17. EVERYTHING IS TRUE AND NOTHING IS TRUE
People, they need to believe. And nowadays, they’ll believe anything.
- Jake Gyllenhal as Quentin Beck, a.k.a. Mysterio in Spider Man: Far From Home
This is a book about war stories.
Like this one.
On my first Afghanistan tour, my infantry company would go to a place outside Kandahar Airfield called Tarnak Farms. It was a former Al-Qaeda training camp that had been repurposed as an exercise ground, and, on the night of April 17th, 2002, my company and I were there to practice shooting weapons at night.
April in Kandahar is nice, neither the searing oppressive heat of the summer, nor the grey, miserable cold of the winter. That night in particular was warm and comfortable, the sky filled with stars that lit up the blackness of the desert, and I was in the company of soldiers who were more like family than colleagues. We’d eaten together, slept together, stood guard together, showered together, even burned our shit together.
At one point that evening, I stopped to shoot the breeze with another soldier, both of us unaware that two American F-16 fighter jets were patrolling the sky above. We were equally unaware that one of the pilots had assessed our training activity as enemy surface-to-air fire and thus a threat, and so we were also unaware that even at that moment, a 500-lb bomb was hurtling toward a point on the earth’s surface less than a few hundred meters from where we stood.
The author Tim O’Brien once wrote that in many ways, a true war story cannot be believed. Often the actual events are so implausible that the storyteller has to make up a series of escalating ‘normal’ events so the crazy stuff is more believable. In this case, what’s crazy about a 500-pound bomb being dropped on a hundred-person infantry company isn’t that so many people were killed and wounded, but so few.
Four dead, out of dozens in the impact area.
As for me, ten minutes prior I’d been standing almost on top of what would be the epicenter of the explosion. When the bomb hit, I was on my way back to that exact spot, a distance I could cover in a minute or so. Had I arrived, I would most likely be dead right now because I would have been exposed to the entire force of the blast and the only reason I’m not was because I happened to run into a soldier and we happened to strike up a conversation for the small time it would have taken me to walk the distance. When the bomb hit, we were saying our goodbyes and so I’m alive by an improbable twist of fate.
Or maybe this is just a story. Maybe I’m full of shit and none of this happened.
If I am, then I’m in good company because lots of what we’re told isn’t the truth, like the tobacco companies who actively and publicly undermined the causal link between smoking and cancer. Likewise, the fossil fuel industry stands accused of funding millions of dollars of climate denial research despite knowing for decades that human activity was linked to climate change. These narratives are made possible partly because there’s so much knowledge these days that it’s hard to know what’s true.
By way of background, in 1982, R. Buckminster Fuller coined the Knowledge Doubling Curve1, the idea that human knowledge increased exponentially over time. From doubling every hundred years at the start of the 1900’s, to doubling every 12 months in 1982, to doubling every day in 20182, Fuller’s Curve suggested the rate would only increase.
Today, we have more knowledge than ever. Instead of making us smarter, however, it seems like all that knowledge only confuses us. This is because all this information means it’s possible to find supporting data for nearly any idea. Electric cars good for the environment because they reduce pollution3? Check. Electric cars bad for the environment because they increase pollution4? Check. The earth is round? Check. The earth is flat5? You get the point.
The problem with this explosion of knowledge is that facts don’t mean what they once did. One reason for this is the half-life of knowledge, which is to say that as we learn more, established facts are replaced with new ones6. Smoking used to be endorsed by doctors7. Now? Not so much. Even in science-based fields like medicine or engineering, once well-known facts are replaced as knowledge grows and with the rate at which this happens accelerating, it’s reasonable to question what we think we know. Maybe climate change will be revealed for a hoax by the time this book goes to print, and if so, wonderful, I guess.
A more harmful reason facts don’t have the weight they once did is because of framing, or the process of selecting some aspects of a perceived reality, and presenting those aspects in a way that promotes a certain interpretation8. This works because the way information is presented effects how it will be received9. So, when an oil and gas company spends more money advertising their green research and development programs than they do on the research programs themselves, they’re framing reality in a certain perspective.
Framing is a method of manipulation, and social media has made it easier for politicians, public relations types, and others to better control what information you’re given, and how it’s presented. Today, not only is our knowledge itself evolving, but we also have alternative facts, fake news, and post-truth, all terms that suggest truth itself is subjective. Ultimately, we have more information than ever before, and all it has done is make it more difficult than to determine what is real and what isn’t.
There’s a method to this madness because people always have motivations when they communicate. When it comes to greenwashing, or misleading people about environmental practices, corporations have a number of motivations. First, many governmental environmental regulations are poorly applied, which incentivizes some corporations to look like they’re taking climate action, when in reality they might not be, at least to the degree they claim10.
Second, projecting an environmentally friendly image is a way for corporations to compete, and so greenwashing represents a way to cultivate that image without having to follow through on the promises. In other words, since some corporations are motivated by maximizing shareholder profit, their use of greenwashing is designed to create the conditions where they can make as much money as possible. Some of the ways greenwashing is done is through vague claims such as ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘all-natural,’ hidden trade-offs, or by making irrelevant claims, such as taking credit for actions already mandated by law, like being free of CFCs11.
All this knowledge and countervailing truth can paralyze us, fill our heads so full we don’t know what to do. That’s kind of the point, because when we don’t know what to do, we may very well do nothing and those who benefit from the current system will continue to benefit.
The way to overcome this inaction is the same as for every other obstacle we’ve looked at; get involved through personal service, like Restless Development, an international youth-led program that mentors young people to lead change and provides training on how to recognize and combat misinformation12. This is vital work because in the end, climate change doesn’t care if we believe in it or not. It’ll just keep on happening and so it’s in the best interest of society to be able to concentrate on the facts.
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, New York, St. Martin’s Press: 1981.
Tim Sandle, “Knowledge doubles almost every day, and it’s set to increase,” Digital Journal, Nov 23, 2018.
Sarah Buchanan, “How cleaner vehicles can bring big public health benefits and fight climate change,” Environmental Defence Canada, June 03, 2020, https://environmentaldefence.ca/2020/06/03/cleaner-vehicles-can-bring-big-public-health-benefits-fight-climate-change/?gclid=CjwKCAiA17P9BRB2EiwAMvwNyIApVK4xaGZeA5b95FPSrx0DJhVeuKAXgmKAp8i-aKSpu9sODgFqKBoCF7cQAvD_BwE, accessed 12 Nov 2020.
Jonathan Lasser, “Are electric cars worse for the environment?” Politico, May 15, 2018, https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/05/15/are-electric-cars-worse-for-the-environment-000660/, accessed 12 Nov 2020.
The Flat Earth Society, ‘FAQ,’ theflatearthsociety,org, https://theflatearthsociety.org/home/index.php/about-the-society/faq, accessed 4 Jun 2023.
Samuel Arbesman, The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date, New York, Penguin Group: 2013.
Robert Klara, “Throwback Thursday: When Doctors Prescribed ‘Healthy’ Cigarette Brands,” Adweek, 18 June 2015, https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/throwback-thursday-when-doctors-prescribed-healthy-cigarette-brands-165404/, accessed 4 Jun 2023.
Entman, R.M. (1993). “Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm,” in Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51-58. P. 52.
David Moscrop, Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones, Fredericton, Goose Lane Editions: 2019, p. 112.
Zhi Yang, Thi Thu Huong Nguyen, Hoang Nam Nguyen, Thi Thuy Nga Nguyen, and Thi Thanh Cao, “Greenwashing Behaviours: Causes, Taxonomy and Consequences Based on a Systematic Literature Review,” Journal of Business Economics and Management, (2020), vol 21: 5, 1486 to 1507.
Priyanka Aggarwal, and Aarti Kadyan, “Greenwashing: The Darker Side of CSr,” Indian Journal of Applied Research, October 2011, Vol 4(3): 61-66.
Restless Development, ‘Youth Against Misinformation,’ RestlessDevelopment.org, https://restlessdevelopment.org/projects/youth-against-misinformation/, accessed 27 Oct 2021.