What’s the Point of Truth in a Post-Truth World?
A few years ago a coworker of mine got wind of the fact that I’m an agnostic and was visibly bothered by the news. He peeked into my office later, ostensibly to drop off some sales expense reports but really to ask the question that had been the pea under his mattress since he found out I was a heathen: “How can you live thinking that this [vague, all-encompassing hand gesture] is all there is — and that there’s nothing after we die?”
Don’t worry, Gentle Reader. This isn’t an essay about religion. I’m not about to set forth an argument about why people shouldn’t believe in God — not only because such beliefs are intrinsically argument-proof, but also because I’m not that cruel. I would never do that to you.
What I want to talk about is the ass-backwards thought processes that inform many of our beliefs on a daily basis — not only religious, but of course (you knew it was coming…) political as well.
Did you notice what my coworker did in that anecdote I presented above? If not, please go back and reread it and think about what might possibly be problematic about it. This guy — who I’ll admit isn’t exactly the Immanuel Kant of the office — immediately questioned not the basis for my beliefs, but the consequences of them.
That’s a janky-ass way to look at truth-seeking, if you ask me. The implication I took away from his question is that one establishes a belief system based on wish fulfillment rather than those epistemological Debbie Downers — logic, evidence, and experience.
Sure, a lot of people in this world believe particular things for strange and infuriating reasons, so I probably shouldn’t make too much of this incident — but the thing that impressed me about our conversation was that it seemed as if my coworker had accidentally revealed the faulty mechanism of his thinking to me. If I asked him in another context why he believed in God, it’s doubtful he’d flat-out admit that his beliefs were opportunistic — that he latched onto Christianity merely as a talisman to ward off unpleasant realities. He’d probably offer up something better scripted and less self-involved than the evidence of his own fears.
If you spend any time at all on social media, you’re certainly aware that this has become the modus operandi for partisan news-sharing around the internet. (I’m not picking sides here, by the way; both the right wing and the left wing have their own ideological echo chambers.) We reflexively award legitimacy to news articles that reinforce what we already believe or what we want to believe. If I hate Trump and I find an article that alleges he tampered with voting results in certain pivotal states, how much more likely am I to believe it (or at least place my hope in it) than if an article of the opposing orientation alleges the same thing about Clinton?
Right now there are plenty of people out there hungry for a news article about Hillary Clinton’s secret underground drug den where she and her corrupt libtard cronies engage in wild bacchanalias and drink the blood of cisgender white male Christian children during full moons. Maybe this is a slight exaggeration, but in this day and age I’m not even 100% sure anymore. The border between satire and reality is rapidly shifting, as if a hard-fought battle is being waged between the two. (Reality is clearly mopping the floor with satire, by the way.)
We want news that legitimizes our feelings, not news that simply offers up facts. Facts, you see, are trending toward obsolescence since we discovered that misinformation is every bit as powerful (and sometimes even more powerful) than a less advantageous truth.
The post-election hangover is still in effect over on social media. Lefties (understandably) continue to bemoan the results and wage a mostly futile war against misinformation and spurious news sources. I’m not saying that I don’t admire the impulse to restore prestige to truth and logic, but these attempts only feed into the larger narrative of liberal resentment and propaganda.
On a fundamental psychological level — whether it’s true or not — we expect the loser in a contest to become a resentful excuse-maker or just a plain crybaby. I’m sure this is the way things look from the vantage of most Trump supporters, and instinctively it makes sense. It reinforces everything they already believe about the unreliability of the mainstream “liberal” press and the left’s tendency to manipulate the truth to further its agenda.
This might be the point in the essay where you shout at your screen, “But — but — it’s the right wing which spreads verifiable untruths with impunity!”
If you objected this way, it’s a clear sign that you’re at least a little out-of-touch with the way things actually are. Truth and untruth are outmoded categories in the political arena. There are still people in the world, for example, who believe that the Obama presidency is illegitimate because he’s a foreigner. You could bring his birth certificate to them for inspection, and they would insist it was a forgery. You could bring in all sorts of experts to inspect the document and ascertain its validity, and these experts would be discounted as frauds or parts of some vast liberal conspiracy. You could even fly in the physician who signed the frigging birth certificate, and the very fact that he would vouch for its authenticity is proof of his unreliability.
The truth — for many of us — is simply what we want to believe. I’m including myself in this equation. Do you know that one quote from Donald Trump that circulated around the internet where he (supposedly) shit-talked Republican voters in the late 1990s?
It’s fake. Completely and utterly fabricated. And yet once upon a time I shared it, either because I’m an idiot or because I got caught up in the desire to believe. (As it stands, it’s a pretty useless quote anyway — since Trump would quite readily bash the Republican establishment and its adherents even today. That’s how he won, after all.)
I hate to be a doomsayer, but this is a pretty dire situation. Both sides of the ideological spectrum are almost completely closed off to each other because they promulgate or create truths which foundationally negate the other side. In other words, anything the opposing camp says is misleading, untrue, and/or wrong simply because they said it. Their political identity itself (not their argument) determines their validity.
If you spend time on Facebook, you probably realize that all these well-meaning attempts at information-sharing and falsehood-debunking reinforce the opinions of both the people who share the poster’s opinions and those who think it’s propaganda. This increasing entrenchment shows no signs of stopping any time soon since most liberals and conservatives can’t even “talk” anymore. I mean, they can literally talk, but they can’t really engage beyond their brute opposition.
I think a lot of people will be discouraged or angered by this diagnosis because it smacks of defeatism. I would argue, though, that defeatism isn’t a mere state of affairs; it’s what people do with the way things are.
Also, this brings me back to my coworker’s question about belief in God at the beginning of this essay… My answer to him was that, no, I wasn’t particularly thrilled that there isn’t an afterlife — and that this [vague, all-encompassing hand gesture] was all there was — but there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about that. What I can do is try to make “this” the best it can possibly be.
