But governments are not the only perpetrators of the big lie. Big corporations and their industry associations are practitioners in the art of the art well. The tobacco industry created a whole body of pseudo-scientific evidence in the 1970s to contradict research that proved cigarette smoking cause cancer. They created a huge public disinformation campaign to protect their industry profits. That big lie worked for years. Doubt was cast in the public mind for what was settled science. Years after the lie was dramatically exposed in Congressional hears, doubts remain in segments of the population. As Hitler wrote in the quote above, -- grossly impudent [lies] always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down."
ANATOMY OF THE BIG LIE
Climate change is another example where a big lie campaign created a factitious controversy. It is an instructive example because climate science started out completely devoid of politics and public opinion. It began within a small sphere of several thousand international climate researchers whose collective deliberations models how opinions form in the absence of malicious intent. Discussions and vigorous debate among them were a natural part of understanding the meaning of data as it was collected.
The initial chaos of ideas and theories slowly gave rise to areas of consensus and then converging theories. Gradually, as more and more data created coherent patterns, a consensus formed among scientists that planet Earth is quickly warming, that carbon dioxide from ancient deposits of fossil fuels is a major contributor, and that the impact of this climate change may be catastrophic for life on the planet.
As alarmed climate scientists began alerting the public to what appeared to be a significant and growing threat to humanity, as they began advocating for solutions to avoid the worst consequences of what is about to happen, their consensus opinion generated alarm in the fossil energy sector. Carbon dioxide exhaust is an unavoidable consequence of burning fossil fuels. You can burn it cleaner, you can capture or offset some CO2, but you can't eliminate most of it. The implications are clear. If science is correct, fossil fuel consumption has to be reduced. This presents a direct threat to industry profits and the whole business model. After secretly confirming the scientific findings on global warming, big energy corporations made plans to attack the science and alter the trajectory of public opinion. In a fair contest of ideas, energy company executives knew that public policy would quickly follow to reduce CO2 emissions and erode profits. This sets the stage for creating the big lie behind the climate controversy.
The creation of a big lie takes place in stages. It starts with some seed of truth and the recruitment of researchers and scientific opinion influences who see little cause for alarm in the data, or who have contrary opinions. These are the outliers on one fringe of the climate science continuum. Their actual numbers will be few by definition, so the goal is to disproportionately elevate their voices in the public eye. The next step is to lavish attention and grant money on these fringe researchers, hire PR firms and media commentators to amplify their minority opinions, and identify conspiracy theorists willing to go even further to discredit the science. This creates the framework for the big lie.
Nurturing the dissenters is the next step. Establishing communications networks and opportunities for personal interactions within this growing cadre of dissidents lends credibility and deepens the group's commitment to their alternative opinion" that climate change is a "hoax". The big lie is broadcast. The larger and more animated the dissenting group becomes, the more audacious the lie they are willing to support and the more impact it will have on public opinion.
The impact of this very loud but synthetic dissent group is amplified further by a simultaneous attack on the scientists on the opposite fringe, scientists who hold the most alarming opinions about climate change. Normally, an attack on the scientific community would raise the strongest reaction in them. This would cancel out some of the noise generated by the big lie. Anticipating the reactions of these scientists and muting it with a preemptive suppression campaign is part of the plan by the architects of the big lie. For the propagandist, it is important that the factitious continuum only extends in a single direction, away from opinions that threaten their plans.
When the big lie is launched in public, it quickly generates a fictitious extension to the scientific consensus on climate change, in this example in the direction of lowering the alarm. The bigger the lie, the longer the continuum stretches in one direction. This has the immediate effect of making the average of climate scientists' opinions appear to be more extreme on the continuum of all opinions. The public information campaign by the scientific community to alert us to their concerns must suddenly compete with a public disinformation campaign conducted by the big energy companies.
As the general public gets drawn into the apparent controversy, the centrality of opinion bias we all have skews our beliefs and distorts public opinion. We look for truth to be somewhere in the middle of these new extremes. This shift towards the big lie further encourages and energizes those who believe the lies. Polarity increases and the truth becomes distorted in the public's mind. Public consensus shifts away from the scientific consensus and towards the big lie. Politics become stalemated and public policy decisions to remediate the problems are delayed.
This still active example of a big lie, as it applies to climate change, may serve as a template for understanding public opinion formation and how it is manipulated. It fits a generalized pattern that helps us identify many other deception-based controversies such as anti-vaccinators, QAnon followers, and pandemic hoax believers. It also illuminates why our bias, that the truth must fall somewhere in the middle, prevents us from seeing the facts more clearly and why, -- the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down." Big lie propaganda causes lasting damage. This discussion doesn't explain the many ways new media disinformation technologies are making it easier to create and sustain public deceptions. The art of lying has truly become a science of deception that alters our perceptions.
There are powerful reasons why big lies are proliferating these days. The ability to electronically identify, analyze and radicalize people on the fringe of public opinion through social media is having a massive effect on society, for example. The repercussions are very serious while public understanding of these new techniques lags far behind the emerging science of psycho-social manipulation. But also, there are social reasons. The big lie is working better than ever for those who want to manipulate public opinion for personal gain. And success breeds replication of the way in which it is obtained. Social prohibitions against lying are ignored or not enforced.
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