Matthew Yglesias’ post, Misinformation Mostly Confuses Your Own Side, argues that political misinformation tends to harm the group spreading it more than it persuades opponents. Key points:
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Misinformation primarily affects in-group thinking: Supporters of a politician or movement are more likely to believe falsehoods from their own side, leading to internal confusion and strategic missteps.
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Limited impact on opponents: While misinformation can provoke outrage, it rarely converts skeptics or shifts public opinion in a meaningful way.
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Echo chambers reinforce bad strategy: When false beliefs circulate unchecked within a political movement, they can lead to poor decision-making and unrealistic expectations.
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Honesty is both ethical and pragmatic: Yglesias argues that promoting accurate information strengthens a movement’s credibility and effectiveness over time.
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For what it’s worth, here’s an excerpt from my book on historical tax resistance campaigns that makes a similar point:
Radical honesty means abjuring subterfuge—conducting your campaign in the open, in plain sight, without trying to take your opponent by surprise through trickery, and without trying to influence people by “spin” and lopsided propaganda. It also means studiously refusing to participate in the dishonesty by which your opponent holds on to power and deceives those who submit to it. Radical honesty has several potential advantages:
1. Honesty provides a stark moral contrast between your campaign and whatever institution you are opposing.
In The Story of Bardoli, Mahadev Desai described how this played out in the Bardoli tax strike:
This contrast can make your campaign more appealing to potential resisters and to bystanders, and can increase the morale of the resisters in your campaign.
2. Honesty itself is a threat to tyranny.
The way people signal their loyalty to tyranny is to participate in the lies that bolster its power. When everyone around you goes along with the lies, it feels like everyone is loyal to the tyrant. Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote of how this worked under communist tyranny:
But, he said, people may start to refuse:
Tolstoy went further, and claimed that radical honesty not only threatens tyrants but constitutes a revolution:
3. Honesty keeps your campaign from deluding itself.
In a tax resistance campaign, as in any activist campaign, there are frequently temptations to take short-cuts. Rather than winning a victory after a tough and uncertain struggle, you can declare victory early and hope to capitalize on the resulting morale boost. Or, rather than doing something practical that takes a lot of thankless hours, you can do something quick and symbolic that “makes a powerful statement.” Or, rather than fighting for goals that are worth achieving, you can pick goals that are easily achievable but that aren’t really worth fighting for.
Radical honesty gets you in the habit of avoiding temptations like these. By facing your situation forthrightly, and by evaluating your tactics unflinchingly and without self-flattery, you become more apt to make effective decisions.
4. Honesty is itself a good thing worth contributing to.
If you conduct your campaign in a radically honest way, you contribute to a cultural atmosphere of trust and straightforward communication. In this way, even if you do not succeed in the other goals of your tax resistance campaign, you still may have some residual positive effect on the world around you.
5. Honesty means there’s a lot you no longer have to worry about.
When you practice radical honesty, you don’t have to worry about keeping your stories straight, you don’t have to worry about leaks of information that might cast doubt on your credibility, you don’t have to be as concerned about information security, and you don’t have to worry about spies and informers in your midst who might blab your secrets to the authorities. This leaves you free to spend your energy and attention playing offense instead of defense.
When Gandhi heard concerns that government agents had infiltrated the Indian independence movement, he wrote:
What’s the catch? For one thing, for a campaign to be radically honest it needs to have fairly tight control over its message. Not just anyone can be a spokesperson, but only those with the talent to speak precisely and to cut through the sorts of baloney that characterize political debate in this era of spin doctors and pundits and talking points.
Another difficulty is that if your campaign already has a credibility problem, it’s going to take a lot of radical honesty to dig you out of that hole.
Also, it seems that at least some of the benefits of radical honesty only emerge when it has become really radical and pervasive. Half-hearted gestures of radical honesty are just another form of machiavellian communication. If you’re not prepared to go all the way, it may not be to your advantage to put in the extra effort.