Truth has long been an aspirational jewel in the crown of our democracy.
Who would have ever thought it would lose its luster? Particularly now, deep into the Information Age. We have the technology to evaluate a gazillion datapoints in a nanosecond, but without fealty to truth those results have limited meaning. This may be the saddest paradox of our times.
To be sure, truth is often illusive. It evolves with new discoveries and thoughts. For example, caffeine’s impact on our cardiovascular system constantly vacillates between safe and dangerous, based on the most recent medical study (here and here). Many of us thought George W. Bush was an idiot until Trump came along and made him look like a Rhodes Scholar. Yet, our one epistemological constant has been the value we attach to truth. It’s what distinguishes justified belief from a convenient whim.
Unfortunately, we seem to be entering a totally different dimension, a bizarre post-factual space where truth is utterly without value.
A few signs of life untethered to reality:
- Rep. Liz Cheney was removed from her House Republican leadership position for saying there was no rampant voter fraud in last year’s election. The facts? At least 86 judges, along with Trump’s own Justice and Homeland Security Departments, completely rejected any notion of a rigged election.
- Several House Republicans last week described the January 6 Capitol riot as an orderly affair. One said it was a “normal tourist visit.” The facts? More than 2,000 criminal charges filed against 411 suspects; some 140 police officers injured, many beaten with flagpoles and baseball bats; five people died.
- Tucker Carlson told his Fox News audience that the “death toll” from COVID-19 vaccines is “disconcertingly high.” The facts: there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim.
Sure, politicians and political influencers have always lied. Remember Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman. . .”? Or Richard Nixon hiding the secret bombing of Cambodia? Or Ronald Regan denying the Iran-Contra scandal? The difference is that back then, once the truth was known, there was no sycophantic partisan chorus perpetrating the lie. Congressional Democrats in 1998 did not flood the Sunday morning shows with testimonials about Clinton’s deep and abiding commitment to marital fidelity.
That’s when truth had value, and untruth was best mitigated by changing the subject and moving on, without relentlessly repeating the lie. That is decidedly not the case today for many conservatives. This putrid pack of prevaricators seems to have traveled through Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass. They, like Alice, were mentored by the White Queen on the art of believing “at least six impossible things before breakfast.”
It’s this obsessive drive to believe impossible things – more than the lies themselves – that is gnawing a hole in the fabric of our democracy. Congressional Republicans know full well that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, but many of them cling to the public position of voter fraud to stay in Trump’s good graces, and help state legislatures to pass voter suppression laws. According to recent polling, however, a strong majority of Republican voters cling strongly to the belief that Trump actually won the election.
Just a week ago, QAnon sweetheart and GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene began her speech to a packed Florida ballroom of the party faithful with this question: “Who is your president?”
“Donald Trump,” they yelled in a thunderous roar, according to NPR.
This malignant phenomena of believing impossible things has metastasized way beyond political rallies. Take the pandemic, for example. Trump knew in February of 2020 that COVID-19 was destined to become the most destructive virus to hit this country in more than 100 years. But he lied, and said it was no big deal and would soon disappear.
Months later, as the pandemic death toll climbed into the hundreds of thousands, acolytes of Trump and Fox News continued to view this coronavirus as a hoax. They partied like it was 2019, disavowing any need for facemasks or social distancing. Over the past year, news outlets reported countless cases of otherwise intelligent people insisting the virus wasn’t real, even as they or a family member took their final breath in a COVID critical care unit (here, here, here, here, and here ) .
Psychologists have long noted the tendency of some folks to deny the seriousness of a pending disaster as a mechanism for reducing anxiety. Studies on the deadly 1918 flu, for example, cite instances of people referring to it as a hoax or treating it as no big deal. However, the research shows far fewer instances of such denial, compared to our most recent experience.
In 1918, of course, the country was deep into a world war. The only news organizations were newspapers, and they went along with the government’s request to play down the reporting on the virus in order to protect the country’s war efforts. John M. Barry, author of the definitive history of the 1918 flu, The Great Influenza, noted in a recent interview with The New Republic that President Woodrow Wilson and other political figures remained virtually silent on the pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans.
Now, take the prompt-free coping mechanism of denial, and mix in Trump’s goofy affirmations of the same. Then add a constant bombardment of hoax advocacy by Fox News and miscellaneous trolls. Stir well, and you have the official lethal stew of our current pandemic.
This is what happens when millions of Americans insist on believing impossible things. They snickered about the myth of COVID a year ago. Now, they heed the warnings of know-nothings like Tucker Carlson and popular podcaster Joe Rogan, and refuse to be vaccinated. As a result, according to the New York Times, most infectious disease experts say we may never hit the level of herd immunity needed to eradicate the virus.
Sadly, it will take substantially more than a shot in the arm to restore truth as the loadstar in our quest for knowledge. For that to happen, facts need to matter again. Fiction can be a wonderful escape while sitting on a couch on a rainy afternoon.
As a governing principle, it’s a total disaster.