What you need to know, October 25, 2025: Milling rumors

Rumors are said to be like mills. They go around and around and grind the natural grains of wheat into powdery flour so that humans can digest them. Here is an example of a rumor mill: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/23/venezuela-tren-de-aragua-gang-police.

It’s a story that everyone concerned with what is happening today in this country should read. More than anything I’ve read this year, Sam Levin’s article gave me a clear understanding of how rumor drives the actions of the government both at home and abroad, that people like our President or Texas Governor Gregg Abbott or Health Secretary Kennedy — who have enormous power to direct the actions of governments — conceive of reality as it is fed them by the rumor mill. They then act on these conceptions – justifiably they think — and thus create for us the altered reality that we must live with.

The indiscriminate deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, the continuing murders of unknown men on the high seas off Venezuela, the undeclared war on Venezuela, all stem, it seems, from an internal memo within the Albuquerque police department on the gang activities of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, presumably in Colorado (not even in New Mexico).

According to that memo, Tren de Aragua was ordering its members to attack the police. That rumor, which came out of the investigative arm of ICE, returned to ICE through the Albuquerque memo as a confirmation of the reality of the rumor. That rumor, much augmented, buzzing round and round in our President’s mill-like mind gave him cause to claim that Tren de Aragua was “at war” with us and thus justified the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for deporting foreigners, the indiscriminate killings in the Caribbean and Pacific, his covert invasion of Venezuela, and all his other war-like actions.

That such prominent and major disturbances can derive from unsubstantiated rumor in an age of writing is pretty astounding. Western culture has prided itself on leaving an oral culture with its habits of mind and becoming a literate society based on writing and documents as long ago as 700 BC. But somehow, we have returned to the bronze age. We believe the reality provided by face-to-face communication, and we suspect the reality of the written word. Besides, it’s too much trouble to read; so, we’ve invented the computer to do our reading for us.

An oral society lives by word of mouth, passing information in a chain rather than the distribution of knowledge unilaterally. Thus, it fosters separate and individual perceptions rather than a common sharing of information. It is prone to mistakes of transmission, as both parlor games and scientific research have demonstrated that a message is garbled in the passing: by the seventh retelling a story has completely been transformed. Orality has no checks for truth, thus no analysis and rationality but depends on authority. Oral society finds unity in repetition, memorized opinions, the use and reuse of certain phrases and words. It is not a thinking society but a following society.

An oral society is ruled by force, which is why government in the West came into being in Greece with the invention of writing. The idea that people can rule themselves, by themselves, and for themselves, that people can think for themselves is a product of writing. And law, the language of governance, became – as the Old Testament recognizes – permanently binding with writing. History, as an idea that human time has a verifiable story, was invented at the same time, and was distinct from the mythological stories that in an oral culture was the telling and repeated retelling of the past. Similarly empirical science came into existence because writing and documentation allowed for the gathering and sharing of information.

Much as MAGA addicts claim to be traditionalists and claim the superiority of Western Culture over other cultures as rhetoric to support racial supremacy, their actions show them to be oralists turning the clock back and denying the foundational, textual basis of this culture.

This change may seem sudden, but it is not. While the Trumpian government is revolutionary in turning government into a private business, the mentality of oralism is deeply rooted in American history. It is part of our national anti-intellectualism, of our Southwestern anti-elitism, of our disdain for mere “book learning” as opposed to real world experience and “American know how.” When I graduated from an elite Eastern college in the fifties, a fellow graduate said to me proudly, “I’m never going to read another book in my life again.”

Of course, I exaggerate in order to clarify the distinction between oral and scriptural mentality since obviously we still have texts and people do write and read (as you are doing now). But our written culture is riddled with a popular preference for orality. Social relations at a distance was for centuries the domain of letters, but we invented the telephone to undercut that. Once the computer arrived, we deliberately used an oral style in our social media writing, feeling that oral speech was more free, more intimate, more expressive of emotions than written forms (though these are illusions). Speech forms are just as formulaic as written forms. The most individual, expressive language use today is written poetry. But poetry has not the appeal of songs which express the individualized feelings of millions with just one set of words.

In our President’s speeches and rally performances, we can see the oral mind at work, the repetitions, the cliches, the sprinkling of abuses, the ramblings, the lack of any focus, the apparent extemporaneous hesitancy posing as immediacy and spontaneity. He’s a master at speaking the daily pitter-patter of working life he learned as a teen working with construction workers. His appeal lies precisely in the fact that this wealthy man of power speaks an everyday language, as if he embodied the American dream. And he is what he seems, a fantasy whose whole knowledge of the real world is circulating rumor, what the courts (a literate form of justice) call “hearsay.”