In a previous article I made a big fuss about the lyrics in a surprise-hit country and western song by a guy named Oliver Anthony. I showed that it combines very ambiguous statements plus dog whistles aimed at the ‘welfare queen’ trope plus some fat shaming. The conclusion I came to was the song is either a tremendously emotional ‘cry from the heart’ that expresses a point of view that is very common in what Americans call ‘flyover country’, or, it was a carefully-contrived piece of nonsense that was created by checking-off a bunch fallacious beliefs held by many rural Americans (kudos to a commentator for encouraging me to say the quiet part out loud).
I’m going on about this this because I am concerned that our politics is not being governed by facts but instead by ‘vibes’ generated by fake news and bad journalism. The online Oxford dictionary defines the word as: “the mood of a place, situation, person, etc. and the way that they make you feel”. Please note that last bit: “the way that they make you feel”.
I’m referring to the relationship between emotions and reason. I’m also talking about the propaganda that is shovelled into the heads of people day after day to incite their emotions in support of a political and economic system that does not rule in their best interests.
The first thing I want to point out is that if readers are tempted to simply dismiss Anthony’s influence on the citizenry they should consider some modern evidence that psychologists have found about how the mind assimilates information. This is the Illusory Truth Effect and in this clip from an excellent YouTube video that Johnny Harris has created on this very subject, an expert on this field from MIT, Dr. Tali Sharot, explains what it is.
My take-away from the above is that the number of times people hear repeated false descriptions of reality, the more they begin to believe them. At this point, I’d suggest the casual reader should be feeling some of the concern I have about stuff like the Oliver Anthony song.
If readers are looking for another example of this Illusory Truth Effect, I’ll give one very relevant one that bugs me and which I suspect some of my readers have fallen for.
There has recently been a great deal of talk about ‘financialization’ of the housing market and how it drives up prices. I did a quick search and found the following trailer for a movie that talks about this. (I watched the entire movie a couple years ago, and I wouldn’t recommend it.)
Here’s another video that I found with a quick Qwant search that’s in the same vein.
What’s the take-away from these two clips?—that rents have gone up because ‘faceless corporations’ have bought up huge amounts of housing! That’s what ‘financialization’ means, right?
Well, no.
If you look carefully at the second clip, there’s a lot of dancing around with reference both to individual investors and corporate ones. And there’s a lot of ‘delicious ambiguity’ around whether what they are actually talking about. This is the same sort of thing I mentioned with regard to the Oliver Anthony song when I asked who exactly are “the rich men North of Richmond’? Having said that, I certainly got the ‘vibe’ that it was talking about corporations more than individuals because it played with all sorts of business memes such as the animation of guys in fancy offices with stacks of money, the monopoly board, etc.
So what’s the truth behind the ambiguity?
As near as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of people who are ‘financializing’ real estate are people like your uncle Ralph and aunt Edith. They both work at jobs, have paid off the mortgage on their own home, and, thought they’d augment their retirement income by using their savings to buy a condominium that they would rent out to someone else or maybe flip for a profit a few years down the road. (This exactly describes the one person I’ve met who bought a condo as an investment.)
Here’s a quote from a 2023 Statistics Canada article.
Typical landlord in 2020 is a couple living in a big census metropolitan area and working
If we look more broadly to all property owners in Canada with rental income (not exclusively condo owners), we find that the typical landlord in 2020 is not a faceless corporation, but a middle-aged, middle-class couple.
In 2020, just over four in five rental income earners owning any type of property were in couple families (81.0%), close to half were aged 45 to 64 years (46.7%), with approximately one-third living in the metropolitan areas of Toronto (21.2%) and Vancouver (10.7%).
Approximately two out of three rental income earners (66.0%) also received wages, salaries and commissions, similar to the share of tax filers without rental income (64.6%). However, the median wage, salary and commission income of rental income earners with wages was almost two-thirds higher in 2020 compared with tax filers without rental income ($59,800 versus $38,570).
Why have pop-media types made such a big fuss about a small number of institutional investors when the real problem are ‘mom and pops’?
At least part of it comes down to what the person making the presentation thinks. This is a point that people often forget—if someone believes in a lie, then they will honestly spread it to others without knowing that they are even lying. I often have a hard time accepting this and in the past I just assumed people knew better. As I’ve aged and got a little more understanding about people in general, the more I’m inclined to think people often really do believe the nonsense they are peddling. And I don’t mean just the odd amateur on the Web—I also think lots of people in authority with substantive credentials believe stuff that is plain bullshit.
More importantly, though, it has to do with how the the ‘attention economy’ works. It thrives on two things: brevity, and, heightened emotions. For a variety of reasons, people like short pieces. But there is a significant problem with keeping things short, something Noam Chomsky ironically calls the “beauty of concision’. He coined this term to describe the idea that when someone is referring to a very commonly-held belief all someone has to do is point towards those preconceived notions in order to bring up an entire constellation of ideas. In contrast, when someone suggests an idea that is totally new, she will have to go into great detail to explain the evidence for it, and, the various nuances that flow from it. This means that it will take a lot more time to explain it than another person who just points towards a cliche. (This is something like the problem of it taking a lot less time and effort to tell a lie than to disprove it.) Here’s a clip from an excellent documentary titled Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media explains this.
What “the beauty of concision” means for people who are trying to make a living off YouTube is that they need to constantly pander to the preconceived notions of a majority of viewers (or at least a significant minority). This means that when they find a commonly-held trope they need to mention it—whether the facts back it up or not. That’s why Oliver Anthony believed he had to fat-shame welfare recipients and why so many folks talking about housing financialization have to make reference to some sort of stereotypical, mustache-twirling, big business villain (instead of uncle Ralph and Aunt Edith). If they don’t do this, they are not going to get enough clicks to become popular—and that means they won’t be able to make an income off the project.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of greedy, villainous business people out there. (Possibly there are also ‘welfare queens’—but I suspect quite a lot fewer). But if we think that this is what is behind the dramatic increase in the cost of condos, we’re dramatically misunderstanding what is really going on. The problem of financialization is that huge numbers of ordinary working people are trying to find a personal solution to a public problem—namely, that they don’t have good pensions anymore and local governments have stifled the growth of the housing stock to the point where it has become the sort of commodity where someone could make money through speculation. (Just like food in a famine.)
Moreover, we live in a society which worships the ‘invisible hand’ of capitalism. Many people believe in this nonsense and think that in some sense they are doing something courageous, noble, and, good when they put their life’s savings on the table and spin the investment roulette wheel. Others are no doubt scared that if they don’t do something ‘big’ they will end up in retirement renting a crappy room and eating pet food. Even worse, there is an ecosystem of on-line grifters selling the lie that it’s safe and easy to make money on the real estate market through dubious investments. So a lot of the uncle Ralph and aunt Edith types get into this either through religious zeal or the terror of elderly poverty. The end result for everyone else is the same—the rents are too damn high!
If you are wondering why mom and pops are causing the problem instead of large corporations, take a look at this excerpt from a YouTube post by the excellent ‘Millennial Moron’.
One of the problems with the housing crisis is the way people routinely blame the wrong players for what is happening. Instead of pointing the finger at city councils and provincial governments for making it too hard for the construction industry to build affordable housing, various Conservative politicians blame the Liberals in Ottawa. And when some ‘progressive’ people talk about the issue of financialization, they blame Engulf and Devour Incorporated instead of uncle Ralph and aunt Edith. This misdirection of anger makes it harder for society to come up with solutions that actually work.
Even if someone makes the effort and comes up with a closer approximation to the truth, the algorithm that decides which story to put in your social media feed is going to select for two things: is it something a lot of other people read?, and, is it concise enough to fit the popular formats?
The really popular formats—like YouTube, TicToc, FaceBook, Threads, and, Twitter have a tremendous bias towards conciseness. That means that they pretty much trade in cliches and conventional wisdom to the exclusion of everything else. As for the longer formats—like Substack—the only way to ‘get ahead’ and build a readership is to get the most ‘likes’ as possible in the shortest period of time. And the way to do that is by pandering to whatever notions the reader already has rather than something that is so new it makes her brain ache to think about it. (Oh, and bye-the-way, if you like this article, please click on the like button—it’ll help others come across Hulet’s Backgrounder and make their brains ache too!)
The problem is the most efficient way to get ahead in the ‘attention economy’ is to pander to preconceived notions. This means almost every new song or story you come across is going to strengthen some narrative (true or false) because of the illusory truth effect.
Oliver Anthony and the people behind the first two YouTube videos I posted about housing may believe what they are saying, or, they may be just ticking a box on a list to make their work as popular as possible. But either way, they are making a false narrative seem more ‘truthy’ to their audience, and that contributes to ‘the general vibe’ that the problem with rural people’s lives is the federal government and welfare recipients, and, that the reason why your ‘rent’s too damn high’ is because of a small number of corporate greedheads.
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Now let me finish by offering a partial solution to this problem that comes from the Laozi. (The full solution would probably involve a revolution—which is still a while off.)
"Five excessive colors make people blind;
five excessive sounds make people deaf;
five excessive flavors rob people's taste;
racing and hunting make people mad;
and rare goods make people steal.
Thus a Sage ruler took care of people's basic-needs (stomachs),
not their excessive-desires (luxuries).
Thus he eliminated desires and supplied needs."
- Translated by Tang Zi-Chang, Chapter 12
This passage might be understood to be talking about materialist consumption. It’s safe to say that the Old Ones who came up the original maxim would probably not have been fans of our modern consumer society. I’m not either. But where I would probably talk about how it increases people’s environmental footprint, they were talking about the psychological effect that too much exposure to its complexity blinds, deafens, etc, people. In the modern case, I’d suggest that exposure to too much social media also makes people blind, deaf, etc.
One response to it, I would suggest, should be something like the ancient one that the Daoists developed to deal with these ‘excesses’: ‘fasting of the mind’. The idea is that it is possible to learn how to control what someone chooses to put into their consciousness instead of treating like like a drain that you can toss any crap into and expect it to disappear without a trace. (That’s because the Illusory Truth Effect means that it stays and changes your worldview.) To this end, they developed meditation techniques that allowed people to isolate their consciousness from the hurley-burley of life, slow it down, and, process the complex information it receives from outside. (Think of this as an augmentation of the critical thinking element of Johnny Harris’ information conveyor belt.) In the terms of this blog post, I’m suggesting there may be a way to counteract the Illusory Truth Effect—but it depends on individual action.
If the idea that people need to learn to practice good mental hygiene seems far-fetched, I’d point out that in olden times the idea that almost everyone would brush their teeth every day would also seem outlandish. Society does all sorts of things to ensure good physical health, why wouldn’t it also put some effort into trying to develop good mental habits among the citizenry?
Many modern folks spontaneously understand this idea, which is why we have people turning off their social media for periods of time as a ‘fast’ or buying ‘dumb phones’ to removed the temptation to ‘doom-scroll’. It’s also why parents try to limit ‘screen time’ for their children. But the idea that everyone should consciously choose which particular types of information they should expose themselves to is still something that is way outside of conventional wisdom. I suspect that this is a notion that our culture is going to have to ‘push into’ if we are going to save our collective sanity. If nothing else, we really need to make media literacy and critical thinking much bigger parts of the elementary school curriculum.