It’s hard to have a meaningful conversation about anything when we can’t tell the difference between opinion and truth, or even agree there is truth.
Passion doesn’t make your opinions right. No matter how intense your emotions, it doesn’t make your feelings true and it certainly doesn’t define reality, not for you or anyone else.
Despite that, good luck finding a passionate partisan who doesn’t pick and choose between the “facts” they care to believe and those they discount as misinformation, fake news, or irrelevant twaddle.
People don’t trust the mainstream media, politicians, university professors, scientific studies, think tanks, judges, or government agencies. They don’t trust institutions for good reason. Institutions and the so called experts who run them haven’t told us the truth.
They don’t necessarily mean to lie to us, it’s just that they no longer know the difference between fact and opinion.
In the recent VP debate, Walz attempted to embarrass J.D. Vance by claiming he, Walz, was only following the experts while Vance ignored expert advice. Vance then reminded Walz how often recently the “experts” have been wrong … on Covid, on the economy and inflation, and on foreign affairs. Vance might be on to something.
The latest poll by Gallup which purports to measure the level of trust Americans have for institutions seems to give Vance’s doubts about the trustworthiness of experts credence.
Only three institutions rate a majority percentage of those with a ‘great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust – small business, the military, and police. Every other institution Gallup tested came up wanting. (Gallup didn’t test family, neighbor, or personal religious leader.)
The temptation to yield to passion over reason isn’t just a problem for elites though. A recent University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign poll found most Americans don’t distinguish between statements of fact and personal opinions.
They gave respondents 12 statements and asked them to categorize the 12 as fact or opinion. On average, respondents properly identified only 7 of the 12 — slightly better than what you’d expect if they were randomly guessing.
Want to know why every chance they get, the media feels compelled to “fact check” Trump, but lets pass the inane and obviously false utterances by Kamala Harris? The research tends to show they don’t even know they’re doing it. They can’t see. They assume those who don’t agree with them are wrong, and those who do are right. Unfortunately, it’s a pit into which we’re all prone to fall.
The mainstream media claimed for more than 3 years that Joe Biden was at the top of his game. He was not just lucid, “he was the best version of himself,” according to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who described himself as a long time personal friend of Biden’s. Scarborough wasn’t alone by a long shot.
Of course, once America saw Biden’s incoherent debate performance, all those pundits who had previously ridiculed Republican doubts about Biden’s acuity expressed shock at Biden’s obvious decline. It would be easy to believe they were only pantomiming as a cynical coverup of their keeping Americans in the dark. That’s probably true for many of them.
Still, it’s likely there really were reporters who believed Biden was in fine fettle. People believe what they want to believe, no matter the evidence.
Coleman Hughes explores this phenomena in detail with his excellent review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book.
Hughes calls Coates’ latest essay collection, The Message, “a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion.” Coates blames western colonialism for plundering black wealth, accuses America of permanent and irreparable racism, and proclaims Israel guilty of apartheid and the source of all problems in the Middle-East.
As Hughes points out, the purpose of the book is purely myth-making and resorts not once to historical fact, actual truth, or even reasonable question.
The problem is that once truth becomes a casualty of our preferences and passions, society as a whole becomes vulnerable to all sorts of mischief.
G.K. Chesterton famously said, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes in anything.” To Chesterton, God is ultimate reality, the very author of objective truth.
When we resist the burden of conforming our ideas to fact, we are then capable of falling for all sorts of crazy cons. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Castro, Daniel Ortega, and Hugo Chavez all established their particular lie among a loyal cadre, then followed up with violence or the threat of violence to enforce their lie on societies that had mostly stopped valuing truth for its own sake.
Bottom line, If embracing friendly facts and discarding those less comfortable is a universal malady, then what hope do we have of preserving social unity and promoting civil society in a culture that no longer recognizes a truth external to our own passions?
Alexander Solzenitzen answered in his first-rate essay, “Live Not By Lies”.
In talking about how citizens could bring down the Soviet government, he said, “(violence) demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty. And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal non-participation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!”
Solzhenitsyn says that when society demands you share the lie, even under threat of violence, simply do this one small thing. Refuse. Never knowingly yield to the temptation of popularity, acceptance, love, or acclaim by accommodating untruth.
Rather, believe in truth. Search for it. Explore the uncomfortable, especially the uncomfortable. Let your speech, your ideas, your identity be defined by an unrelenting regard for what’s real.
If we make the truth the ultimate hunt, then the lie can’t hold. But if we won’t, if we succumb to the natural temptation, then let’s stop complaining and accept the consequences we deserve.