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There once was a couple who owned a ship. They loved their ship! But they knew nothing of sailing. They needed a crew and a captain.

On this ship, there were sailors and one star-gazing navigator. The sailors would laugh at the wise navigator, dreamily observing the sky, while they ran across the decks, sweating as they hoisted sails and kept the ship moving.

Crossing the oceans was great fun, but the ship-owners knew they still needed a captain.

Each day, the sailors would flatter the owners and themselves, boasting of their sailing skills despite having no knowledge of navigation, quarrelling over who was the best. Competing for their affection and approval, each sailor hoped that the owners might make them captain.

One night, the impatient sailors tricked the owners into drinking so much wine that they couldn’t see straight! And then, they demanded: “Now, make your decision. Who is your captain?”

In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates drew this analogy comparing the ship to the democratic state, the ship-owner to its voting population, the sailors to politicians and the navigator to a philosopher.

His warning was that voting is a skill and requires specific education for people to make informed and rational decisions on behalf of the state. He understood the threat and allure of demagogues who “seek support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.”

Voters are fed enticing ideas by politicians who either tell us what we want to hear, or validate our worst fears in order to secure our votes. This is their wine. Socrates said the only capable ruler is the philosopher, with their grasp of the big picture, a sense of the overall good and a willingness to examine ideas and beliefs to find truth.

His point was, democracy can only work when all voters are equipped with an extensive education, because without the capacity to make informed decisions, demagogues will persuade us and our democratic choices will never really be our own.

We can argue why Socrates chose death - was he respecting the democratic process? Was he revealing the tragic errors made by an uninformed ruling majority? Was he activating fury in his supporters to retaliate the injustice of his death and prompt social change? Was it a statement that people should stand by their convictions? They’re all plausible.

But they all return to the same question: how do we make democracy work better?

“The Death of Socrates” is a Memento Mori of democracy.

It’s a reminder that democracy is precious and also fragile. It’s entirely dependent on each of us respecting its value and this painting represents the tragic consequences of failing to think critically in an operating democracy.

It holds particular significance in today’s post-truth world. We listen to opinions whether they’re well thought out or not, but surely every opinion can’t be worth listening to because not everyone lives examined lives. Socrates’ grave reservations about democracy stemmed from the fact that the majority opinion does not equal truth.

Our poor old mates, the ship-owners, really had no chance of making an examined decision after the amount of wine poured down their throat by the sailors. The same is true of us.

We are susceptible to having our world views altered by the media we consume.

The KGB began a campaign of disinformation in 1962 when it strategically established an English-language Indian newspaper, Patriot, with the sole purpose of publishing deliberately distorted information that would manipulate. The newspaper was used as the first ‘leak’ of disinformation and one notorious example is when it successfully granted false legitimacy to a story invented by the KGB that claimed AIDS/HIV was created by the CIA. Slowly, this disinformation leaked through media channels until it reached main-stream American television, and still today persists in the popular conscious. The story eventually evolved into conspiracy theories which exacerbated existing racial tensions, post-colonial resentment and anger from already marginalised groups. While this full process took decades, today the strategies remain the same but information can be disseminated at an inconceivable rate on the internet with even less requirements for authenticity than before.

Today, social media acts as the primary vehicle in Russia’s disinformation campaign. Graphika, a social media analytics company that monitors digital threats targeting vulnerable users, produced Twitter Maps which reveal how accounts created by the infamous St. Petersburg troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, operate to influence with disinformation. Bots infiltrate politically polarised realms on Twitter, then tweet inflammatory posts hundreds of times per day to garner support and influence. Rather than pushing their disinformation to the mainstream, they build credibility within already divided communities and use false personas to engage with real people. From there they introduce new divisive narratives and amplify ones already circulating.

The intent is to distort our perception of reality so much, that we willingly consume disinformation which legitimises our fears and prejudices, deepening the existing fractures in our societies.

These disinformation campaigns are scary enough, but this flavour of psychological warfare is being used against us by establishments we trust. As the Cambridge Analytica scandal unfolded, The Guardian’s investigations and ‘The Great Hack’ provided us with a lot of insight into how corporations and political parties have been using social media to manipulate desired outcomes for elections and referendums around the world.

Firstly, they used our online behaviours to profile us all to identify what they so affectionately termed ‘The Persuadables’ - those of us whose psychographic profiles suggest we are open to be influenced, prime targets for manipulation.

Secondly, after identifying our triggers, those deepest fears and insecurities were used against us with tailor-made, fear-mongering content - ‘the wine.’ They crafted campaigns with fabricated stories, alarmist calls to action, invented facebook events, contrived viral social movements and used inflammatory imagery to ignite anger and division within populations. They then pushed all of this crap out to the most vulnerable among us, ‘The Persuadables’, and, well, persuaded them to see the world as they wished.

Facebook has created a policy that allows politicians to post ads with any claims they want — even if blatantly false — in the name of ‘free expression’, because even the lies, according to Zuckerberg, are newsworthy. Vanita Gupta, President of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (a coalition representing 220 civil rights groups) stated: “Mark Zuckerberg is co-opting civil rights history to try to justify Facebook’s policies that do long-term damage to our democracy… The company is in denial about what’s happening.”

“Zuckerberg is co-opting civil rights history to justify Facebook policies that undermine our democracy,” said Vanita Gupta, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Hard to imagine MLK and Frederick Douglass, who he just invoked, supporting FB’s move to protect politicians who rely on misinformation and race-baiting for electoral gain.”

As populations, we’re not trained to put enough thought into where content is coming from or the legitimacy of sources and evidence. Partly, this is because we have faith in our governing and broadcasting bodies that we assume implement standards for our protection. We believe that organisations will be held to account for ‘false advertising’, both commercially and politically, but we’ve been misled. Campaigns used by Trump, Brexit and even the ‘Death Tax’ lie in Australia play on our most primal fears - invasion and others taking what we believe to be ours - so we can’t help but believe the threat of immigration or the idea that we’re being ripped off. And unfortunately, now we need to accept that the media so many of us have trusted, is not here to tell us when we’re being lied to.

Although we’re well-aware that our media manipulates us, we still can’t tell when we’re being drip fed 'the wine’ as opposed to the truth.

Our values inform our votes. We rarely take the time to scrutinise the basis of those values and certainly don’t make the effort to understand every political policy. Our decisions on election day are heavily influenced by whatever ‘wine’ we’ve been consuming through our radios, tvs, phones and computers, and by that stage we’ve been given so much that none of us can see straight.

Services like VoteCompass can help us to take the time to think about our priorities and help us navigate where we stand in the context of parties and candidates. Without judgement or persuasion, it helps us remember that we have our own minds and while the privileged white men with the loudest media voices tell you to vote for the party that will best protect their interests, our votes really do impact us. And our interests, for the most part, do not align with those of the loudest voices.

In John Berger’s About Looking (1980), he considers how the use of photography has become “habitual, an unexamined part of modern perception itself.” He considers the impact of photojournalism “whereby the text follows the pictures instead of vice versa,” as well as the role of advertising as a crucial economic force and reveals we’ve been trained by both journalistic and advertising media to swallow and trust the images we see before considering the information behind it. Photography had “replaced the world as immediate testimony.” We have been taught to see reality in place of artifice.

Art, however, is unapologetically artifice. It is intended to be read.

One of the most valuable lessons art teaches us is how to read the world. It encourages us to look deeper, to take time, to seek patterns, to analyse and deconstruct, to learn plural perspectives, to question intent and accepted realities. The value of analytic thinking is growing in the face of inexorable digital media that misrepresents opinion as fact and disinformation as truth but by engaging in art analysis, we learn to apply the same principles to the content we consume, scrutinising sources, purpose and constructed messaging. The more practiced we are at reading artifice, the more likely we will carry these lessons on to perceive digital media as the artifice it is, to understand information as distinct from consuming it.

Art can teach us how to examine the information that informs our beliefs, but it can also deepen our own understanding of those beliefs. It challenges us to think Socratically, but perhaps not too harshly, observe and re-evaluate our ways of thinking. Art really does have the power to make us better citizens.

During the French Revolution, art’s focus shifted from historical to contemporary subjects and Napoleon led the charge, with his innovative understanding of the power of art as propaganda, creating his own ‘fake news’ of current events. Witnessing David’s success in allegorical painting, he shrewdly exploited his skills, naming David the ‘First Painter to the Emperor’. He had him document his reign in a way that would legitimise his power and idealise the Empire by glorifying military victories, aligning him with historical French heroes, by showing him as a tireless leader working at all hours of the morning for his people, by presenting him as a Christ-figure caring for the sick and wounded, by exaggerating the grandeur and lavishness of his coronation. Napoleon’s strategy was to persuade the French public of his success and grant him authority as their leader to consolidate loyalty and establish a deep sense of nationalism.

David was the vital cog in the Napoleonic propaganda machine.

After creating “The Death of Socrates”, a work that provided us with so much to unpack about the concept of democracy and the responsibilities of citizenship, it’s a sadly un-Socratic ending to the story. But, it’s a cautionary tale revealing the fact that we’re all susceptible to veering away from the examined life, because it takes work. It requires us to constantly be rethinking our choices and questioning our firmly held beliefs. It means scrutinising our media, sources of information, bias and intent. But the more we practice, the more we see it in action, the easier and more habitual it will become.

By leading Socratically examined lives, by engaging more with art and learning to read the world the way art invites us to read its own artifice, we can be better citizens. Art can save democracy. Maybe it can even save our ship.

Additional Reading & Viewing:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611807/this-is-what-filter-bubbles-actually-look-like/

The Great Hack, Netflix

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-disinformation-fake-news-elections.html

https://www.vox.com/2018/2/16/17020974/mueller-indictment-internet-research-agency