I wanted to quickly explore a concept that seems to be more and more relevant as internet reality bias silos people into contradicting versions of events.
This is the achilles heel of free systems. Where freedom is promoted, there must always be a check to make sure the freedom enabled by the system isn’t used to destroy the system itself.
I haven’t been able to find an exact term for this phenomenon, so I will give a few different examples.
Examples
The Tolerance Paradox
This term is from Karl Popper in his book: The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) - a direct analysis of WW2 and the totalitarian ideologies that took hold of Europe in the early 20th century.
“In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”
This encapsulates the paradox of free societies - you can not allow the freedom of the society to be used to destroy the freedom of the society. It is a self referential paradox.
To have a completely tolerant society, which means all choices are respected, you can not respect those choices that do not respect the choices of others. So to be tolerant, you are required to be intolerant.. of intolerance.
While this seems obvious and counterintuitive at the same time - it is the main route of exploitation by bad actors to disrupt and destroy free societies.
By tolerating intolerance, intolerance will be all that is left.
Performative Contradiction
“There is no Truth!”
Bad actors will often shout self referential paradoxes like this, because they know most people listening can be tricked into not looping it back to the original statement.
The statement “There is no Truth!” immediately invalidates itself in the paradox loop. However, people that don’t recognize the loop will just apply it to everything but the original statement.
You see this all the time lately. Where do you always hear the term “Fake News”. Think about it - it’s always reported in the news. But of course it’s all other news, not the one I’m watching now.
Self-Defeating Principles
In a recent debate video series, Medhi Hasan debated someone who ended up being a fascist. After making a quick point, Medhi responded by promptly ending the debate - because fascists don’t believe in debate.
It’s important to understand that the only reason a fascist would use debate is to undermine the system enabling it in the first place, as to remove debate for everyone. This is actually stated by the fascist in the video, as he describes how he aims to use democratic systems to vote someone in who could then end the democratic system.
A contradiction can be used to exploit systems that don’t account for their negative. In a free society that allows everyone to vote for whatever they want - you could vote to get rid of voting.
Thus, the extension of free debate does not include those that don’t believe in debate - in order to protect debate.
You can see how easily misinformation could disrupt a system if one does not understand this principle. An onlooker could easily yell - “Look! Medhi won’t debate someone with a different opinion than him. He doesn’t believe in free speech and debate.” - while not realizing that this is the one exception that free debate requires.
The only person you must refuse to debate, is one who doesn’t believe in debate at all.
Normalizing Terms
I do not see this feedback loop referred to in public even though it is happening all the time.
Those that seek to destroy free systems are much easier to pick out when you realize how simply they are undermining the system.
Basically to put it in the simplest way I can:
Any right that protects the right to destroy itself must include one exception - its negative.
I wish there was a term to describe this more clearly.