‘Snake oil’ conjures a product and a time that we are all happy to have behind us, something we are privileged to avoid. Now, when we walk into an American supermarket of virtually any size and in virtually any place, we enjoy the assurance that there is no ‘snake oil’ on the shelves and thus whatever product we buy, however unknown it, or its maker, is, it will not poison us, it is safe to consume, there will be no immediate untoward consequences (even if may still be potentially detrimental, statistically speaking and in the long run, to our overall health).
We can thank two governmental institutions for this removed anxiety (that only a century ago was ubiquitous): the FDA, and the FTC, Federal Trade Commission (policing ‘truth in advertising’). Multiplying the beneficial effect of these governmental regulators is the judiciary, and the possibility to pursue malefactors through civil lawsuits threatening monetary penalties for demonstrated violations of the regulations.
While all this is unequivocally positive, it should be recognized that this change, from a century ago, was not ‘free’, it did not come with no price tag. These regulations after all – as is true of all regulations – limit freedom, both the freedom of the maker to produce ‘snake oil’, and the freedom of the consumer to buy it, ingest it, and sicken or even die from it. Nevertheless, the vast majority of us, it seems fair to say, accept that price, that limitation, as not only reasonable, but eminently desirable.
Yet as intimated above earlier, these regulations are a compromise: they do not mandate that the product be beneficial and produce no ultimate personal harm, only that the proximate result is not evidently injurious. As might be expected, the exact location of the boundaries of this compromise has been subject to debate, with the most obvious example that of cigarettes: serving no necessary bodily function and having long-term detrimental, even sometimes fatal, effects, they have not been banned, as many suggested, but permitted to be sold with warnings (with some countries mandating graphic pictures of damaged internal organs on each individual pack) and heavily taxed. Another is the decision to require more detailed labelling on foods, showing nutritional content, with fat and sugar displayed to permit the consumer to know just how much of these long-term ‘poisons’ he/she is ingesting, without the outright banning of those – ultimately injurious – ‘foods’.
Which brings us to the ‘snake oil’ of misinformation. As originally constituted in the 18th century, freedom of the press was a crucial aspect of the appealing notion of the free marketplace of ideas. In that ‘marketplace’, the notion affirmed, the individual would presumably be free to choose, and therefore would be expected, in the Panglossian ‘best of all possible worlds’, to choose – in most cases at least – the most logical, the most thoroughly grounded and factually based ideas. You can almost envision the consumer wandering from stand to stand, sampling the various offerings and ultimately choosing only the best.
No ‘snake oils’ here, nothing was banned because nothing demonstrably caused proximate damage, illness, or death. There were no obvious physical symptoms on which to base a judgement to impose a ban.
The founders, the producers of the American experiment, felt emboldened to propagate this ‘free marketplace’ – most clearly and unambiguously expressed in the first article of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights, the freedom of religion and of the press – because they viewed all old-world limitations on propagation of ideas, of censorship, as ultimately an inevitable expression of the illegitimacy of those political regimes, based as they were on imaginary links to the divine order of the universe instead of on the concrete, measurable will of the people, of the citizens. No doubt there was some truth in this, even though the rationale for the restrictions on propagating ideas in those, frequently monarchical, old regimes, on expression of thought, was often articulated differently, as potentially undermining public morality and ultimately public order, since that order was based on common moral principles.
The immense shock of World War II demonstrated to the Europeans that this old argument was not devoid of truth, that public order could be, indeed, not only damaged but obliterated by distortion of public morality. It was apparent that the poisoning of the public mind, of the majority of citizens, was not only theoretically possible, but had actually occurred, with devastating results. It was for this reason that Hitler’s 1925 pot-boiler “Mein Kampf”, for example, was banned in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere in Europe for many decades after WW2, a policy that was changed only very recently (and, with qualifications: the new edition is heavily annotated). It is still impermissible in most countries in Europe, punishable by fine and jail time, to propagate assertions, blatantly and provably false assertions, that the Holocaust did not occur, or was exaggerated. Here was recognition that mental, psychological ‘snake oil’ could, in fact, exist: they had experienced it in action, and it results could be far worse than any tainted olive oil or benzene traces in mineral water.
The nearly two and a half centuries since the American Revolution have seen kings and absolutism depart, to be replaced by something akin to popular sovereignty. This process has been, however, anything but smooth, with intervals of violence and transfers of power that we in America have viewed with disdain (conveniently forgetting the horrific, unequalled blood-letting of our own Civil War). We in America have lived on a fantasy that our political system, in distinction from Europe, was older and more firmly based, not susceptible to the sort of irrational, violent disruptions that fascism and communism had produced there. Now, after DJT, we can see clearly just how misplaced that belief was – there is nothing intrinsically different about us that separates us from them, from the rest of world experience. If it happened there, it could happen here. Moreover, shrinkage of the world through high-speed transportation, and especially through electricity and electronic transfer of messages, made that almost inevitable.
Modern communication ensures that information, and misinformation, can spread with phenomenal speed, blindingly fast, virtually at the speed of light. Moreover, that ‘marketplace of ideas’ is now individualized, not subject to observation from the outside by anyone: no casual observer in the bookstore, at the newsstand, can see and comment (even report!) explicitly or by implication through gesture or expression, on your interests. It is possible, to cite a most repulsive example, to indulge in the wildest perversions and that perennially recognized scourge of pornography of all types – so obviously destructive of public order in highly complex modern, highly mobile societies, especially so endangering to the physical safety of women – is readily available.
Given this history, the argument for an “internet information FDA and FTC” seems self-evident, with the addition of further enforcement thru the availability of private civil legal action. By way of illustration for example, under such a system the propagator of ivermectin as an inoculation or cure for Covid-19 could be taken to court in pursuit of financial penalties for misinformation. In other words, civil actions in the judicial system could be used to punish these purveyors of false advertising, of mental snake oil.
More speculative, it would seem useful for the sake of the public good – in particular, for the general acceptance of fundamental verities, reducible in former times to the phrase ‘common sense’ – that there should be an independent, government- (but non-partisan) scale of veracity, so that internet posts could be labelled with a number indicating the level, i.e., the equivalent of a nutrient label. It would probably need to be something very simple, not e.g., 0-100, but some number say 1-5, with the higher number signifying agreement with more scientific reports (defined as scholarly papers in widely recognized scientific, peer-reviewed journals). In particular, this would help expose the level of misleading information or outright fraud in areas like discussion of global warming.
We need to be clear that no such arrangement will eliminate conspiracy theories, or fully restore faith in our political system. Such hopes are utopian: there will always be a segment of the population susceptible to the most egregious nonsense, unreachable by scientific studies and logical arguments. Reduction of their number, however, is possible, highly desirable, and even vital. Democracy, dependent as it is on the informed opinion of its electorate, cannot long survive when nearly half of its citizenry is regularly and repeatedly seduced by demonstrable fallacies, when presentation of proof contradictory to those fallacies is summarily discarded. If we can reduce that number to something less than 30 percent – a level only marginally higher than what existed before the internet and social media – then preservation of the democracy is much more likely.
None of the above should serve to vitiate the argument that our democracy itself, as it currently exists, is in sorry and urgent need of fundamental reform (in particular, elimination of gerrymandering; mandatory public-only election financing; abolition of the electoral college; removal of voter suppression measures in favor of more widespread voting; reforming of the Senate to make the number of senators from each state proportional to the population of that state; transformation of the supreme court, with more justices and nominated for a limited term). Indeed, in many respects, it is not a democracy in the true sense – minority rule is still far too common, with the resulting distortion, if not elimination, of rights and privileges to large swaths of the population. Still, it is vastly preferable to autocracy, absolutism, despotism, or dictatorship, as there still exists, inside this system, the real possibility to change it peaceably for the better, however difficult that may be. In an autocracy or a dictatorship, by definition, there are no such (non-violent) avenues for change.
In sum: to preserve this democracy requires addressing two enormous problems simultaneously. We must find a way to reduce the baleful influence of irrational, unfounded beliefs, a great number of which are fueled by a system deifying avarice. The generation and persistence of imaginary conspiracies is often lucrative, so the incentives and mechanisms for their reduction or elimination are frequently, by comparison, disturbingly inadequate, depending as they do not on self-interest in the narrow sense, but on overall societal interest and well-being. In addition, we are faced with the urgent need to fundamentally reform our political system, our democracy, where yet again we are confronted with vested interests of enormous power and influence who thrive in the current system and thus fight these changes in every conceivable way. So intractable are these problems that it seems probable that we are approaching a conundrum: democracy as we have it may be unchangeable without sacrificing a part of it that has been considered the key to its survival: capitalism, and the culture of greed.
Here we need to take a brief pause for a short excursus on the connection between capitalism and democracy. This nexus was first observed in the historical development of the industrial revolution, happening as it did first in England, with the stresses that imposed on the political system, the monarchy, resulting in gradual, but monotonic, development of more inclusive democracy. This empirical observation was reinforced by the impressive theoretical explication of Marxism, that capitalism required democracy for its full development, concealing at the same time the class nature of that rule under a patina of a superficial superstructure of religion, moral betterment and apparent overall societal enrichment (Many, especially the Marxists, say that enrichment is limited to the few, the capitalist class, the entrepreneurs. We will ignore here the further inevitable impoverishment of the working class that leads the Marxists to their other inevitability, that of the Communist Revolution.)
Moreover, there is an additional argument for the intimate coupling of the two, capitalism and democracy, by the observation that the enriched capitalists, to protect their capital, i.e., their interests, will demand inclusion in manipulation of the decisive levers of the polity, will seek to bend the political system to their ends, the preservation of that capital. This is most easily accomplished in a democracy, where the power is readily diverted to those with the money to control the electoral system. Finally, wedded to all of this is the power of the counter-example, Russian Communism, where capitalism was violently eliminated and, as a result, there was not even the slightest vestige of democracy, with the most brutal despotism, autocracy, absolutism – whatever you want to call it – put in its place.
While all of the above seems to prove the capitalist-democracy nexus, it ignores two developments that undermine its clarity: fascism, and Chinese Communism. Fascism, in Italy and Germany, did not last long enough for proof that capitalism could flourish under authoritarian rule, but flourish it did, especially in Germany – though a good portion of that can be explained by militarism and public spending on military ends (which are considered to be short-term stimulants but long-term parasites and thus depressants of the overall economy of capitalist systems). The phenomenal growth of China under a political system that is the opposite of democratic requires closer examination, however, as a very large component of that growth can be attributed to huge and explosive pent-up demand. Still, there was very little capital to work with, other than massive reserves of labor, and it was there that the iron-rule of the Communist Party was put to greatest effect. However one wishes to explain it, there is no denying the stupendous achievements of the Chinese Communist system that has managed, in the course of 30 plus years, to fundamentally transform China, lifting over 400 million of its citizens out of abject poverty. The speed and extent of this ‘miracle’ has never before been equaled.
In sum, the capitalism-democracy equation is not as self-evident as it once seemed. Returning to our argument, that so-called key to democracy, capitalism, may have to be abandoned. Put another way, we may have to fundamentally alter capitalism to save democracy, or as some would put it, it (unfettered, free-market capitalism) may have to be destroyed to be able to save it (its putative greatest creation, democracy). On the other hand, as we have seen, they may not be immutably linked. In any case, the chances of that happening – given the enormously powerful interests invested in preserving that system – in a non-violent way, are essentially zero, however disconcerting it is to admit this fact.
