I’m not the only person who has the impression that recent incidences where facts have been blatantly disregarded has been pretty extreme - even by Washington standards. Last week This American Life was discussing whether our society was post truth/facts, offering such things as the flood of immigrants streaming across our southern border (demonstrably false).
But wasn’t it about Nazi Germany that it was said, “Repeat a lie often enough…”
I suspect that the spreading of clear falsehoods - and followers’ eagerness to accept them in the face of evidence to the contrary - has existed as long as humans. But I wonder if the phenomenon is in any way magnified (or reduced) by technology. It is increasingly easy to “factcheck” any statement or action. But if one only gets partisan reporting and commentary through social media, is such fact-checking irrelevant?
Do you perceive that there has been a trend in one direction or another with respect to the relevance of demonstrable facts in American political discourse? If there has been, do you perceive it as good/bad/neutral?
I don’t know if it’s a trend or not, but “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” and a lot of the other post-truth rhetoric of BLM and groups like that shows what the justification is, for those that accept it. The individual instance might not be right, but it highlights a more important truth.
Maybe the Duke lacrosse team was framed by a crooked DA, but it highlights the rape culture we all live in. Michael Brown wasn’t really shot in the back, but it shows that police are racist murderers of black men. Etc.
As Bill Maher would say… I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true: The idea that we are more impervious to facts than in previous generations is a “post truth” belief.
Immigrants have always been vilified. Minorities have always been treated poorly, based on prejudices (and it was much worse in the past). Partisans have always been eager to believe the worst about their political rivals (so-and-so had an illegitimate child :eek::eek::eek: ).
I agree with Mace. It’s the way people have always been. Perhaps it looks different now in the modern (mis)information age, but at the root people prefer comfortable thoughts over uncomfortable facts.
Before the Internet, memes were passed around using photocopies and/or mail. Groups were addressed via church, meetings, and local radio. Before cable as we know it today, i.e., up until the late-'70s/early-'80s, people all across the country pretty much watched the same shows and received the same network news. Racists, isolationists, Conspiracy Theorists, fringe groups from the right and the left, etc., seemed (IMO) to be confined to ‘pockets’. With widespread cable and hundreds of channels, people’s viewing habits became more diversified. Niche markets developed (and some already existed on local radio) to cater or pander to what people wanted to hear. The Internet allowed these once-isolated nutters to communicate with other once-isolated nutters all across the world.
By and large, people are lazy. We are also offended by things that disagree with our beliefs. 'Factcheck? Never! This meme supports what I believe, therefore it must be correct! :mad: ’ I have friends who post horrid right-wing propaganda on Facebook. I have given them factual information, backed up with reputable citations, showing that they have been mislead. They say that the reputable citations (including government and educational sources) cannot be believed, and that obamaisakenyanmuslimterrorist-dot-com has the TRUE information. One friend posted a meme from a debunked story that happened in 2014, passing it off as current news. I provided him the facts. No response. But he posted the same story, with his outraged commentary, the next day – but with a different picture. This person is wilfully ignorant, or else intentionally lying. Wilful ignorance cannot be fought, but it can easily be spread with current technologies.
I think its gradually gotten worse over the last few decades and the number of potential news sources proliferated. Back when there were just 3 television networks each with its nightly news, the target audience was the common denominator and so neglecting the truth in favor of a partisan lie would lose you a good portion of your audience. Now there are so many news sources, that each individual can seek out the source that gives him the “facts” he is most likely to agree with, and it is possible to make a business model based solely on these niche audiences.
While this appears to suggest that we are entering a ne3ver before seen age of the big lie, it may in fact be that the relatively non-partisan nature of news that dominated the late 20th century may have been the anomaly, and we are just sliding back into the good old days of yellow journalism where each town had a Republican Newspaper and a Democratic Newspaper, and it was obvious which was which.
Hollywood and certain fiction genres pushed a “Follow your feelings!” moral - *“The heart is always right.” *Elsewhere there has also been plenty of popular advice or Dear Abby-type stuff in the past decades about “Trust your intuition/go by your heart, not your head.” And then of course there were some philosophers with the viewpoint that truth is subjective, promoting solopsism, or other such stuff.
So after decades of this “your feelings are always valid!” messaging, Oprah talk shows, and Hollywood culture and whatnot - oh, and also lots of 9/11 and Elvis and JFK and Moon landing conspiracy theories - it shouldn’t be surprising one bit if, when someone feels that refugees are rapists, or feels that vaccines cause autism, that that’s good enough for them.
This YouTube video - which most Dopers no doubt know of already - probably involves a certain amount of cherrypicking and confirmation bias, but shows University of Washington students being reluctant to tell a 5’9 white man that he *isn’t *a 6’5 Chinese woman.
When society tells people that feelings trump facts, then, well, people will believe that feelings trump facts.
This might be behind a paywall, but the Economist recently published with a cover that said “Art of the Lie”. Long but worth a read.
The main article was “Yes, I’d lie to you” - Dishonesty in politics is nothing new; but the manner in which some politicians now lie, and the havoc they may wreak by doing so, are worrying.
I definitely think this part is true. Objective journalism has rarely even been an ideal much less practiced.
But even in the limited TV news era people still had gossip, the loud mouths anywhere people gathered to voice their problem about some group they didn’t like or the general government paranoia or the secret cabals that rule the world type thing. Anything that feels wrong is always someone else’s fault, right?
It has been noted several times in recent weeks that when Al Smith ran for President, many people actually believed the story that Smith was building a tunnel from New York City to the Vatican so the Pope could run the USA. The breathtaking insanity of this claim tops anything Trump has said. That was 88 years ago.
There were plenty of sources of junk “news” back in those days. From radio to newspapers to popular magazines and tabloids. Plus, no one could go to Snopes or FactCheck.org!
I have become more sympathetic to lying politicians, in a way. Not in the sense of condoning their lying, but rather, in the sense that, the American electorate wouldn’t elect a politician who didn’t lie.
The electorate wants to have its cake and eat it, too. They want a politician who will tell truth, but if that truth is something they don’t want to hear, then that politician will lose. So the politicians have to lie in order to win. The blame lies with the voters.
*
“Give us truth - but only if it’s truth that we like!”*
Politicians have always lied to get elected. What seems to have changed, is that being caught blatantly and obviously lying appears to no longer have significant consequences.
In the past, politicians would lie about what they would do in the future. As in the TV show The Prisoner: “my platform is: less work, and more play!” (or in our terms, “I’ll lower taxes … and increase services!”). We may suspect it is a lie, but we can only find out once they are elected. By then, it is too late; and politicians gamble we will simply forget or not care about old lies, when they stand for re-election.
Now, politicians such as Trump will lie about what they said yesterday. In short, they will lie blatantly, as if the truth is simply irrelevant.
I suspect the problem isn’t so much that America is ‘post truth’ but more likely ‘post nuance’.
Nuanced positions don’t sell. A couple examples:
Either climate change is the biggest threat to everything ever and anyone who disagrees wants the world to burn or climate change is a total hoax and those who believe in AGW just want to control everyone. There is no possible middle ground.
If you don’t support abortion it is because you want women back at home, barefoot, pregnant and helpless. If you do support abortion it is because you like killing babies. There is no possible middle ground.
On every issue that hits emotional buttons, the issues are framed in such a way that those who disagree with you are evil. This is pushed by the pols to get the base out. This is pushed by media outlets to gain and keep their core audience. Outrage wins elections and sells ads. So nuance isn’t good.
And since those who disagree with you on issue X are evil, you don’t want to talk with them. So we are balkanizing, forming little places on the internet where we go to agree with others who agree with us that those poor, stupid folks who don’t agree with us are evil*.
It is sorta funny. I have floated the idea (on this board and elsewhere) that what us voters ought to do is severely punish any politician caught lying. Vote them out and make it clear that lying won’t work. The reaction so far has been along the lines of 'Yeah, those damned <insert opposition party here> will be screwed!". When I point out that it needs to happen to both parties the reaction is usually ‘We can’t do THAT!’
Of course, the reason that you can’t do it is that the other side might win an election or two…
There’s a passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four that seems relevant:
As long as the U.S. is a military-industrial power, the fields of science and technology will have to work from facts, but politics and religion have always been fact-free zones. What Orwell called doublethink was the ability to know a fact and know a contradictory lie at the same time with no internal conflict, applying whichever fit a given situation. Though he may have coined that particular term, I doubt he was the first to note the concept, which I’m sure has existed as long as humans have been forming governments mingled with convenient myths.
If anything, modern Americans (indeed, modern anyone-in-a-post-industrial-society) can live in reasonable comfort, using and surrounded by technology they know how to use, but need not bother understanding the principles behind.
