https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GAw6dvh8v4
Masha Gessen: "There is something inherent in that kind of populism - that it appeals to an imaginary past. The reversal of the cultural vector is something that happens immediately."
Bob McKeown: "You say it happens almost immediately. Explain that dynamic, because one would think that there would be so much entrenched power, resistance, whatever, that it would take a long time definitively. Why immediately?"
M: "There are a lot of things that take a long time to change, and those generally tend to be formal institutions. But what maintains societies and what maintains states in fact are informal institutions. They are norms. They are cultural habits. And those are much more fragile than we realize."
B: "You say that in an autocratic situation there is an impulse to normalize. Can you explain that?"
M: "We imagine autocracy, with good reason, as a catastrophe - the end of the world as we know it. But, in fact, the world has never ended. And so there's a kind of cognitive dissonance that happens when you wake up the morning after and the sun has indeed come up, and you still have two arms and two legs, and you can live in this situation. And so maintaining the idea that this is unlivable, this is not normal - when, in fact, it begins to feel normal very quickly - people adapt, that's what we evolve to do as a species. So, you have to maintain a tension that feels uncomfortable, feels even unnatural, to continue to be able to recognize that this is not normal."
B: "You raised the similarities between Putin and Trump. Is use of language - use of facts and the truth, or lack thereof - part of that?"
M: "I think it might be one of their most important similarities. They both lie, and that's been well documented. But, I think, what's less understood is that they don't lie to avoid telling the truth. They lie to assert their power over reality. It's a bully tactic. 'I'm going to say whatever I please. I assert my right to say whatever I please. And what are you going to do about it?' And the answer is, we have know idea what to do about it."
M: "I think that there is a basic misunderstanding of how much you can accomplish with naked facts without telling the bigger story. The analogy that I've been borrowing from my friend Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion who would say this when he first quit chess and went up against Putin as a politician - he would say that dealing with Putin was like playing chess with somebody who kept knocking the figures off the board. I think that the big mistake that a lot of established institutions made in covering the campaign was covering the campaign as though they were playing chess when Trump wasn't playing chess."
B: "So is that part of the distinction you draw between fact-checking and telling the truth?"
M: "I think that we need to stop focusing quite so much on the facts - we still need to focus on the facts - but we need to tell the bigger story of what is happening to us. And that's the difference between facts and truth. Just an agglomeration of facts is not yet the truth. You have to have the courage and the confidence to tell the story."
Remember to put in the title if it's an opinion piece
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
