Review of “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World—And Why Things Are Better Than You Think”
Book review by qpooqpoo
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World—And Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling
New York, NY: Flatiron Books, 2018.
“[T]he technoindustrial system simply defines the term “high standard of living” to mean the kind of living that the system itself provides, and the system then “discovers” that the standard of living is high and increasing. But to me and to many, many other people a high material standard of living consists not in cars, television sets, computers, or fancy houses, but in open spaces, forests, wild plants and animals, and clear-flowing streams. As measured by that criterion our material standard of living is falling rapidly.”
–Theodore Kaczynski¹
“People constantly and intuitively refer to their worldview when thinking, guessing, or learning about the world. So if your worldview is wrong, then you will systematically make wrong guesses.”
–Hans Rosling²
One of the most dangerous aspects of the technological system is its capacity to pervert our ability to think clearly about it. Propaganda, education, various organizational conditioning—all of these evolve among competing systems in a technological world. Systems that best manage behavior by conditioning members to have beliefs and attitudes most conducive to technical efficiency are the systems that expand in their power, and at the expense of less manipulative systems. The totality of this process results in many intelligent and well-meaning individuals who utterly fail to appreciate the full implications of a particular social system. (This is one of the reasons why astute scholars of social revolutions throughout history observe that revolutions are rarely seen coming, but after they do happen, they seem obvious and reasonable in hindsight.)³ The most pathetic victims of this process are those scholars in the humanities who enthusiastically defend the techno-industrial system.
Hans Rosling was a member of the global technocratic elite, the pro-progress business, governmental, and academic class committed to global “development.”⁵ He grew up in mid-20th century Europe, an environment steeped in the belief in progress. He holds this worldview, but it’s clearly failing: the industrial system has entered a period of severe social and environmental crisis and most people have grown hopelessly pessimistic.⁴ The system must act quickly to reprogram people’s attitudes lest they turn to disruptive and damaging ideas or are seduced by alternative ideologies. Enter Factfulness, the epitome of the latest wave of pro-technology propaganda to hit bookshelves. They all follow the same formula: marshalling a seemingly endless parade of data, together with the testimony of countless experts and institutions, to “prove” that technological progress is indeed making the world “better.” This propaganda is designed to be self-aggrandizing and self-reinforcing.
The argument is in the title: People today feel as though the world is getting worse because they have the wrong facts, and this is a bad thing. If people think the situation is getting worse, they may lose hope in the institutions that are promoting technological growth and “development.” But the facts don’t show the world getting worse, Mr. Rosling tells us. It is “objectively” getting better. His job is to correct everyone’s wrong impressions with his “objective” facts. There’s just one catch: Rosling and the techno-cheerleaders set the standards by which to measure improvements, and these standards are based on values that are so deeply entrenched in our technological culture through generations of education and propaganda that they’re now simply taken for granted: they are axioms. But they can no longer be. People are rightly anxious about the future as a result of rapid and uncontrollable effects of technology upon their societies and the natural world. They know that this developing “Brave New World” Rosling and his friends are ushering in is terrifyingly evil. But because they’ve been so inundated in technological cultures their whole lives, few of these people can even conceive that these negative developments are caused by technological growth itself. Rosling’s argument is directed toward this narrow vision, giving himself and his readers the (relatively) comforting things they think they want to hear: People are disturbed by a lack of technological growth throughout the world, and not from the full implications of technological growth itself. This is a rather brilliant sleight of hand, as it deflects attention from the full social, psychological, and environmental implications of technological growth, and back onto the positive assumptions readers retain from their prior conditioning. Technology itself is thus safely guarded against scrutiny, supplanted by distractions. The problem is, to make this trick work, Rosling is forced to commit glaring errors and omissions. He has to cherry-pick data that support his worldview, downplay the negatives, and exaggerate positives.
To wit, he paints a ridiculous caricature of less-industrialized ways of life that relies on what can only be willful ignorance of current anthropological knowledge. And, as with all pro-progress worldviews, he conveniently overlooks the wide range of pre-industrial lifestyles. He focuses on low-income sedentary cultures while ignoring pastoralists, nomads, and primitive hunter-gatherers. We’ve come a long way from Thomas Hobbes’s ill-informed “nasty, brutish, and short” view, but the supposedly “objective” Rosling ignores these facts. According to him, life before modern technology was “misery and deprivation” (p. 31), a “bad old times” (p. 90) spent in “dreadful conditions” (p. 22), but thanks to modern technology, “almost everybody has escaped hell… billions of people have escaped misery and become consumers and producers on the world market…” (p. 53). “[W]e humans have always struggled hard to make our families survive, and finally we are succeeding” (p. 55) with “fundamental improvements” due to the “secret silent miracle of human progress.” (p. 51). Some lower-industrialized cultures may be severely lacking relative to “advanced” and “developed” societies today, even by non-technological standards, but to then conclude that on the whole these developed societies are unquestionably better places to live than in all pre-industrial societies throughout history is extremely myopic. For if we consider the freedom and happiness of people, and the sustainability and integrity of their environments, then the situation changes dramatically.
"The Pirahãs show no evidence of depression, chronic fatigue, extreme anxiety, panic attacks, or other psychological ailments common in many industrialized societies." …
"I have never heard a Pirahã say that he or she is worried. In fact, so far as I can tell, the Pirahãs have no word for worry in their language. One group of visitors to the Pirahãs, psychologists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Brain and Cognitive Science Department, commented that the Pirahãs appeared to be the happiest people they had ever seen."⁶
“The Mbuti "were a people who had found in the forest something that made their life more than just worth living, something that made it, with all its hardships and problems and tragedies, a wonderful thing full of joy and happiness and free of care.”⁷
This is just to barely scratch the surface. There are hundreds of examples in the historical record showing true primitive living to be far different from the one-sided cartoon parody Rosling portrays.
Furthermore, his low-income definition apparently only includes people living within or on the edges of industrial civilization. He fails to consider people who have lived completely independently of industrial society. In 1800, the majority of people lived in “extreme poverty,” according to Rosling, and the picture he paints is of all of humanity living like modern Indian slum dwellers. But his definition of “poverty” apparently includes a way of life that is simply not integrated into the global economic system. This would include all self-sufficient aspects of living, including low-tech agricultural/pastoral systems of bartering and hunting and gathering. If you grow your own food locally, fetch water from a local spring, and hunt wild-game, if you live in any way low-tech no matter how satisfying and sustainable life is, then you are living in “hell” according to Rosling, and the technological system must “save” you. This is ridiculous of course, and it flies in the face of the intense satisfaction—the freedom, dignity, personal fulfillment, and environmental balance—that most of these cultures provide.
It gets worse. According to the author, by 2100 the world population will reach 11 billion, an increase of 3.4 billion people from our current population of 7.6 billion. To put that into perspective, this is more than the populations of India and China combined (currently 2.8 billion). How the author conceives of giving 11 billion people on earth the same material living standards as the most “developed” nations is quietly left ambiguous. Technology will have the answer he assures us—somehow: “We must put our efforts into inventing new technologies that will enable 11 billion to live the life that we should expect all of them to strive for.” (p. 221). Here we’ve crossed over into the realm of fantasy. Rosling blithely glides over the fact that our current world situation—with just a fraction of 7.6 billion people living in fully “developed” or “level 4” categories—has caused colossal damage to the natural world, and now threatens catastrophic, unmitigated existential risks to life on the planet not just now, but into the future, forever. When people express to Rosling their fear of overpopulation, for many it’s not only the overcrowding, per se, that is their concern. What concerns them is the cost to the planet of the sum total of maintaining all of these new people at a certain material “standard.”
Assuming that Rosling and his peers were able to fit 11 billion on the earth, all living like middle-class Swedes, it would undoubtedly come at a tremendous cost. Everything has a cost, after all, and willfully blinding oneself from the costs doesn’t make them go away. The worldwide population would have to be ruthlessly regimented, regulated, and ordered so as to be “sustainable”, because 11 billion tech-enabled humans living under-regulated lives would entail disaster. This would mean the complete end of anything resembling human freedom—far and away worse than what we already see in “developed” countries—and it would require omnipresent global control and management. Wilderness and wild country will have been destroyed to make way for the massive industrial and agricultural infrastructure needed to support the population. And this is to say nothing about the tremendous and absolutely appalling misery in “advanced” countries: the depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicide, stress, and frustration⁸ which have been consistently shown to grow in pace with economic and technological development. The situation here is truly abysmal. But, of course, to Rosling these are simply temporary “problems” which only more technology and development can “solve.”⁹ This is because Rosling and his circle will be there to “manage” everything, to “treat” everyone, for the “benefit of humanity” of course. With such people shaping perception and attitudes we are unfortunately barreling full speed ahead toward this nightmare vision every day.
All of the supposed improvements Rosling cites, and all of the graphs detailing upward trajectories, are simply reflections of the growth of the techno-industrial system. Each metric might reflect a positive trend in its own right, but it can’t be viewed in pure isolation. The world is comprised of interconnected forces—causes and effects. If you dig deeper into Mr. Rosling’s isolated “improvements” and take the entire system into account, you find much more disturbing trends. Take the decline in violence as an example: Of course Rosling, as a member of the technological elite, would laud non-violence as one of the most important moral codes. Violence most threatens to disrupt the orderly, efficient functioning of the modern social machine he worships. For technology to progress smoothly, violence must be monopolized by the industrial system and individual-on-individual violence must be ruthlessly suppressed and replaced with a docile, meek, obedient population. To Rosling, the general trend toward less violence “is the most beautiful trend there is” (p. 114). “The world was once mostly barbaric and now it is mostly not” (p. 113). First, the world only seems less barbaric on an individual level, but horrific violence is undertaken by organizations that, if not destroying each other in military confrontation (because their weapons are too powerful) are laying waste to the world in ruthless economic competition for survival. Non-violence is required among individuals who operate within and are dependent on these organizations, and individuals must sublimate their individual conflicts for the smooth functioning of their organizations—becoming obedient cells in vast social organisms. Second, all of this comes at a tremendous cost to individual freedom: maintaining this order requires the individual to suppress and internalize his natural hostilities and submit to regimens of education, propaganda, psychological coercion, highly-regulated and monitored living, all to a level far beyond what he has been psychologically and physically adapted to—and therefore this loss of freedom results in great misery and suffering on part of the individual, to say nothing of the costs to human dignity. But this is all lost on Rosling because…
For the technocratic class, freedom is only conceived as being those meaningless and unimportant freedoms that have no practical effect. Real freedom for individuals would threaten the smooth orderly functioning of the technoindustrial system, because the system needs humans (for now) who must operate as orderly, docile, obedient gears in the social body. “The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.” (p. 64) says Rosling. But what exactly is this “freedom” and what can and can’t we do exactly? “Thank you, industrialization, thank you steel mill, thank you power station, thank you chemical-processing industry, for giving us the time to read books.” (p. 220). In other words, fritter away your time in leisure and pleasure-seeking. For books, Rosling would sacrifice Nature and allow the currently known consequences of industrialization, steel manufacture, electric power generation and distribution, and industrial chemical production. Of course, humans need more than media and leisure to live full, rich, and joyful lives. People need to be in control of the practical life-and-death circumstances of their lives and the numerous psycho-social maladies of our era prove that there is no sanitized replacement for such important, intrinsically fulfilling work.¹⁰
“A fact-based world-view is more comfortable. It creates less stress and hopelessness than the dramatic worldview, simply because the dramatic one is so negative and terrifying.” (p. 255). Having an errant interpretation of facts which suits your worldview accomplishes this as well. Diverging from your worldview is terrifying. And Rosling and his colleagues¹¹ are engaged in this self-delusion. It would be bad enough if these Rosling types were simply deluded buffoons, but unfortunately Rosling hints at something in his work that’s far more dangerous and insidious: If people don’t understand that the “facts” Rosling presents are good, it’s because of something wrong with their brains, he tells us. “Why do so many people’s brains systematically misinterpret the state of the world? …illusions don’t happen in our eyes, they happen in our brains. They are systematic misinterpretations…most people are deluded…” (p. 14) One can imagine a future where the technological system will seek to “treat” people who draw the “wrong” interpretations of data—meaning interpretations that are threatening or harmful to the system—with various psychological or biological techniques. Having the wrong worldview (e.g., that a worsening state of Nature and human freedom is inextricably tied to technological advancement) becomes “delusional,” a pathological “sickness” to be “cured.” Rosling’s compatriots would of course deny that doing something like that would be justified (currently). But such an arrangement is logically consistent with the direction of industrial society, and not unprecedented. History shows that time and time again powerful people will resort to such barbarity if they feel their power or their worldviews are being seriously tested. And they tend to act not with grudging regret, but with sincere righteousness.
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NOTES:
Theodore John Kaczynski, Technological Slavery, Vol. 1, Revised and Expanded Edition, Scottsdale, AZ: Fitch & Madison Publishers, 2019, p. 164.
Rosling, Factfulness, p. 13
“Indeed, it becomes possible to explain the origins of a revolution in such detail that its onset seems, in retrospect, inevitable. Yet at the same time, when revolutions do occur, they usually come as a complete shock to everyone…” Jack A. Goldstone, Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2014, p. 20.
Out of people in 30 countries polled by Rosling, 50% or more felt that the world is getting worse. (p. 50). “I meet many such [pessimistic] people, who tell me they have lost all hope for humanity.” (p. 69).
“When people wrongly believe that nothing is improving, they may conclude that nothing we have tried so far is working and lose confidence in measures that actually work.” (p. 69).
Daniel Everett, Don't Sleep There Are Snakes, New York, NY: Random House, 2009, p. 278.
Colin Turnbull, The Forest People, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1962 p. 26.
The evidence is overwhelming. Here we only cite: Joseph, Soumya, “Depression, anxiety rising among U.S. college students,” Reuters, Aug. 29, 2019, online at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-mental-undergrads/depression-anxiety-rising-among-us-college-students-idUSKCN1VJ25Z; Tavernise, Sebrina, “U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High,” New York Times, April 22, 2016, online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-surges-to-a-30-year-high.html
The solutions proposed are either total insults to human dignity, or further expand the power of the industrial system at the expense of human freedom and autonomy (e.g., ref. to Kaczynski, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” ¶ 145). Amid a bevy of crises caused by prior and present technology, the faith that these progress-cheerleaders demonstrate is truly astounding: pushing readers to share their wild faith that the looming technologies to come will not heap upon us infinitely more problems, but only solve those as yet recognized and unresolved.
For a more detailed treatment of this problem, see, e.g., Kaczynski, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” ¶¶ 33-38; Technological Slavery, Vol. 1 (2019), pp. 151-55, 258, 293-94.
What we’ve said here about Rosling applies more-or-less equally to Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, and Bill Gates among others.
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