Communications Breakdown by Sconosciuto

Author:Sconosciuto [Sconosciuto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

THE CHURCH OF THE BOOK

Sundays: Closed

Wednesday, 7:00 p.m.: Weekly meeting

Minister: Dr. Alexander Singh

“Found it!” I say.

Helen grins at me. “You had faith.”

The door is locked. Helen puts down her pack, takes out her tools, and makes short work of that. We step inside.

I met Helen online, when we were both nineteen. We’d probably never have met—she went to one of the city’s other universities—if we hadn’t both been online and in the same closed group: ExEx. It was for the children of excommunicates. Discussions were heated but guarded: everyone there was still careful of what they said online, and how far it might go. Despite that, she and I found we had a lot in common. Her parents had been members of the third or fourth congregation of the Church of the Book. It didn’t take us long to meet in real life.

“Your father’s basic fault,” she said, on our second date in the café, “is frivolity. He isn’t a fanatic for truth, or even for free speech. He doesn’t believe the lies the other side puts out.”

“And your parents do?”

Helen scoffed. “How could they, when the lies change all the time? No, they’re true believers at a deeper level than that. They’re onside for the other side, for God knows what reason. They think throwing out disinformation is like putting up flak: it doesn’t matter how many shots miss, as long as it keeps the bombers from getting through.” She shook her head. “Something like that. Jason Rawlins, though, he’s just too mentally lazy to sort things out for himself.”

I felt stung to remonstrance. “When we still bothered to argue . . . he would hit me with straight John Stuart Mill: that people who don’t know the other side of an argument don’t really know their own—no matter how foolish or misguided that other side may be. And that shutting people off from the other side’s propaganda in the war means that deep down, many people end up not even really believing our side’s news. Same with climate change, and—”

“No!” Helen leaned across the table. “That’s where you’re still wrong, Liam. You still think it’s an argument. An argument implies good faith, however mistaken one side or the other might be. And there’s just no good faith in what the other side puts out. There’s no equivalence between the bias, the distortion, even the deceptions in our mainstream media”—she smiled at her own cliché—“and the sort of reckless rubbish that gets pumped out by state media, demagogues and populists, and fossil fuel companies. That stuff is a weapon of war, and it has to be met by fighting it, not arguing with it.”

She won that argument, and she won me. In time, she won other arguments, in the profession we both chose. She formed a specialist group. When the next stage of the war came, we were ready. We had old vans with no fancy electronics, maps and compasses, carbines, and all the tools to finish the job.

Inside the church is a library.

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