Inspired by Trevor Aleo’s work, I’ve been reading up on Paulo Freire’s “reading the world”, a concept I like a lot. I feel like Stimpunks work around reframing, epistemic justice, scientism, lateral reading, and critical thinking is much about teaching how to read the world.

Reading the world is especially important in our multimedia disinformation age. A significant part of the US population lives in a debased reality of disinformation that inverts US history and the moral universe. Their ability to read the world has been purposefully broken.

I recall the “reality-based community” remark usually attributed to Karl Rove.

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’

Reality-based community – Wikipedia

Hannah Arendt described totalitarian thinking as having “extreme contempt for facts”. The divide between those who respect knowledge and those who reject knowledge feels like a central struggle of our times, especially when looking at the culture war. Efforts to teach children to “read the world” so they can be better citizens in pluralistic society are met with insistence (especially here in Texas) that we teach white supremacist mythology and “Christian Alt Facts” that are utterly contemptuous of truth and aim to break our abilities to read the world.

Reading the world thus precedes reading the word and wríting a new text must be seen as one means of transforming the world.

The Importance of the Act of Reading, Paulo Freire

Reading is not exhausted merely by decoding the written word or written language, but rather anticipated by and extending into knowledge of the world. Reading the world precedes reading the word, and the subsequent reading of the word cannot dispense with continually reading the world. Language and reality are dynamically intertwined. The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text and context.

The Importance of the Act of Reading, Paulo Freire

Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world. As I suggested earlier, this movement from the world to the word and from the word to the world is always present; even the spoken word flows from our reading of the world. In a way, however, we can go further, and say that reading the word is not preceded merely by reading the world, but by a certain form of writing it or re-writing it, that is, of transforming it by means of conscious practical work. For me, this dynamic movement is central to the literacy process.

The Importance of the Act of Reading, Paulo Freire

The fracturing of our shared reality is purposeful and ongoing through conspiratorialism and schismogenesis.

Long before opportunistic right wing politicians realized they could get mileage out of pointing at the terrifying epistemological crisis of trying to make good choices in an age of institutions that can’t be trusted, the left was sounding the alarm.

Conspiratorialism – the fracturing of our shared reality – is a serious problem, weakening our ability to respond effectively to endless disasters of the polycrisis.

But by blaming the problem of conspiratorialism on the credulity of believers (rather than the deserved disrepute of the institutions they have lost faith in) we adopt the logic of the right: “conspiratorialism is a problem of individuals believing wrong things,” rather than “a system that makes wrong explanations credible – and a schismogenic insistence that these institutions are sound and trustworthy.”

Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis (25 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

There’s a name for this phenomenon: “schismogenesis.” That’s when you decide how you feel about an issue based on who supports it.

Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis (25 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

For many people – millions – the thing that fills the black box is conspiracy fantasies. It’s true that tech makes finding these conspiracy fantasies easier than ever, and it’s true that tech makes forming communities of conspiratorial belief easier, too. But the vulnerability to conspiratorialism that algorithms identify and target people based on isn’t a function of Big Data. It’s a function of corruption – of life in a world in which real conspiracies (to steal your wages, or let rich people escape the consequences of their crimes, or sacrifice your safety to protect large firms’ profits) are everywhere.

Progressives – which is to say, the coalition of liberals and leftists, in which liberals are the senior partners and spokespeople who control the Overton Window – used to identify and decry these conspiracies. But as right wing “populists” declared their opposition to these conspiracies – when Trump damned free trade and the mainstream media as tools of the ruling class – progressives leaned into schismogenesis and declared their vocal support for these old enemies of progress.

This is the crux of Naomi Klein’s brilliant 2023 book Doppelganger: that as the progressive coalition started supporting these unworthy and broken institutions, the right spun up “mirror world” versions of their critique, distorted versions that focus on scapegoating vulnerable groups rather than fighting unworthy institutions: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#ifthe-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis (25 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The epistemic injustice of all this is felt intensely among marginalized people. Our community of neurodivergent and disabled people experience epistemic injustice throughout our “unworthy and broken institutions”.

Epistemic injustice refers to harms that relate specifically to our status as epistemic agents, whereby our status as knowers, interpreters, and providers of information, is unduly diminished or stifled in a way that undermines the agent’s agency and dignity. The concept was defined by Miranda Fricker (2007), who identifies two key forms of epistemic injustice. The first is testimonial injustice, which refers to cases where testimony is unduly dismissed because of prejudiced beliefs regarding minority groups. Hermeneutical injustice refers to cases where a community’s shared vocabularies have been structured in a way that unfairly distorts or stifles understanding for, and of, a minority group. In each case, there is an instance of people being harmed specifically in their capacity as knowers: individuals capable of knowing or providing knowledge.

Neurodiversity, epistemic injustice, and the good human life – Chapman – 2022 – Journal of Social Philosophy – Wiley Online Library

We are in epistemological crisis.

This is the epistemological crisis we’re living through today. Epistemology is the process by which we know things.

Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis (25 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow