Words are more powerful, more determinate, and more real than reality itself. In Christianity, the Divine Logos, the Son of God, predates reality itself. Words frame our world. Since the Son of God, the Logos, is not made of the contingent matter and mass that reality is built from, the Logos and the rational words He represents are more real than reality. Personhood and the rational words that give personhood its frame and identity are therefore more real than reality. All personhood as we find it in humanity is grounded by the Logos and imitates His inherent personal identity.
Should we find ourselves questioning if the above thesis is right, we should immediate realize that our questioning of it entails words, and those words have the power to question or tear down the reality of what I allege. Words build or tear down worlds. Only in and through words do I gain access to the world in which I find myself. Words provide access to reality. Without words, reality’s determinate structures, its intricacies, and my ability to connect to it, are little more than amorphous data toss by the vicissitudes of time and place.
We may imagine a world that has no observer, no intellect capable of organizing, but the imagining activity itself requires the very intellectual observer we are trying to remove. Not everything conceivable is possible. In this plane of existence, there is a union of reality with words, and these resulting entities are called humans. It is the immaterial mind of humans that organizes the world through a combination of material entailments: the brain with its neurons, electricity, and matter. On the Christian view, all this is very simple: the eternal Mind, God, provides the vast array of already highly organized raw materials: energy, gravity, mass, etc., etc. This universe’s raw materials are conveniently arrayed to allow for biological life on one planet in this universe, earth. The other minds, human minds, take these vast materials and, in a microcosm, arrange and organize these materials into more intellectually fashioned frameworks. These human minds are mimicking the eternal Mind. The invisible changes the visible.
Let’s zoom in now on 5th generational warfare, which is narrative warfare. This is a misnomer; narrative warfare–the war of words and stories–is really the very first generation warfare. The Christian view tells a story of how the serpent reframed and questioned what God told Adam and Eve about the tree of knowledge. It was a simple story twist. This slight change in the narrative led to devastating repercussions for all reality, but firstly for the humans, because those little humans minds now had a very different set of words framing their world. Before the first transgression, God’s message to humanity was, I will walk with you and you will procreate, fill the earth, and rule. After the first sin, work now required inefficiency, procreation required pain, male and female would make war with one another for dominance, and of course death would abound and destroy human destiny. Words are more real than reality.
5th generation warfare–to tie it in with the title–is often associated with Qanon in political pop-culture. Qanon is an alleged intelligence operation designed to wake up the sleeping American masses from the brain-washing that had led most of the public to complacency and misplaced trust in politicians and government institutions. Specifically, this operation was only called ‘Q,’ not Qanon. The -anon part of the name came from the initial interactions anonymous persons would have with the writer of the ‘Q’ posts. The Q posts provided some true intel, some fragmented intel, and some disinformation. In the philosophy of speech, there is something called speech-act theory, which differentiates the verbalization or words as locution, what is done with that verbalization of those words as illocution, and the effect the words have on the audience as perlocution. To understand so-called 5th generation warfare, we must be attentive to perlocution. The accuracy of information, its truth value as it were, may be largely unimportant when considered together with the effect (perlocution) on the audience in view. Asking certain questions, for instance, that one might already know the answers to, is considered the Socratic method; the goal of this method is not to mislead but to get the audience to heuristically engage. If we feign ignorance of the answers to the questions we pose, are we deceivers? Are we guilty of misinformation, or misrepresenting? What if my point of putting disinformation out there is simply to get my audience to care to know the truth?
Where am I going with this? We know all humans have limitations, and all humanity will always have limited information, fragmented information. Thus, the shear existence of humans-using-words is a situation that always entails fragmented information or misinformation. It is inescapable, that is, unless someone can pose a theory of humans that shows them to be unlimited, infinite, eternal, etc., and therefore their words to have always perfect accuracy. Striving for accuracy, for truth, is applaudable and should be our goal, but humans’ knowledge grows and changes, resulting in large contexts in which humans are inescapably involved in disseminating misinformation. It seems to me that there are two features we need to bear in mind when it comes to misinformation. Firstly, is the speaker sincere in his belief that the misinformation he is providing is accurate: i.e., the speaker believes he is speaking the truth. Secondly, it is further helpful to understand the intent of using the misinformation if the speaker does know he is spouting misinformation. Before the accusation comes at me that I am advocating for an “end justifies the means” ethics, we must recognize that things like rhetorical questions, hyperbole, metaphors, and the like, all put forward differing degrees of what may look like deception, evasion, or intent to distract. With language, there is a whole, whole lot of “ends justifies the means”; said differently, there is ubiquitous “end effect on my audience achieved through a vast array of language devices/means.”
Modernism–the Western intellectual movement from roughly 1600s to the 20th century–built many falsehoods into nearly unassailable assumptions. One assumption I have written on extensively is the myth of the individual against the backdrop of “God is Trinity.” The human person is always already an intersubjective entity before any thought of lone or individual can happen. A child is his mother, his father, and someone unique as well; hence, a child is already intersubjectively constituted in his very nature before he can ever have the erroneous thought that he is somehow a lone individual. Similarly, the cognitive development of a child is always built from the incoming and constitutive influences of other humans. Except for the rarest of tragedies, that somehow a child is alone all her life–how would this child live beyond a few days though–there are no cases where a child’s mind develops devoid of the building blocks of other humans’ influences.
Another so-called unassailable assumption from modernism, which likewise fuels suspicion against putative misinformation, is that truth is gained in an all or nothing manner. If truth is imagined to be inside of a building, and you only can claim to have the truth if you are in the building, then how we understand truth is an either/or situation. You are either “in the truth” or you are “outside of the truth.” Before I get accused, let me affirm that there is a place for either/or truth propositions. What I am calling a wrongheaded, unassailable assumption is the framing of the entirety of the human situation and relationship to truth on the model of “you are either in or out.” Truth is better understood as concentric circles around the central truth claim, and where someone is mapped tells whether someone is closer or farther from the truth. Our knowledge grows in proximity to the truth, gets closer as we diligently work to know the truth. In an attempt to stay away from making this truth conversation religious, I will simply aver that this model of truth-concentric-circles works equally well for science and religion.
Coming back to narrative warfare and the idea of misinformation, the 21st century’s Western governments have criminalized–or are in the process of trying to criminalize–something that is inescapable to how human knowledge develops. All human knowledge is partial, fragmented. This is why even the most well grounded scientific theories, which have utterly changed the world, are still considered provisional. Stephen Hawkins opines in his now famous A Brief History of Time that it only takes one divergent event to obliterate the sufficiency of any scientific theory. Thus, science is ever provisional and revisable. What not to miss is that asserting this about science is likewise asserting that human knowledge is limited, incomplete, and therefore has all the markings of what Western governments are calling misinformation. If the 21st century has taught us anything, it has taught us that “controlling the narrative” is a god-like ability, and whoever can control it will centralize and accumulate monstrous power.
There are other questions here. To whom is something misinformation? What knowledge tapestry is in view when someone claims something is misinformation? If I don’t provide all the context surrounding the filming of a movie–the off camera context unrelated to the task of the filming and production crews–I can only provide a reporting of it that is misinforming since the actual experience of being on set for the filming would entail those unrelated off camera contexts. If I ask certain questions–Socratic method–designed to get you to think, but you instead just assume the answer that my question seemed to suppose, am I guilty of misinformation? An example might help. Will the universe always continue to persist? My question here supposes the universe to be eternal; this is called question begging and is supposedly guilty of misinformation. The running scientific consensus by in large is that the universe had a beginning. My question, however, was designed to get you to work on the wrong assumption and likewise to get you to think about putting a historical divine attribute (eternal) onto the universe. My purpose in the question is well-intended. Claiming the universe to be eternal, for instance, is a subtle affirmation of the sufficiency of the Christian worldview, since Judeo-Christian beliefs about the eternality of things is a long standing doctrine. It suggests that humans desire the eternal.
The context, therefore, of a Socratic method question situates the misinformation. Let it not be forgotten that even in the Gospels, Jesus tells his disciples that He speaks in parables so that people will not understand, Luke 8:10. Jesus speaks indirectly with the broader populous but to his disciples directly. Is the use of such parables guilty of misinforming, especially considering Jesus was perfectly capable of explaining His teaching thoroughly and clearly: just as He goes on to do with the disciples n the Luke 8 text cited above. The point I am driving at is that human language and human relating is way too complicated to be boiled down to nothing more than, “Is so-and-so reporting the facts accurately?” Notice the modernist assumption hidden here. Why is accuracy of telling facts such a priority over say riveting story crafting? The multi-trillion dollar film and entertainment industry tells us that humans value a good story more than facts, doesn’t it? Modernism of the later Enlightenment took a war-footing against all forms of mysticism. It became infatuated with the scientific method and a “just the facts” mentality. Fast forward to today. The provisional-nature of science and the discrepancies between quantum and macro physics, for instance, has highlighted how limited human knowledge is, how fragmented it is, and thus how misinformed we continue to be. The renewed interest in “spiritual” endeavors and a new openness to mysticism has been the birth-child of the disillusionment fostered by the failed promises of both science and modernism.
A word on postmodernists: these persons thought the only reaction to the failure of modernism to capture the truth with certainty was to deny all access to truth. Many who desire power are drawn to this view. To make the truth as you wish on a whim is a god-like power as is the judgement these postmodernists make when they free themselves from all accountability. We see here yet again an either/or view on truth. If you can’t have the truth perfectly, then you can’t have any of it whatsoever. The postmodernist has it even easier than this though: they can have the truth perfectly precisely because no one else can have any of it whatsoever. A momentary sidebar here is in order. On postmodernism, they assert that the individual’s biases or subjective influences color the world so drastically that every person ultimately fails to be able to communicate (much much more could be said, but this will have to do here). There is no way to falsify the truth as the postmodernist frames it because it is solely accessible and crafted by the postmodernist alone. Of course, the entire postmodernist view of things utterly crumbles once it is demonstrated that humans are not lone subjects: i.e., humans are intersubjective entities, already built as embodied community from the DNA of mother and father.
To summarize, if misinformation is to be criminalized, and governments are to determine what is real information from what isn’t, quoting Plato’s excellent observation about governments, “who guards the guardians?” The Western governments are posturing themselves as the guardians of what is credible information. Governments, remember, have biases as well–as I’ve shown in other articles, escaping bias is impossible unless humans can remove all limitations on themselves. The question is, whence do your biases come, and why are they appropriate or not? This question demarcates the fact that with every bias there is an implied morality or at least epistemology that undergirds its appropriateness. Misinformation is part and parcel to all human endeavor since all humans and their ideas are imperfect, growing, improving. As noted earlier, to whom is this intel or claim misinformation? The atheist should claim that belief in God is incredulous and therefore misinformation, should she not? This would be nothing more than the atheist following her convictions, which I think most of us would applaud. Take that atheist and put them into a position in government that involves forming policy, specifically related to monitoring appropriate speech. From that policy forming position, that person can craft the very world you and I live in, making public affirming speech about the existence of God outlawed. Coming back to the Christian Logos, this is why I affirm that words are more real than reality. It should be that way, at least according to Christian theism, because the Logos is the blueprint for all that is, but this Logos is the Word, it is speech. Whoever wields speech, wields the world.
Dr. Scalise