Why You Don’t Want To Restore The Fairness Doctrine

The solution is making the personal effort to become genuinely literate in media and information; to equip yourself with the tools to “think back” at misinformation and disinformation, to train your own mind not to simply accept a statement as true because it appeals to your biases, nor to reject it simply because it doesn’t.

Until we get our public education system back in working order so that this vital life skill is taught to all of us from the earliest age possible (for instance, we could start by teaching kids how to resist all the advertising aimed at them), the burden of that education is on each of us as individuals, and that can be a daunting task.  It means breaking ourselves of the habit of trying to find push-button solutions to complex and difficult problems.  It means admitting our fallibility and doing the hard work of setting aside our egos and pride, and it means spending a lot of time unlearning old falsehoods and re-learning some of the things we missed.

Modern Monetary Theory provides an excellent example for illustration.  Most of us learned in middle school that Congress appropriates funding for all federal spending, but the reality that reveals went right past us.  We still think of federal spending in terms of “my tax dollars,” but federal tax revenue doesn’t fund federal spending.  Congress does.  We know this, but we’re taught to avoid putting the pieces together to make a whole picture.  We want to think of “our tax dollars” because we’re taught to believe that’s what gives us agency in government; that if we don’t pay taxes, we have no right to a voice.  Problem is, that’s not true.  Not only isn’t that true, but nothing that flows from that basic “spending my tax dollars” thinking is true.  It’s not necessary to lay a heavy tax on the ultra-wealthy “to pay for” anything; the reason for progressive taxation is to stop too much money, and the power that goes with it, into too few hands.  It doesn’t pay for anything; things are paid for when Congress says “pay for this,” and then the proper keystrokes are entered into the proper spreadsheets to create the dollars to “pay for this.”

It’s not the purpose of this article to get deep into MMT, but it does provide an example of the problems at hand, and their solutions.  The primary problem at hand is we’ve been taught to think incorrectly; the primary solution at hand is to accept that reality and then do the work necessary to learn how to think correctly – to do the research, to be willing to admit to ourselves that we’ve been misled and misdirected, and to attain the knowledge necessary to fix it.

Fortunately, there are some excellent tools to help you achieve this.  There are many, many books and websites out there dedicated to giving us those tools, but if I were to pick only one critical resource it would be a book by Robert Cialdini titled “Influence: Science and Practice. (disclosure:  affiliate link)”  This book not only gives an excellent foundation for identifying and neutralizing the compliance-gaining tactics employed by those who deliberately mislead, it’s also well-written to appeal to the casual reader as well as the academic, and the citations contained therein will take you through other important writing and writers like Korzybski’s theories of general semantics (a separate thing from basic semantics, the “meaning of meaning”), the theory of linguistic relativity (“communication creates reality”), and the work of philosophers and influencers like Edward Bernays (aka “the father of public relations.”)

If you visit and make studied use of the links in the above paragraph, you will develop the tools necessary to successfully resist attempts to disinform and misinform you, not in the sense that so many internet know-it-alls who get sucked in to ridiculous nonsense like QAnon and other conspiracy theories, but in a genuine, powerful way that will have a profound positive impact on how you process the information you consume.

That’s the solution to all of this, and it’s in your hands.  Use it, and you’ll quickly stop relying on empty and unworkable but seductive “quick fix” ideas like restoring the fairness doctrine, and start vaccinating yourself against the overwhelming flow of disinformation that surrounds us all in the modern world.