Pol Pardini Gispert

Disinformation is often defined as misleading content intended to instill false beliefs. But this definition is too narrow. We need to focus instead on its broader epistemic effects. Indeed, some disinformation campaigns rely not on sharing falsehoods but on spreading what I call grievance narratives. These narratives exploit the (real or imagined) grievances of a community and frame them as signs of a deeper systemic problem, typically instigated by a powerful and hostile group. In this way, they legitimize and amplify aversive emotions and foster a negative orientation toward the world, one in which emotions like resentment or indignation feel continuously warranted. Now, grievance narratives are particularly harmful because they epistemically isolate their targeted audience. In short, they undermine the network of information sources that a community can rely on and, as such, they obstruct access to epistemic goods, such as knowledge and understanding. This stems from a key feature of these narratives: namely, they polarize the world between those who recognize the forces responsible for the community’s suffering and those who don’t. The latter are portrayed as not merely mistaken, but as either hostile or complicit with those to blame. In this way, grievance narratives systematically foreclose any alternative explanation of the community’s experiences, leaving them with little more than a single narrative to trust.

Nietzsche’s claims about Christianity are difficult to reconcile. In some passages, Nietzsche claims Christianity is an expression of nihilism; in others, he suggests Christianity is a remedy against nihilism. In this article, I provide a solution to this puzzle. I show, first, that Nietzsche’s use of the notion of nihilism is contextually and temporally dependent: he calls an ideal nihilistic if it cannot confer meaning on the lives of a particular community in a specific context at a given time. I argue, second, that this meaning-conferring role is contingent on a wide array of factors. It ultimately depends on whether the ideal makes life feel bearable for those who accept it, and this may change over time. This, I conclude, is the key to the puzzle. According to Nietzsche, Christianity was not nihilistic at first. However, it became nihilistic when a force it cultivated undermined its meaning-conferring role.