—who else would rally against the “freedom,” “equality,” and “peace” for which you stand? Borrowing pithy terms like “disinformation,” coined by Joseph Stalin in 1923 as “dezinformatsiya,” or creating your own new rhetorical slogans can be a particularly effective version of repetitive labeling.[3][4] Sufficiently adept manipulation of these terms will allow you to create fear, false certainty, and an impossible-to-place sense of impending collapse—the likes of which, of course, are terribly unprecedented and curable only by complete and unquestioning adherence to your positions.
While conducting these selective evaluations, give no oxygen to the claims of antithetical anti-realities that overlap with The Truth. It is unwise and unnecessary to attempt direct confrontation with what is fundamentally true, and any competing position that poses a threat will have claims of this nature. Anti-realities that have no overlap with Truth are not worth the resources required to attack them. Such worldviews prove to be extremely fragile and are eventually relegated to the trash heap of crackpot conspiracy theories. Claims that are easily falsifiable and not sufficiently abstracted will die before any meaningful Lollapalooza effects can be constructed to prop them up. Ensure that your anti-reality does not have any of these fatal traits.
This idea underlies the final and most important rule to follow when lying about reality: you must never cross the threshold of plausible deniability. When you make a claim or defend an anti-reality that is patently indefensible, the people you are attempting to fool will suddenly realize that you are calling them stupid to their faces. This is a deadly sin. When an anti-reality’s assertions directly conflict with physically undeniable first-hand experience, its specious nature is exposed. The Lollapalooza effect that you have been weaving comes undone all at once. This is a genie that is nearly impossible to put back into the bottle; it requires scapegoats, long stretches of time, and a complete restructuring of the proposed anti-reality.
You must never, then, lead people to direct confrontation with The Truth. That is an unwinnable proposition for any anti-reality, and all purveyors of false narratives would do well to fear it.