fog not only denied you access to the facts but actually convinced you of the validity of erroneous data? From a business perspective, imagine not merely being unsure about the number of your customers but being certain of an incorrect number. It’s under this condition— of believing wrong information—that the most difficult issues emerge and take us by surprise.
There is always some fog present, and organizations try to diffuse it as best they can.
The military uses on-the-ground scouts, communications intercepts, high-resolution satellites, and night-vision technology to track and assess the enemy. Businesses analyze market trends to identify and outmaneuver the competition. But what if the information you see deceives rather than informs you? The real danger in battle and in business “wars” is that you may be convinced you have a clear picture when you don’t actually understand what you’re seeing.
That’s exactly what happened in Berkeley. Without anyone realizing it, the fog of war enveloped the campus. The attack wasn’t at all what it appeared to be. This brings us back to our conversation with Sergeant Reich.
She, along with the rest of her police force, is dedicated to protecting the campus and the community. But in order to protect against an attack, you need to know who’s waging it.
This fundamental question—who incited the Berkeley violence—has ramifications far beyond the Berkeley police or even the city itself. As Reich and her colleagues tried to make sense of what was happening during the protests, operatives from both political parties on the national level were composing their own narratives about what was going on.
When violence breaks out at a protest, fingers naturally point at the organizers themselves. But as we have noted, these particular organizers were of the nonviolent type. Gandhi could’ve learned a thing or two from them about organizing peacefully. Even if we’re to believe that the culprits were the student organizers, who regardless of their co-op lives did turn violent, why would they target, of all the buildings on campus, the student building, the one that houses all the student clubs (which—wait for it—skew heavily progressive)?
It would be out of character for them to do so, they had no motive for targeting that part of campus, and they had no history of such behavior. Either something completely unexpected happened that morphed these peace-loving liberals into hyper-aggressive militants or there’s more to the story.
That’s exactly what Reich thought when she looked at the events. Something just didn’t make sense. But if the student organizers didn’t cause the violence, who did?
“We believe,” Sergeant Reich told us, “that these were paid anarchists.” If it sounds like a wild conspiracy theory, it is.
There is no evidence that anyone was paid, and no one knows anything about who these so-called anarchists even might be. But here’s a Berkeley police sergeant admitting that this is her leading theory. At this point the only thing we can be certain of is that the fog of war lay thick on the city of Berkeley, drifting to cover everyone nationwide who was trying to make heads or tails of the situation.
But if paid anarchists were responsible for the Berkeley violence, who paid them? One narrative holds that the anarchists were paid by one of the far-left extremist groups behind the riot, Refuse Fascism, said to have received $50,000 from a group backed by socialist billionaire George Soros. The theory was that “anti-fascists” started several fires, smashed windows and ATMs, looted downtown stores, attacked cars, and assaulted dozens of Milo Yiannopoulos fans.
Why, though, would a left-leaning organization (and a respectable funder) hire thugs to vandalize arguably the most progressive university in the country?
This is where yet a third theory of events enters the picture. Under this theory, the anarchists weren’t paid by the Left. Rather, Yiannopoulos and Breitbart were in cahoots with the agitators, laying the groundwork for a White House crackdown on liberal universities and their federal funding.
In a blog post about why the protests turned violent, Berkeley professors drew a connection among Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, and President Donald Trump, suggesting that the violence could have been coordinated to support the president’s call during his campaign to revoke federal funding for UC Berkeley.
And thus we have three competing accounts, each troubling in its own right.
Were Berkeley students out of control?
Did communists pay agitators to vandalize the campus?
Or did conservatives and affiliated media stage a coordinated information operations campaign?
At least two of these theories had to be wrong, and one of them had to be right. Right? Maybe not. What if the police, the university professors, the government, and the media reported the events as they saw them but were all mistaken?
In trying to figure out who the perpetrators were that night, we discover a global trend and a battle being waged right under our noses but unrecognized by even the most careful of observers.
Uncle Shoe Store
At a family Christmas party, Ori found himself in a conversation with an uncle who’s a professor of philosophy, specializing in language and epistemology. The two were talking about fake news and how in the near future the trend might affect our ability to discern the truth. Halfway through the conversation, they were joined by another uncle, a physical therapist who runs a specialty shoe store for athletes. This uncle is one of the top experts in the country on running shoes and even holds a patent on a machine that tests a shoe’s stability to gauge its appropriateness for a given runner.
The conversation—as tends to happen at family events— turned to global affairs. Uncle Shoe Store mentioned that he’d read about a Harvard professor who demonstrated that climate change science is wrong. “I mean, look around,” he continued. “It’s not hot this winter in San Francisco.”
Of course, Uncle Philosopher is at the opposite end of the political spectrum, so Ori bit his tongue and sat back to watch the fireworks. Instead of engaging in an argument, Uncle Philosopher asked Uncle Shoe Store how he had reached his conclusions.
Uncle Shoe Store said that he had read the information online, and that a number of his friends—all successful business owners—had read and agreed with the same materials. Uncle Philosopher tried to ask about the multitude of peer-reviewed journal articles backing climate change, but Uncle Shoe Store put little stock in them.
Just as Ori kept his mouth shut at Christmas, we’re not going to weigh in on climate change. For a moment, though, let’s view Uncle Shoe Store from the perspective of someone who believes in climate change.
We need to recognize that Uncle Shoe Store isn’t simply spouting unfounded beliefs. He is actually being rational— reading up on climate change in his favorite publications, seeing what the people he trusts on social media say, etc., and coming to a rational (albeit debatable) conclusion. He’s in no way irrational. He’s reached a conclusion based on both the data in front of him and the so-called wisdom of the crowd. In other words, not only does he find the data compelling, but he’s verifying it via a statistically established methodology. He’s just not necessarily aware that the crowd whose wisdom he’s tapping may be decidedly biased.
As much as we might feel superior to someone who holds an alternative view of scientific data, we all are soon going to suffer the same fate. What Uncle Shoe Store
