Antidote for Fake News: Fair Witnesses and Mentats

Journalism is dead. Fake news proliferates. Fact checkers are corrupt. Most people
want the truth but don’t know where to find it. This post offers a possible solution
Antidote for Fake News: Fair Witnesses and Mentats
By: George Noga – February 5, 2017
    More Americans believe Elvis is alive (8%) than trust the media (6%). Their distrust is not misplaced. Journalism schools are hothouses of progressive argle-bargle; they draw their students, who cling to illusions of adequacy, from the bottom deciles. The media have abandoned even the veneer of objectivity; they are irredeemably corrupt.
    Most Americans want to know the plain truth even if it shatters long and deeply held shibboleths. I exclude from that group the 24% who self-identify as progressives because their beliefs are based on religion and are thus impervious to facts or logic. Fortunately, there are solutions for the remaining 76% of Americans who want truth.
     All the main fact checking sources including Facebook, PolitiFact, and Snopes are debauched and unprincipled. We need an unimpeachable, competent and nonpolitical source for checking facts and determining truth. We need Fair Witnesses and Mentats.
     The Fair Witness concept is a creation of science fiction author Robert Heinlein in his book, Stranger in a Strange Land. Heinlein’s book takes place in the milieu of an overbearing government (familiar?). One way citizens could counter the overweening power of government was to hire a Fair Witness, a specially trained and recognized person who was so truthful and objective as to be unimpeachable. Anything observed or reported by a Fair Witness was universally accepted by government and the courts.
    Heinlein’s Fair Witnesses are professionals with an eidetic memory trained to make no extrapolations or assumptions; they wear distinctive white robes and are accorded deferential treatment by society. When a Fair Witness is asked the color of a house, he/she replies, “It is white on this side.” Heinlein’s book was published 55 years ago and the Fair Witness concept was only a small, obscure part of the book. However, if you search the internet for Fair Witness, there are 80 million entries – more than for the Kardashians, Pope Francis and Vladimir Putin. Obviously, it resonated with readers.
     Mentats, created by sci-fi writer Frank Herbert (Dune series), were specially trained to develop their cognitive and analytic capacities to unimaginable heights. They were the embodiment of logic and reason and only a few could qualify. It is thus a recurring sci-fi theme that society needs accurate, impartial arbiters of ascertainable facts.
    Clearly, the public, or at least 76% of it, is hungry (make that desperate) for a reliable way to separate fact from fiction. The potential is unlimited and there is no reason the Fair Witness/Mentat  concept could not be modified to work today. In fact, I have a blueprint for such a program but it is too lengthy to include herein. If someone successfully introduced such a concept (website) today, he/she could be the next internet billionaire. I would be tempted to try it if I were fifteen years younger.
     Imagine the possibilities! Fair Witnesses would transform public debate about any matter that lends itself to proof. It would be the death knell of progressivism – which is based on lies. Being untruthful would become unproductive. The thought of a news story being promptly rendered untrue might even make the media more circumspect. There are obvious applications for business and advertising. Note: I  plan to write a future post about what a Fair Witness might have to say about climate change.
     We have much to learn from obscure sci-fi tracts published long ago. Like all great science fiction, Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune speak to us today. Fair Witnesses or Mentats would shatter the Elvis myth but they also would bring about a renaissance in the media – currently trusted by only 6% of the most gullible Americans.

Next up from MLLG on February 12th – The Democrats’ War on Blacks