The first rule of psychotherapy?  Never quote song lyrics, even if they seem devastatingly apt. Even if someone says ‘it’s like a jungle out there’, do not be tempted to reply ‘you sometimes wonder how you keep from going under’.

Even if someone says, ‘some people call me Maurice’, as actually happened to me once, don’t be tempted to get out the air guitar and play the riff from The Joker. (No, I didn’t do it.)

Quite likely your client will recognise the words, in which case your authenticity is blown. 

Nevertheless, songwriters are great at encapsulating a feeling. If you must quote, include the attribution. Like, ‘as Leonard Cohen would say, Everybody Knows’. 

I’m a late convert to Leonard Cohen’s music and poetry. Clearly, he should have won the Nobel prize instead of Dylan, just for this song. Everybody Knows. In 5 minutes and 37 seconds the song lists all kinds of skulduggery that passes for normality. The dice was loaded. The good guys lost. And in particular, a concern about Fidelity: ‘You’ve been faithful, give or take a time or two’.

There are lots of lines in the song that sound like paranoia but fall just on the right side of understandability. Everybody Knows gets close to conjuring a ‘delusional mood’, an altered state of experience where nothing seems normal. Everybody Knows creates a resonant view of the world’s main problem, which is Falsehood.

But does ‘everybody’ mean ‘everybody’ or just ‘everybody but me’? 

There are hundreds of words for Falsehood and the list is growing. I like ‘knowing’, but you may prefer terms that allow a little more nuance, like ‘greenwashed’, ‘gaslit’, or ‘spun’. Not to mention, for Bill and Ted fans, the evergreen word ‘bogus’.

I am using ‘knowing’ to describe a situation where deceit is implicit but unspoken. Knowingness describes a situation where people quietly share an awareness of falsehood. Like when the checkout assistant asks whether you found ‘everything you were looking for’ today and you say Yes, but you mean No.  The assistant has been told to say that to every customer, perhaps in case Bono ever visits Eurospar. And is still looking for whatever it was he was looking for in 1987. 

What the checkout operator is really saying is ‘I’m being held hostage in this shop, call the cops’.

In Casablanca, (spoiler alert)  everyone knows that Rick shot Major Strasser, including Captain Renault who was there at the time. Instead of arresting Rick, the Captain orders his men to ‘arrest the usual suspects’. Note, Renault does not actually tell a lie.

How often does arresting the usual suspects resonate with our experiences today?

Take this Guardian article by Rafael Behr*

This followed a Sunak speech pretending that he had cancelled a tax on meat, mandatory car sharing, needing 7 recycling bins and other fictitious green policies.

Behr observes that the speech was ‘delivered without the trademark Boris glint that showed at least some awareness that he knew that you knew that he was bullshitting’. Worryingly that means that Sunak is either a better liar than Boris or the opposite, that he has no insight into his own scam and thinks he is telling the truth. 

The glint, the knowing look, is the sure sign of a ‘knowingism’. But if the glint is not discernible there’s a problem. Knowing who knows and who doesn’t has become a major challenge. At one end of the scale, which we can call Glint Positive, is the account of two Russian tourists who visited Salisbury in 2018 and who were suspected of poisoning people. They claimed when interviewed that Salisbury Cathedral was ‘famous, not just in Europe but in the whole world for its 123 metre spire, for its clock, the first one of its kind ever created in the world, which is still working’. 

This is a clear ‘Everyone Knows’ situation. Salisbury cathedral isn’t even famous in Wiltshire.

At the other end of the scale perhaps, I once had a colleague who left stacks of casenotes on every horizontal surface, so that you could hardly see him across his desk. He complained every time you met him that he was grossly overworked. I never knew if he really was stretched to the limit or merely conducting a strategy, possibly one he had learned on a management course, to stop people asking him to do anything. I don’t think he had a glint in his eye though. He probably just had a terrible job.

What happens when a person has learned to disguise that tell tale glint? Or more likely, when a person has talked himself so well into a role that he has forgotten he’s acting?

Misrepresentation, distortion or outright lying is rife in politics, advertising, in corporations and in the public sector. 

Top of the list for doctors in the UK is the monstrous carbuncle called Revalidation. Keen to be seen to respond to the Harold Shipman scandal and strangely determined to force as many retirements as possible, the General Medical Council imposed a time consuming and user unfriendly annual charade on its captive audience of practitioners. As an appraiser and as an appraisee, there are glints in both eyes throughout the process. There is even a glint each time you type the nonsense into adobe acrobat, send it a few times between you and your appraiser and eventually ‘lock it down’.

The GMC removed thousands of licences from doctors for ‘failing to engage in the requirements for their revalidation’. It’s not quite a Post Office Scandal level event. But Revalidation has probably accounted for 10% of medical time and 90% of medical exasperation since it was introduced. And everybody knows that Harold Shipman, if he hadn’t been caught, would have sailed through the Revalidation process and probably led appraisal workshops during which people unaccountably died. (Trevor doesn’t seem to have come back from the coffee break…’)

Doctors would probably settle for a much lower pay rise, or even a pay cut, if they were never again forced to fill in a ‘reflective portfolio’. The GMC say they exist to ‘protect, promote and maintain the health and safety of the public’ much as LAPD  supposedly exists to Protect and Serve. 

The psychology of knowingness was famously invoked by Donald Rumsfeld in 2002:

 ‘as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know’

Rumsfeld was ripping off a piece of psychology called the Johari Window, which has been a stalwart of management workshops since its invention in 1955. 

The four parts of the window are Known / Known; Known / Unknown; Unknown / Known and Unknown / Unknown. Leonard Cohen helpfully simplified the four window system into one – just Known / Known. 

You can probably recall those kinds of workshops and remember the levels of knowingness you felt in the room; the facilitator earnestly drawing the four windows on his flip chart, asking people to think of things that he can write in each window. Meetings where people whispered ‘beam me up Scotty’ from time to time.

Even though the song Everybody Knows, from the album I’m Your Man, came out in 1988, slightly preceding the breakdown of the USSR, the Russians got more and more fascinated with disinformation strategies.

For some reason, the capacity to generate and disseminate false information has become regarded as a work of genius. Russia’s ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ strategy has been hailed as massively effective by some psychologists.

Sometimes attributed to Putin or his advisor Surkov, who presumably read ‘1984’ in the Lower Fourth like we all did, the Firehose involves multiple competing and often conflicting streams of information.

It has been observed that Surkov’s strategy was only really effective because he revealed what he was doing. So that everyone really did know that nothing was what it seemed.

After several decades, the question remains, what has it achieved? 72nd place in the GDP per capita league? And Surkov under house arrest? Yes, but is he?  

Like pirates, a few individuals have made fortunes out of chaotic conditions. Some have been lucky, most have not. The armaments industry has done well, even if there never was a real SDI ‘Star Wars’ program, even if Ronald Reagan pretended there was. As though nobody knew he was an actor.

On the contrary, creating and broadcasting falsehoods is neither difficult nor clever and most often results in a negative outcome for the agent. Take Macbeth for instance. His strategy: kill the king, kill both his bodyguards, blame the bodyguards for the murder, make yourself king, then remember your colleague knows you did it, but have your colleague murdered too. What could possibly go wrong? Only getting PTSD, wife going mad and killing herself offstage and finally getting killed after not noticing a forest creeping up on him.

Macbeth’s plan, like the Rwanda scheme, fell apart under the weight of its own complexity.

The basic problem for propagandists is that disinformation is self-defeating. Especially in the case of propaganda whose objective is to stop people believing anything. Although repetitive and plausible disinformation can seem to be effective in the short term, does it really have a lasting effect? Did it really advance Putin’s agenda if, as a result of the Firehose of anti-vax falsehoods, there is a slightly higher rate of measles in Skegness? Or do beliefs just settle back to where they were before? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It’s not rocket science – oh wait, it is!

There’s a contrary view. And an alternative definition of Knowingness. Jonathan Lear, in the book Open Minded,  describes it as a posture of ‘already knowing’ – of purporting to know the answer even before the question arises. Knowingness is a false claim to knowledge that makes it impossible to be surprised by anything new.

According to Malesic,** knowingness can also take the form of ironic or cynical distance, of seeming to have ‘seen it all and gotten over it’. Which is pretty much the world view taken in Everybody Knows and perhaps the true meaning of the song, a jaded acceptance of failing humanity, always attempting to punch above its weight.

It’s become trendy to label such human failings as cognitive distortions, which is a nice way of regarding different ways of lying to oneself. 

As a result perhaps of decades of propaganda, most people’s beliefs nowadays are super shallow – often what the last person they heard told them. Popular beliefs are like topsoil or shifting sand.  

In time perhaps the sands do move and another house in Scarborough falls into the sea. 

In general though, the number of people with views that can be described as ‘fanatical’ stays below 15%, 3% or 1%, depending on where you draw the cut off line and start using terms like ‘far left’ or ‘far right’. For instance, in the UK only about 1.5% of people belong to a political party. This has been falling gradually over the last 70 years.

So, not Everybody Knows. Just 98.5% of people.

Confucious said that real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance.

Socrates said that the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Abba, more realistically, just said: knowing me knowing you – its the best I can do.

*https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/28/rishi-sunak-success-failure-general-election

**https://psyche.co/ideas/our-big-problem-is-not-misinformation-its-knowingness

.