Which is stronger — truth or ignorance?
The triumphant, bald ignorance of Donald Trump was once again on public display as he tweeted his congratulations to “the Great State of Kansas” for the Superbowl win by the football team from Kansas City, Missouri.
It was a simple mistake, one in a long string of simple mistakes based on ignorance. But not all ignorance is so innocent or so seemingly inconsequential.
Few things are as dangerous as willful ignorance. Simple ignorance is easily dismissed. It’s a mistake knowledge can erase. But willful ignorance is a lie, a big lie, and, as such, it is sometimes far more powerful than the truth.
Lies are powerful because they are static, impervious to facts and analysis. Truth is dynamic, always changing in response to new evidence and better analysis.
Late in 2019, Trump, responding to taunts from Iran, tweeted his own outrageous threat to destroy fifty-two cultural sites in Iran. As foreign policy it was a bad move, but as propaganda, brilliant.
The Pentagon quickly issued a clarification and denial of any plan to attack sites of cultural significance in Iran. Trump reframed his threat to unspecified targets. He said he was not aware destruction of cultural sites was a crime. In claiming ignorance, he was telling the truth. His ignorance was real and it served him well.
For Trump, willful ignorance is a powerful propaganda tool. It allows him to make false claims and empty threats to bolster his image of himself as a bold and unapologetic American patriot. Speaking and acting from ignorance allows him to avoid any and all accountability for the real harm caused by his intemperate outbursts and uninformed policy directives.
Can we fight willful ignorance?
The truth is it often requires an expert, actually, a lot of experts, to distinguish what is true from what is a lie. Expertise is the opposite of willful ignorance.
I define an expert as a person who has an informed opinion about something because they have taken the time to gather and study the facts and have learned how to interpret those facts in a systematic and reliable way. Even more important, an expert is constantly striving to make minuscule reductions in the infinite scope of their own ignorance.
For most of my adult life, I have been an expert. Like all experts, I am constantly, out of ignorance, making mistakes and missing the truth. Ideally, I learn about and admit my mistakes because other experts, in my own field or from other fields, have pointed out facts of which I was previously unaware and/or used facts to make a convincing argument to counter my own, faulty findings.
In the mid-1980s, being an expert was part of my official job title. For three years, I was a “foreign language teaching expert” in the employ of the People’s Republic of China. After that, I earned a Ph.D. and became, perhaps somewhat less officially than in China, an expert back home in the U.S.A.
Today, being an expert (on anything) in America is starting to feel a lot like being a “foreign” expert in China. In China, truth is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Scientists or engineers or philosophers or experts of any sort are regarded with suspicion in the PRC. There is always the possibility that, in “seeking the truth from facts” (a slogan Deng Xiaoping borrowed from Chinese history to signal the end of the Cultural Revolution and the start of a new, more pragmatic approach to China’s national development), an expert might diverge in some way, however slightly, from some belief held sacred and immutable by the Chinese government and Communist Party. In China, shining the light of truth on cracks in the ideological edifice of state power can be very dangerous.
America, like China, has never fully trusted its experts, intellectuals, and journalists. Here, the will of the people, has always been more important and more powerful than the evidence-based analyses and opinions of experts. But today, we see fear and loathing of experts reaching new heights. We see it clearly in the dismissal of dire warnings of imminent ecological catastrophe from climate scientists. We see it in dark mutterings about machinations of a “deep state” operated by career professionals in the federal bureaucracy. And we see it in widespread disdain for fact-based journalism from news sources thought to be controlled by the so-called “liberal elite.”
Truth or consequences?
Like all experts, my area of expertise is extremely narrow and has shifted over time. Early in my career, my primary area of expertise was language teaching, but beginning with my doctoral studies and through my professional career, I acquired some expertise in other, adjacent bodies of knowledge.
These days, I think of myself an expert on informal education, learning that happens outside of school. Of course, I’m not an expert on all aspects of informal education. But having lived and worked in China and having done the required reading and many years of independent research, I feel I have a better than average understanding of the type of politically-charged, mass informal education we call propaganda.
Inspired by what I was reading in the news in the last month of 2019, I went looking for a concise definition of one of the central tools of propaganda, the “big lie.” I found the following description of the strategies employed by a master of the art of the big lie in a declassified report from the U.S. intelligence services:
“…never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame…people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
Ring any bells? Here’s a hint. These words were written by Walter C. Langer in 1946. The report is A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend and it was commissioned by the OSS, the WWII precursor of the CIA.
Hitler was not the first to use the big lie, and certainly not the last. The big lie remains a remarkably effective tool for evoking fear and anger in the populace and paving the way for authoritarian rule. Trump may be ignorant, but he is not stupid. He knows how to wield the big lie to impose his will and protect his power.
When the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate votes to acquit the president on two counts of impeachment this week, it will confirm the party’s wholesale abandonment of truth based on facts. For Republicans, truth is now based solely on desire.
Republicans have learned that desire, not truth, is the key to power. Desire is what drives the will of the people. To manipulate desire, lies, especially big lies, work as well, if not better, than the truth.
Will America become China?
In China, the Communist Party expertly monitors and manipulates the hearts and minds of the Chinese people using propaganda to impose its will and maintain its lock on power. When Americans turn our backs to experts and facts, we make ourselves pawns to propaganda. We cede our power to those unscrupulous enough to manipulate our desires to serve their own selfish ends.
Donald Trump, and those who follow in his path, will always tell us to ignore the facts, ignore the experts, trust only us, our desires are yours. Against Trump and his enablers, an expert, any expert, looks weak.
An expert only has facts. No expert has all the facts. Experts who share the same facts can differ on what the facts mean. Experts change their minds when faced with new facts. All this makes it hard to absorb what the experts are telling us. Much easier to trust the man who claims no expertise, the man who revels in ignorance and says he has never made a mistake and only he can solve our problems.
But truth won’t stay buried. Facts have consequences. Climate change is real. Racism is real. The need for immigrants to support the U.S. economy is real. The widening wealth gap is real. Displacement of workers by technology is real. These are facts, not fake news concocted by partisan hacks.
We ignore reality at our peril. People are suffering. As suffering increases, so does anger, and it will find an outlet. Reality has a way of punishing us for letting ourselves be controlled by dangerous lies and the people who spread them.
Lies are most powerful in the hands of tyrants and oligarchs. Truth, on the other hand, is more powerful the more widely it is distributed. Truth draws its power from the collective and gains strength through inclusion and democracy.
We don’t have to trust the experts. But we do need listen to them and consider the facts they can show us. No matter how hard the struggle to uncover the truth, we cannot give up. Democracy needs truth to survive. Will we choose the hard path of elusive truths and democracy or continue to close our eyes and let ourselves be led into autocracy by seductive lies?
