Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance

 

Today's Meme of the Day is inspired by a conversation between comedian Russell Brand and psychologist Jordan Peterson. Billed as a "debate," this conversation is no battle or fight. It seems to me to be more of a spirited conversation between two intelligent people with slightly different views. I enjoyed this excerpt from Russell Brand's Under The Skin Podcast #46 With Jordan Peterson

At 3:10 in the excerpt, Brand raises the issue of how people in the media can misinterpret a speaker's words or intentions. Brand posited that both he and Peterson had been misunderstood at times, and he wanted to attribute this controversy to a lack of nuance in reporting. In turn, the lack of nuance in reporting can be attributed to either editorial direction or the short attention span of the audience, or both. The resulting tendency is for people to force other people into ideological categories (left, right) too quickly. 

Brand had worked with the Maysles brothers on a documentary film. (Interestingly enough, the subject was reportedly Donald Trump.) Brand recalled Maysles' quote during this portion of the conversation. Peterson was not familiar with the quote but took an immediate interest. Peterson remarked, "there's no nuance in ignorance but it's excusable because you just don't know any better. But when it's deliberate, that's a whole different story."

Ignorance, simply being unaware of the facts, is forgivable. Willful ignorance, choosing to remain ignorant in spite of facts, is certainly an offense against the pursuit of truth. deliberately obscuring facts from others keeping them ignorant would be worse still. Tyranny is even more nefarious for its subtlety, leaving facts but removing nuance. 

The lesson is to search for the truth, to ask questions, to trust only what is verified, and to be suspicious of motives until they are plainly exposed. Not coincidentally, these were the principles of the Maysles brothers' pioneering style of documentary filmmaking known as cinema veritas.  

For more information about Albert Maysles and his brother David, feel free to read this New York Times appreciation of their award-winning approach to documentary filmmaking. Albert died in 2015 at the age of 88. His brother and collaborator, David, died in 1987 at the age of 54. PBS published a list of their seven most important films. How many have you seen?

• “Psychiatry in Russia” (1955)
• “Salesman” (1968)
• “Gimme Shelter” (1970)
• “Christo’s Valley Curtain” (1974)
• “Grey Gardens” (1975)
• “When We Were Kings” (1996)
• “Iris” (2014)