Wishing Black Was a Little Blacker
The roots of moral panic lie in people's need to believe the worst about their enemies.
Another week, another story about “children identifying as cats.”
These stories are false, obviously. They are false in the obvious sense of being either made up entirely, or of being stories hewn from something true in a way that has distorted and misrepresented the reality.
These stories were false when they triggered a moral panic in America last year. They are false now, when our tabloids and certain attention-addicted head teachers are pushing them.
They are also false in the sense discussed by Fred Clark in his Slacktivist blog:
The fake stories Stetzer describes are not being spread in good faith by innocent dupes. They are not innocent and they are not dupes. And the stories are not merely “fake,” but false. The biblical term for what he’s describing is “bearing false witness against your neighbor.”
An innocent dupe — or even a partly innocent dupe — spreading a fake story in good faith isn’t deliberately lying. They’re stating untruth, but only because they have been deceived, not because they are attempting to deceive others. But those who are bearing false witness against their neighbors have not been, themselves, deceived. They are, rather, choosing to pretend that they have been deceived in order that they can, in turn, invite others to choose to pretend the same thing.
The people spreading these stories pretend to be horrified and appalled. They are not. They spread them gleefully, revelling in the opportunity to perform righteous anger and to fantasise about the discipline and violence they believe should be brought to bear on these abnormal children, and those who indulge them.
These are performances of, very literally, self-righteousness: condemning the deviants in order to hold themselves up as paragons of decency, positioning themselves as defenders of society against the wicked outsiders who would infiltrate and undermine it.
Clark quotes C S Lewis, from Mere Christianity:
The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
This is a test we can apply to those sharing the cat stories. They pretend that they are horrified and disgusted by these things. You would think that telling them “they are not happening, you are worrying over nothing,” would be received as good news, but it is not, because they are not genuinely horrified by it - it’s an act that they enjoy performing. Point out that these online rumours are obviously made up and they will get angry at you. It is part of their identity, part of their own personal belief structure, that these deviant children exist, that the liberal teachers indoctrinating children about gender anarchy are widespread in primary schools, that drag queens are teaching 6 year olds to do gay sex before lunchtime. It gives them something to set themselves against, a moral high ground to occupy. As Clark puts it, they are “playing” – imagining themselves as heroes, and imagining their enemies as evildoers to be crushed. They are the goodies, the people they hate are the baddies, and thus they are also free to indulge themselves in morally clear, Hollywood-movie fantasies of retributive violence.
If you say “this isn’t true” then you don’t make them happy, because you take all of that away from them. They’re not the good guys, they’re not bravely standing athwart the tides of degeneracy and perversion threatening to trans our kids’ genders – at worst they’re just some marks who believed some obvious bullshit, printed a news story off the back of rumour and hearsay, are bad at their jobs. At worst, they are malicious, lying propagandists for a bigoted worldview. Neither of these things is palatable, and so, they double down.
The liberal media will talk about “misinformation,” “fake news” or “conspiracy theories.” Much hay is made about how to effectively debunk false narratives, how to get through to the dummies who just believe what they read on Facebook. And yet, when someone says “my child is in a class where another child is identifying as a cat” it is frowned upon to simply say “no you didn’t, that’s not true, you’re lying.”
It’s the same dynamic for other fronts in the culture war. Someone can say “I live next door to a family of refugees getting thousands a week in benefits” on national TV, and be safe in the knowledge that their “genuine concerns” will be solemnly accepted and broadcast. The press and broadcasters, of course, all know that these things are not true. But the unwritten rules say that you have to behave as if everyone really believes this bullshit, that it isn’t all a mutually-beneficial game where some people pretend to believe it, and other people pretend to believe them.
We do know “debunking” often does not work, but the academic discussion on this focuses on the public doing the believing, not on the motivations and techniques of those spraying a firehose of misinformation into the public sphere. The reputational impact of being caught spreading clearly false bullshit seems to figure very low in the average tabloid editor’s calculations when deciding whether to publish a story.
And why should they care, when anyone who pushes back can be designated as an enemy and monstered? What threat is there to them, when the mainstream, respectable, liberal papers all bend over backwards to accommodate every wild story they gin up out of whole cloth, when they can shithouse the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition into having to act as if they aren’t talking garbage? Where is the countervailing force that might make them accountable?
If we want to properly tackle this kind of thing, we have to be prepared to face up to this reality. We don’t just need fact-checking, or a “new narrative.” People have spent so long believing that children are being transed into cats by communist Muslim drag queens that it’s now impossible for them to stop. Anything we say can be easily countered by turning to one of the newspapers, where some respectable establishment columnist will have dropped a terrifying scare story in nice, solid newsprint, with advertisers next to it and the full reputational weight of a mainstream paper behind it.
Our opponents are not just misguided, gullible, or mistaken. They are powerfully committed to believing these things, or at least pretending to believe in them, which might be even worse. It is pointless arguing with an enemy for whom the truth simply does not matter. We need to act accordingly.