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Resist the Urge to Simplify the Story

Jan 10, 2024, 4 min read

https://app.getpocket.com/read/3005146246 Author:: Anne Applebaum

* highlights from 2021-02-08

* Like most Americans, I am nowhere near any violence right now. Nevertheless, I am hearing and seeing violence on a series of screens: television screens, smartphone screens, computer screens. Even in a room as quiet as mine—outside the window I can see grass and trees—the cacophony is almost unbearable. It’s as if different choruses are all singing at the same time, and not in harmony. 
* Many would like to simplify these events—to give them a single, clear interpretation. Some tell a harrowing story about police violence. Some tell a heartwarming story about police and communities pulling together. Some tell an insidious story about black looters. Some tell a murky story about white infiltration of peaceful black protest movements. 
* Now we have patchwork protests, mixed with patchwork riots. In each one of them, the police and the protesters have different motives, create different impacts, affect people in different ways. 
* The point, for many, is to find justifications for what they already believe and reinforcement of the identity that they already have. From this vantage point, the unrest is the fault of black people (or white people), police (or protesters), the right (or the left). Emotions are so high that the ongoing effort to manipulate images coming out of the protests is already an industry in and of itself, involving uncounted fake accounts, bots, and provocateurs. 
* The proliferation of false stories and fake narratives doesn’t mean that truth doesn’t exist, or that Americans will never find out what really happened. But it does mean that the full story has to be told in quite a complicated way, from different angles, by many people. That requires time and patience, as well as the sort of journalism that millions of Americans no longer trust. If nothing else, the dozens of physical attacks by police on journalists in recent days offer final proof that the president’s constant verbal attacks on journalists have been absorbed and believed by many, including a number of officers. False stories can be promulgated more easily when the people trying to tell true stories have been discredited—or when they are battered by rubber bullets. 
* In any case, quite a lot of people will not want to hear the truth. Quite a lot of people will want, instead, for everyone to shut up. They will want force, violence, whatever it takes to make the cacophony stop. The behavioral scientist Karen Stenner has written very eloquently about people who have what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a personality type that is bothered by complexity and is especially enraged by disagreement. Trump has made himself into the spokesperson for precisely these American authoritarians. 
* Trump was sending a message to his Americans with an authoritarian predisposition: I share your identity. I am part of your tribe.
* 
* But force is not the only possible response to cacophony. Instead of imposing silence, you can produce harmony. You can create a different narrative—a larger narrative that pulls people together. You can seek consensus; you can appeal to something that everyone can agree on. You can invoke patriotism, America, the founding documents, or just the belief that things can change for the better. 

* He has to convince Americans that nothing will function, that all of the institutions have failed, that only violence remains. He has to convince all of the people who are sitting at home as I am, surrounded by trees and grass, that they are in such grave danger from the noise on their screens that they need brute force to shut it off.

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