Is lying endemic to ALL nations? Are Western nations in any position to judge? A guest blog!

I do very few guest blogs. But this letter sent to me by a friend and tech-colleague was so thought-provoking that I feel I must share it. Also below, see my response to his concerns.  And - I believe - the concerns felt by many of you.

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 Dear David,

I finally watched the popular series about the Chernobyl disaster. During the first few episodes, I worried that the lying seemed to be too clearly ascribed specifically to Soviet practice. My own feeling was that analogous failings of a wider range of other organizations including religious as well as government organizations can result in similar pressures and stories. 

I think that the combination of novel technologies, complexity, political issues, and auras of secrecy can also lead people to feel that "lying for the greater good" is both understandable and likely to succeed. In fact, I think that those features may tend to recur in nuclear accidents, partly because it is often thought feasible to get away with lying about radiation doses and implications. Note that adding new software to most smart phones (with no new hardware!) might let them detect substantial radiation exposure, perhaps due to bit flips in mass memory. I'd like that.

My musing led me to wonder about the US response to the H-bomb we lost track of near Palomares Spain, and initial confusions after 3 Mile Island and Fukushima.

But then it hit me that there are far more recent analogues lurking not very far below recent news headlines. They include:

1. The unwillingness of nearly all Republicans to acknowledge apparent traitorous acts by some Trump associates.

2. The similar unwillingness of most Republicans to acknowledge sustained clear incitement by Trump of the Jan 6 invasion of the US capitol building as an insurrection, and the obviously restrained response of the security personnel. 

3. Some details of the 1921 attack on the "Black Wall Street" Greenwood (Tulsa) community exactly a century ago, that suggest advance planning, including positioning of a machine gun, and airplane drops of incendiaries on Greenwood buildings. How can we get away with fussing so much over Chinese mistreatment of their minorities, given our own sustained mistreatment of both blacks and Indians?

4. Sure, China has not been frank enough about the beginnings of the Covid pandemic.Though I doubt many other countries would be, including ours. But Covid-19 does appear to have started in China. Even if there is nothing to lab leak claims, China has to have long known the gambles associated with its wet markets and the suppliers that support them.  I suspect that is the main reason that foreign health experts work in a lab near there. 

The first two items above have not led to massive deaths, as Chernobyl did. But our sustained mistreatment of blacks and Indians might even exceed the direct and indirect deaths from Chernobyl. And we know Covid has caused far larger deaths than Chernobyl. We don't know what the true responsibility of China is for it. It is possible that secrecy will be maintained not because of a lab leak origin, but rather because of a far smaller mistake, but by someone able to keep that mistake secret, or shift the responsibility to someone else who has already died.

But let me focus on just the US death toll from Covid. I believe that many of our ~600,000(?) US deaths directly flowed from Trump choices over a year ago, and his lies "for a greater good." (Note how few people appear to have died in most Asian countries other than India, despite earlier exposure. In particular, South Korea and Taiwan and New Zealand appear to have been models of proactive and competent response.)

I suspect that the CDC has been more broadly handicapped for years. One cause might be Republican reaction to the CDC studying gun deaths. But more generally, I suspect nearly all Republicans and even many Democrats don't want the CDC looking under any new rocks that could justify new regulations on pollution. I have also been puzzled by how long it has taken for the CDC to acknowledge the most common Covid transmission routes. To put it briefly, I worry that the US may have become to some extent an "epidemiological third world country," perhaps largely by indirect intent.

Now let me get back to a question on the Chernobyl series: I hope that enough of the people in all large organizations around the world recognize the Chernobyl series as not being mostly about Chernobyl, but potentially about them. 

Is that likely?

Jack

== My response ==

Jack thanks for your missive, and permission to turn it into a guest posting on my blog.

Of course, what you are describing is fundamental human nature. 6000 years in which 99% of human nations and tribes were pyramids of inherited privilege that rewarded thuggish cheater males - and their sons - with extra reproductive advantage. (And we are all descended from the harems of guys like that.) 

This pattern - seen on all continents, in almost all centuries - saw top male cheater-clades exhibiting one top priority: to repress criticism. Sure, this helped them to keep their top positions and harems and pass it all to their bratty sons. But it also resulted in spectacularly bad governance for those 60 centuries and more! Because we humans are all delusional and the one thing that those kings and lords and priests compulsively repressed - criticism - also just happens to be the only known antidote to delusion and error. (CITOKATE.)

Want another horrific example? In 1915 the "Young Turk" leader of Turkey - Enver Pasha - hurled hundreds of thousands of poor peasant boys into mountain passes to be slaughtered by Russian machine guns. Needing to deflect blame for that disaster, he then concocted a genocidal rage against all Armenians. Millions died because of one SOB's attempted distraction-coverup... as have many millions from covid-coverups... as have hundreds of millions of others from this age-old human reflex, across the annals of humanity.  

This pattern - of top males cheating and manically/murderously crushing criticism - so well explains the litany of horrors seen on all continents that's called "history." It is also what stallions and bull elephant seals and indeed most male animals try to do, across the animal kingdom. Moreover, it is likely pervasive across the cosmos! Everywhere that species attain almost any technology, even just agriculture. It is a stunningly depressing vista and alas, I rank it highly as a theory to explain the Fermi Paradox.

And yet, I see the bright side. For humans may be exceptional and maybe even able to break the pattern! 

On certain occasions - escaping the feudalism trap - we seem to have found an alternative attractor state -- Periclean Enlightenment -- which flattens societies enough so that the children of elites must compete with each other and with girls and boys empowered by equality, rising from below. This social condition, while rare, has shown itself also to be powerfully creative and productive.

Even the poor extent to which this alternative model has been implemented -- frustratingly  incomplete -- has unleashed more human success, justice and creativity than all the rest of 99% of human existence, combined. And the waves of criticism that are unleashed (name one other society that ever indoctrinated its youths to be so critical!) is exactly how we catch mistakes and delusions and make rapid progress.

== Why the standard response is nonsense ==

Which leads us to my answer to your comment: "How can we get away with fussing so much over Chinese mistreatment of their minorities, given our own sustained mistreatment of both blacks and Indians?"

Yes, that is the standard Chinese response to any criticism. Generally they do this by citing fierce denunciations of the USA and West pouring forth from our own liberals and our own children!  And none of them - not the Chinese, nor our leaders, nor those liberals or children - ever step back and look at WHAT JUST HAPPENED.

What happened is that the PRC mouthpieces are hurling at us our own self-criticisms and reform messaging. A reform and self-crit process that they do not allow their own liberals and youths to undertake. 

A rich irony that we could exploit (if anyone on our side had a lick of brains), is that we are better than them, morally and in all other ways...

... not because we have committed no crimes. We have. 

 But because criticism flows! And all those crimes repeatedly have their scabs ripped off by young people who have been trained by four generations of Hollywood memes of Suspicion of Authority, Tolerance, Diversity and individualist Eccentricity. 

 (For more on this indoctrination for self-criticism by western media, see: VIVID TOMORROWS: Science Fiction and Hollywood.)

That is how we are better, not just quantitatively but qualitatively, than our adversaries. Because we have the strength and confidence to encourage our citizens - especially new generations - to shout at crimes and hypocrisies.... 

... only now a world cabal of oligarchies are united in their united project to bring us down by using these strengths against us, with their shared aim of ending the Periclean Enlightenment forever. But to see how this inherent enlightenment strength is being used against us - inciting Western youth not to criticize for improvement but denounce their own cultureas meriting destruction - you may need Vivid Tomorrows.

== A final note ==

Last night we watched Hunt for the Wilder People, Waititi's lovely, fun film about a kid and an old man heading into the bush to hide from a pretty darn nice civilization. Well, it's New Zealand, after all. Or rather Aotearoa, where I set many scenes in my 1990 novel Earth, with a prominent role for a Maori billionaire. 

What struck me in this film was that a large majority of the characters -- both the wilder boy plus sympathizers and the cops chasing them -- were either Maori or half-Maori or some such... and this seemed so normal that probably very few viewers even noticed or remarked on it! Except for a few gliding, half-references, this film was almost completely... and comfortably... post-racial, in a way you normally only see delivered (sometimes tortuously) in sci fi futures. 

No guilt trips. No beratings. Just a simple, confident assumption that the task is mostly done down there.  Or, certainly farther along than almost anywhere else on Earth.

(And yes, Jacinda Ardern for World PM! I lay my sword at her feet.)

Only now let me tell you something that occurred to me -- something that kind of proves my point that human civilization is gradually, grudgingly evolving. (A point I also made here in my year 2000 essay about "2001 a Space Odyssey.")

Look across the globe at countries with a history of difficult encounters between civilizations, especially native peoples viz. conquering incomers. And from the start, widen your view of history; stop assuming it is entirely a tale of savagery by European colonialists!  Tell that to the Xhosa and other peoples who inhabited most of Africa and were almost utterly wiped out by the Bantu Migration. Tell it to the non-Han peoples of what is now China - not just the Four Kingdoms crushed into homogenized uniformity by the First Emperor Chin, with all their cultures erased, but a vast array of polyglot peoples now all-gone, except for some residual dialects. Tell it to the original waves of people who migrated to the Americas from Asia, whose blood genotypes now only exist south of Panama, after later arrivals (ancestors Northern American Natives) drove them out.

No, we are ALL descended from rapaciously warlike tribes. That does not excuse the crimes of colonialism!  But it does suggest we can gain real insight by looking at matters of how and who, and when.

Why did Maoris get the most favorable initial treaties and the best follow-up deals with their white immigrant neighbors?  Because New Zealand/Aotearoa was among the last places colonized by Euro-invaders, well after guilt and tolerance and diversity memes began their slow bubble through art and literature.  

Go to the other end of this story.  The first nation in the Euro-colonization wave - the Portugese - dived right into the horrific slave trade without a second thought. The Spanish who followed Columbus into the Carribbean left no Carib peoples alive... followed by Cortez and Pizarro. They made no well-intentioned treaties to be later neglected and/or betrayed. There were no gestures of dignity or respect for - say - Nahuatl or Aztec culture. 

"You name is now José and this place is now called San Cristobal," they told those who survived the plagues and silver mines. There were no memes of guilt or diversity or even curiosity, as every Mayan manuscript or codex burned.

Such memes were - barely - starting to percolate a little later. It began as a wee bit of patronizing romanticism that caused the front edge of Anglo expansion to contain enthusiasts. "What's the NAME of this place?" they asked the local inhabitants, while pointing at the nearest stream or river or valley. And hence, from Massachussetts to Alabama to Michigan to Dakota to Albuquerque to the Sequoias, at least that dignity survived... small comfort after later, poorly policed predators stole the land with forged deeds, or gave out smallpox-ridden blankets, or incited "incidents" that the natives could never win. 

I am not asserting that place-name preservation... or even later tributes in songs and then novels and movies and even giant statues... can ever make up for real crimes and betrayals, either inadvertent or lazy or deliberate. What I'm saying is that a pattern emerges. One showing that first contact events -- while continuing to be drenched in tragedy and injustice -- have been evolving. Far, far too slowly! Horrifically too slowly! But to deny that progression is in itself a kind of blindness to a cultural trait that can be amplified, if we first admit that it exists. Real cause for hope that memic reform can work!

It's the very thing that today's activists demand. Shouldn't they look for... and not reject evidence out of hand... historical proof that the thing they wish to achieve can be achieved? Because in a grindingly too-slow way, it was already underway?