Resistance Is Futile

I have talked in the past about my weird love/hate relationship with cranks. Thinking on recent events has caused me to realise something about where the positive part of this might come from.

The world is very complicated, but while we must perforce rely on preexisting societal mechanisms to determine facts, it is very difficult—often impossible—to find those separated from narratives. Facts with which one is presented—by others or in the media—are generally presented selectively to support narratives, whether intentionally or otherwise.

Print newspapers have the factual bit—which creates a tacit narrative by virtue of the subtleties of what's left in and left out and how it's shaded and what gets reported on at all and all that good consent manufacturing stuff—and opinion columnists, who create the explicit narratives around those—they're the bit of the paper that really draws the crowds, at least to heard the journalists tell it.

They concretise the arguments implicit in the factual stuff: there will be a factual story about rates of benefit fraud, and then there will be a columnist saying that benefit fraudsters should be put in the pillory or hanged or something. Certain narratives are reiterated and accepted as tacit truth by larger or smaller sections of the media and thus the populace, and this serves to reinforce said narrative. It can be remarkably difficult to avoid being worn down, particularly by less "extreme-seeming" beliefs.

I think the admiration I have for cranks—where I have it—resides largely in their ability to resist the lure of socially-enforced external and popular narratives. Where their analysis is correct, this resistance allows them to avoid these mendacious narratives—to avoid, as the lads would say, false consciousness. (When incorrect, of course, it can lead to some really bad stuff.)