On #nocleanfeed and Doublethink
I have been pondering Stephen Collin’s response to my last foray into the #nocleanfeed argument for some time now. And I think we’re both wrong, though at a deeper level than we’ve argued previously.
It’s axiomatic that before people will agree with your arguments, that they must believe your arguments. This is a problem for the #nocleanfeed argument (certainly as articulated by Stephen, and by plenty of others), because the most basic tenet of the argument - that the filter simply won’t work - confronts a fundamental belief that I think most people hold about their government, and in the face of this cognitive dissonance, a lot of people will disbelieve the #nocleanfeed argument. The Australian public doesn’t do Doublethink.
I think it’s fair to say that the Australian public firmly believe that their governments are rational. We have no statues of Turkmenbashi, nor are we regaled with tales of the Dear Leader hitting 12 holes-in-one in a single round of gulf. We believe that the government acts on the basis of evidence to achieve the goals it sets for itself. This is not to imply that these goals are always aligned with the public interest, of course. But where the government acts corruptly, we believe that the corruption is at least rational (X donates to Y, Y legislates for X), if not ethical. Even where our governments are inefficient or unresponsive or acting outside the public interest, we believe that they do so rationally.
We do not believe that our governments are random, arbitrary nor delusional. It is unthinkable in Australia that the word for bread should be changed to reflect the name of Kevin Rudd’s mother. (See the Turkmenbashi link above.)
And this is why the #nocleanfeed argument creates cognitive dissonance: We argue that the government wants to impose a solution that does not work, to solve a problem that does not exist. The blatant corollary to that argument must be that the government is indeed irrational.
The traditional routes back to rationality for this sort of argument aren’t present here: there seems to be no political rationale for the ALP government to pursue this policy. To the degree that the #nocleanfeed has political and electoral implications (which ain’t much), it would have to be seen as a slight negative for the government.
There seems to be no constituency of the ALP which is being appeased, nor - as far as my amateur kreminology of the ALP can tell - any internal driving force which would continue to give this policy momentum.
We are reduced to arguing that our government is irrational, and this means our argument collides head-on with a fundamental belief of the people we’re arguing to. This is not fertile territory to find new supporters. We need to be able to answer the obvious question: why does the government want to impose this filter?
I wrote this blog post after I had attempted to explain to my parents - who are surely representative of the vast majority of the public we wish to convince - why the filter was a bad idea. They asked exactly that question above - if there’s no problem and the proposed solution doesn’t work, why does the government want to impose this filter? I was not able to give them a convincing answer. And I don’t think the #nocleanfeed movement as a whole can either.
Coming in Part 2: The other big problem with the #nocleanfeed argument.
