Scott Adams on Censorship and Voting

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert and host of daily video blog Coffee With Scott Adams on YouTube and Locals) posted this tweet with a provocative thesis.

Censorship determines the narrative. The narrative determines public opinion. Public opinion determines the vote. The vote determines who runs the country.

We have replaced voting with battles over who gets censored.

In response I posted this:

Behind the censorship is the postmodern idea that those who have the most power can decide and determine what is true.

Although I agree with Adams, I think he doesn’t go back far enough to the source of the censorship. The censorship Adams talks about doesn’t spring out of nothing like the Big Bang. We need to identify the beliefs that people use to justify imposing censorship that prevents certain ideas from being expressed or facts from being uncovered.

I believe postmodernism plays a role in many issues. I summarize postmodernism as the belief that there is no objective truth. Therefore, “truth” is determined by those who have the most power over the tools of communication such as social media, news media and over our language which includes the meanings of words and what is considered acceptable uses of these words. (There are some who claim that even silence can be oppressive because if you don’t vocally repudiate something that means you secretly support the “offensive” idea.)

Therefore, I now use the term “partial news” when referring to the news media. (I know, it's not as catchy as Trump's "fake news." I’m also thinking of using “skewed news.”) Here the word “partial” has two meanings. The first meaning refers only part of the story being told so that leads us to the conclusion they want us to reach. The second meaning refers to our news outlets as being partial rather than being impartial (i.e., objective). Postmodernism lies behind this because postmodernists believe there is no objective truth. When the truth and facts no longer serve as a yardstick, your political agenda takes over. News stories can then be crafted to steer us to a predetermined conclusion rather than presenting other sides of the story.