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Press: Why public opinion is like a Rubik’s cube  

18 October 2024

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IF YOU have ever taken a Rubik’s cube apart, you will know that all the blocks are connected in stalks to a central structure, almost like the florets of a cauliflower. The apparent incoherence of the patterns on the exterior faces conceals a common order on the inside, and it is this inner structure that matters if you’re going to solve the cube.

This is also the way in which public opinion works. The things that people assert may be hopelessly jumbled, but they conform to an inner logic, and you cannot change minds without understanding the underlying structure. This is not made of sentences, but of nouns with adjectives baked into them: things like Immigrants Bad, Church of England Woke, or, on the other side, Nuclear Power Dangerous, Progress Good, Discrimination Bad. Anything that appears on the outside must fit with these root structures. If it does, it’s accepted as true; if not, it’s dismissed as propaganda.

Journalists traditionally tried to make the outsides of the cube into a pleasing pattern; even the successful papers were those that paid attention to the inside of the readers’ cubes. But it turns out that it was only in print newspapers that the facts could be arranged like the outside of a Rubik’s cube, in tidily bounded fields. Out on the internet, there is no context to anything, and the limits to a story are set entirely by the readers’ sense of what is fitting — except that, nowadays, they don’t read at all, but look at pictures.

Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic’s correspondent on the culture of online life, is despairing. “Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts.

“So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, ‘The primary use of “misinformation” is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.’ This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information.”


THIS isn’t entirely new: anyone who wrote that the late Bishop of Durham David Jenkins “compared the resurrection to a conjuring trick with bones” was playing the same game, only with words. Or you can just put your lies on the side of a bus.

But, at the moment, in this country, the big propaganda push is towards assisted dying. The philosopher Kathleen Stock, writing on UnHerd, was characteristically trenchant about some of the words involved — the ones that hold the Rubik’s cube together: “Dignity in dying is a concept we hear a lot about — indeed it’s the name of one of the most prominent organisations campaigning for a change in legislation — and yet dignity is also a culturally porous entity, changing its shape according to prevailing norms and ideals. The Enlightenment philosopher most famous for representing dignity as a universal human value was Immanuel Kant, but he would be horrified at the idea that its possession — or not — somehow depended on your contingent physical state. . .

“I once worked in a nursing home and a lot of my time there was spent dealing with incontinence: not much fun, either for the resident or the carer. Still, in the right sort of setting, both become accustomed and can look past it to more important things. The venerable Kantian-inspired ideal is that in periods of frailty, you can retain dignity in spite of what is happening to you physically; and this is recognised when carers look after you in non-instrumental, respectful ways that acknowledge your intrinsic human worth.

“From this angle, the legalisation of euthanasia does nothing to increase dignity but provides new ways to undermine it, and especially in the present non-ideal context where social care is already underfunded and overstretched.”


THERE were silly stories, too, of course. The Mail on Sunday ran with “Woke row erupts after Nottingham University puts trigger warning on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The university countered that aspects of medieval Christianity are rather triggering to modern sensibilities.

This is true, even when the sensibilities involved are those of practising Christians. You won’t find many Catholics defending the sale of indulgences today; and, if the Alpha course does not put a trigger warning on the Book of Common Prayer, that’s only because it’s aimed at people who will never know that that book exists. But that would never make a news story, because “Woke universities” are in the Rubik’s cube, and “Woke happy-clappies” are not.

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