What happened to "credibility"?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I used to think the #1 rule in expressing your thinking was that if you said something–anything!–that was demonstrably false, you would no longer be believed by a large number of people, and if you did it twice, your ability to speak in public on any subject from that point would be futile. “He’s a liar,” people would say, “so why should I waste my attention taking him seriously? Better to listen to people who HAVEN’T been shown to tell lies on important subjects.”

So I was wrong about that. Trump and his ilk have shown that there is NO loss in credibility for telling bald-faced, self-evident, ridiculous lies. Your fans will continue to believe you, no matter how absurd or nonsensical your lies are, and your detractors didn’t believe you to begin with. Net-net: same-same.

Or was I wrong? Has the world changed since I came up with that principle, and what used to be unacceptable and disqualifying is no longer, or has it always been that way and I was naive in my pronouncements?

2

Respect for credibility was replaced by tribalism. “He’s on my side so I gotta defend him and find reasons to rationalize why his bullshit isn’t bullshit…”

Back in the day, you could at least say “Wow, we were wrong about that asshole” but now it’s a “loss” for your side if you admit that someone from the tribe was wrong/stupid/lying/etc.

3

One thing that has changed is that facts are now debatable, and with the US evenly split along political party lines you see people believing their own set of facts, and using those beliefs in arguments that are demonstrably false, but that no longer matters.

A large part of the population believes Climate Change is a myth invented by the liberals. A large part of the population believes COVID was no worse than the flu and was intentionally overblown by Dr. Fauci and the liberals for some reason, and some people still believe the 1969 moon landing was faked just to make the US look good and the QAnon is real.

You can show these people the facts, and argue with them until you are blue in the face, and they will stick to their beliefs, which they consider facts, to be true. People have been empowered to believe whatever they want to believe regardless of whether it is true or not. Social Media has made it a lot easier to spread lies around and there are plenty of gullible people willing to believe them.

4

This is pretty much it.

I’m sure you can find solid examples of your “He’s a liar” scenario, but history has shown that the current environment is not at all new.

5

Based on tests on peer pressure/conformity, hypnotic susceptibility, etc. it’s arguable that about 70% of people will gladly submit to any position, no matter how patently incorrect it is, if they worry about falling out of favor of their peer group or upsetting a person of authority.

At the moment, we have large sources of authority - Fox, CNN, etc. - that aren’t particularly well sourced and who use information in a motivated way, with insufficient due process to double-check the veracity of what they’ve heard, so long as it supports the narrative that they are targeting. (CNN much less so, of the two mentioned, but they’re creeping downhill pretty steadily). That authority creates a large peer group who then consumes more of that media source - giving the media source a financial incentive to maintain that narrative, leaning them towards reinforcing the narrative where they can, leaning their customer base to more firmly take hold on that narrative.

Urban folk might have a slight advantage over rural as it’s easier to find a variety of peer groups in the city, so the impetus to conform might not have quite as much of a hold since you can shift towards a slightly milder version of the group that you’re in rather than having to fully reject it. Urban folk are also more likely to come into contact with groups with different beliefs.

But, fundamentally, we’re all humans and that force to conform is still probably in force for about 70% of us, regardless of where we live. Most people that you know probably don’t believe anything they say, they just follow the party line, because it’s what they understand to be expected of them. There are no safeguards in place to ensure that they don’t become the Liberal form of MAGA-heads and you can bet that there’s some sleazeball out there who has been taking notes for the last few years on how to use media attention and peer pressure to seize power, and who is more competent than the last run.

And no, I don’t believe that the people who follow this stuff believe it. You take some religious person, a MAGA-head, a conspiracy theorist, etc. through good hard evidence and logic and if logic forces them to accept that Putin’s reason for saying he was going in to kill Ukrainian Nazis is because Joe Biden was paying Putin to do it, so that the US fracking market could have a big payday, then they’ll bite and tell you that, yup, that’s what happened, smile, give you a wink, and walk away. They know that they’re bullshitting.

It’s not about truth, it’s about being a member of a group. You spend decades of your life deciding who you want to be, how you visualize yourself, what sort of people you want to hang out with, etc. The whole weight of your personality and self-image is tied in with the beliefs of the group. How do you maintain all those other things while losing your peer group and losing the people you respect?

Ultimately, the cost of being the person you want to be is, most people seem to decide, is to not be a real person, just an image of a person. Being that person has a cost and 70% are willing to pay it. The alternative is that you wasted your life.

Between saying something dumb or admitting that you spent 20, 30, 50 years working towards becoming a waste of human potential is no hard choice. The other person who caught you in a lie is probably just as much a liar and probably doesn’t really know what they’re talking about either. They just got lucky with that one thing, after all. It’s easy to justify when you believe that it’s what everyone else is doing and how everyone else is. And if you go look at news comments or YouTube comments, and look at what your own side is saying (whichever side that may be), you’re very liable to find that almost none of them understand their own position, what argument there is for it, what evidence, etc. The other side is just Nazis and Fascists if they’re daring to hold a different political position. Those comment battles aren’t debates on belief, they’re war cries of faithful adherents.

In a world of liars, it’s no bad thing to be another liar.

It’s not belief, it’s the way that humans are. 70% vote that it’s true and the majority is probably correct.

6

The bolded bit is the change. There was a time when if someone said something like “I had the largest inauguration crowd in history” that was just on its face obviously wrong, even their supporters would admit that they were lying, and would sometimes change their opinions on the person’s credibility.

But now we don’t see that nearly as much. What we see instead is people embracing the lie, no matter how outrageous, and actually believing it. Not just pretending to believe it - actually believing it.

I have no idea how to fix this, alas.

7

What happened was that confirmation bias started to override truth. I see this with modern-day “prophets” who utter false prophecy one after another and their followers still lap it up despite being let down countless times.

8

This, to a large degree. Years ago I heard an interview of Jaqueline Kennedy; I don’t remember most of it, but the one thing that stuck with me was something about “listening to your husband to learn what opinions to have.” It was an example of tribalism on the smallest scale. Survival used to depend on being a member of a tribe. That’s not so true anymore, but on an instinctual level, we still find being involuntarily ejected from a tribe to be a painful experience - so much so that many folks are willing, consciously or not, to subvert their own rational thought processes.

A number of other sociological phenomena are at work:

Scroll down to the bottom of the groupthink page to the “see also” section, where you’ll be confronted with a laundry list of things that probably factor into people’s willingness to “believe” or espouse absolute bullshit, no matter how strongly it is controverted by observable facts.

9

Yeah, in the case of trump I used to think there would be a “have you no sense of decency” moment when trump’s BS was called out in a way that finally got his followers to realize just how full of shit he is and turn on him. Until I finally realized his supporters don’t really care that he’s lying, as long as he’s ‘owning the libs’. Or at least they have an infinite capacity to tie themselves in pretzel shapes rationalizing the BS that he spouts.

10

And that is the genius of the mechanism! Create an in-group loyalty test of “owning the libs!” as a last resort. So, if the demand for belief in a lie results in an individual’s squishiness (“That doesn’t sound quite right…”), move the goalposts to “owning the libs!” and that is something the individual can get on board with!

11

Which is why I have permanently adopted the principle of not giving a shit what they say, taking them seriously, entering into discussions with ANY OF THEM, ever again, on any subject whatsoever. If you’re a Republican, even a nice friendly reasonable Republican like, I don’t know, Mitt Romney or Adam Kinzinger or whoever, I have contempt for you, and while I’ll accept your votes or your support on a few issues you’ve decided to buck the GOP on, you can go to hell as far as I’m concerned. If you’d like to earn your way out of hell with a few reasonable remarks in a sea of hell-worthy positions, good luck, but dont try to use me as a reference.

12

George Orwell introduced the concept of “doublethink” when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949.

doublethink: The acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time, especially as a result of political indoctrination.

So clearly the idea that people en masse will follow complete bullshit isn’t a new concept.

One of the problems IMHO is that the advent of social media has led to a proliferation of what is basically so much noise that it’s difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Information can range from well intentioned peer reviewed fact checked material with reasonable errors or gaps to well intentioned anecdotal lessons learned from random non-experts to complete bullshit intentionally designed to mislead and obfuscate. So it can be difficult to objectively determine what is “true”, particularly if one isn’t particularly intelligent, is intellectually lazy, or just doesn’t give a crap.

13

An accelerating trend in recent years has been contempt for well-trained and experienced experts (the hated “elites”), in favor of Doing My Own Research via Google, and glomming on to the views of celebrities and social media “influencers”. On the Internet, everyone can see you’re a moron but many won’t accept it.

The process has been accelerated by the pandemic, i.e. simultaneously believing that the effects of Covid-19 are grossly exaggerated and precautions unnecessary, and that vast numbers of lives have been lost because of lost access to cheap, safe, wildly effective cures.*

*depending on the level of conspiracy crazy, this is due to 1) government and public health officials being out to enrich Big Pharma, 2) a global depopulation conspiracy engineered by Fauci and Bill Gates, or (3) both.

14

Part of it is born from a distrust of the hated “elites”. Otherwise known as “experts” and “people in authority”. And much of it is the fault of people in authority. Politicians, lobbyists, marketers, PR people, media pundits and so on all putting their particular spin on everything to further their own interests. Plus with events like 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008, COVID, all the stuff that’s going on in the tech world and Wall Street, I think it leaves a lot of people with a sense that all these things are happening behind the scenes that they don’t really understand and aren’t being told about. So that leaves them susceptible to scam artists and charlatans telling them “You were right about all that stuff you think you aren’t being told. I’m going to tell you the truth!”

15

I think that actual credibility is being replaced by weight of multiplicity, monopoly and collusion. With a heavy dose of self serving manipulative psychology. Credibility is a money making commodity that does not actually have to be the product it pretends to be.
It is a 1984 situation. But the institution of it is not so centrally constructed or imposed.
Often things that seem conspiracy/planned are just individual interests pursued in a way that tend to a common good or bad end.
But there are some bad things that have been lately or long allowed that have corrupted the appearance of credibility. I say the appearance, because credibility exists unto itself. It is only the ability to identify it that has steadily been obscured.
The concept of news versus entertainment has been blurred. It actually went to court. And apparently lost for us.
Laws against using state propaganda on ones own citizens have been cancelled or watered down. So lies can be state backed if it is considered for the states good.
Monopoly ownership of media is allowed. So you hear/see more one sided voice of what or who is credible. Also propaganda on that media is now legal.
The corporate and government system of who gets to positions of power, is so perverse. Credible people and concepts are less likely to get ahead in such cesspools of perverse incentives. A credible concept/opinion/ideal/person is more likely crushed under the weight of the complex hierarchy of ass kissing, go along to get along methods of survival and moving ahead required in these systems.
Take a peek of how gigantic corporations sub companies create a spiderweb in this world. Even they don’t always know when they are hurting or helping their best interests among themselves.
Credible things and people. Too often they are just the little metal flecks that fall down out of these great grinding gears.
You need to search them out. Support them. Listen to them.

16

That has been allowed because people don’t care about “credibility”. Mostly because people are idiots. Like I look at how my inlaws process information. They are old, rural, not particularly well educated, and seem pretty dumb. For all intents and purposes, “idiots”. They leave Fox News on in the background all the time and constantly make comments about how Biden is an idiot or “they don’t know what they are doing”. Right. I can’t imagine why the people who do this for a living for decades don’t consult with you about economics, foreign policy and other matters of state. Because you clearly know more than they do.

But that’s how they get their information. Passively absorbing information from a partisan media source presented in a superficially “credible” manner by attractive, well-dressed talking heads parroting what they already “know”.

I’m not particularly political and I hate the sound of Fox News. To me, it just sounds like a Republican propaganda machine. Like watching a bunch of spoiled rich frat dudes and sorority girls echoing how “those other people” are “losers” because they aren’t invited to the rich frat/sorority. It’s not a credible, debatable source. It’s just a constant “Liberals are stupid. Democrats are stupid. Joe Biden is old and stupid.”

What I find interesting is their reaction when I (finally frustrated where I can’t ignore it any more) ask a relatively benign question or make a counter point. Like “did Trump ever give those hundreds of millions in defense assistance he was withholding from Ukraine?” or “I bet some of those ‘illegals’ the ‘Government is dumping in East Stroudsburg, PA’ might be willing to work for some of those places than can’t seem to hire anyone because everyone is getting rich off COVID assistance.” I’m usually met with some inane Marge Simpson-y platitude.

Or they get hostile and defensive. Like the other day, my wife was watching Fox News and Hannity said “…like Sun Tzu said…keep your enemies close…”
I mutter “Sun Tzu didn’t say that”.
She’s all like “OMG! You’re so angry and hostile!”
I’m like “I’m not angry. He just didn’t say that. That’s not from The Art of War. It’s from The Godfather paraphrasing Machiavelli. Sorry for spreading facts”

Although in all fairness, the quote is so misattributed I actually had to look up the actual Art of War to confirm I was right.

17

Here is another of their memes that self-explodes, or should.

Biden is old? OK, but wasn’t your complaint about Obama in 2008 that he was young and inexperienced? Or how about the one that he was a celebrity–remember all that stuff? So then you run an elderly man who was literally an inexperienced celebrity to succeed him, and all those categorical objections on your parts just–what? Disappear like you never went insane complaining about Obama’s inexperience or celebrity status? And now you’re saying that this guy who can’t string together three coherent words or walk up a ramp is plenty young but his opponent, the same age, is too old to do the job? Can you hear yourselves? “We’re running Trump in 2024 and beyond to succeed Biden who’s too old to serve as President.” You’d think your heads would have exploded from all the bullshit by now.

18

But what if they said, “Conservatives are stupid. Republicans are stupid. Trump is stupid.” If your counterargument is, “But, but, but, Trump really is stupid!” you’re just as guilty as them.

FTR, I’m not a fan of Biden or Trump. But I find it interesting that people talk about the importance of credibility and objectivity, and then in the next sentence defend “their side” to a tee. Because “their side” is right.

19

And maybe it is?

20

The difference is, when challenged to show something stupid that Trump has done, we can list so many things we’ll run out of electrons trying to post them all, while an equivalent list for Biden will be much shorter, and mostly things that are legitimately debatable, but have been declared stupid by Republicans by fiat.

Hell, just in the last week or so, Trump “solved” the war in Ukraine by suggesting that we paint F-22s with Chinese flags and use them to bomb the crap out of Russia.