How Do You Find the Truth in a Society Full of “Boys Who Cry Wolf?”
When people don't know where to find the truth, they can start believing in anything
There was once an understanding in American society that polite conversation required that you avoid discussions of race, religion, and politics because those were controversial, emotionally charged topics. Along similar lines, athletes, corporations, and entertainers understood on a fundamental level that they should avoid those same issues because, as Michael Jordan said:
Jordan flippantly made that comment after he was pressured to endorse Democrat Harvey Gantt in his race against Republican Senator Jesse Helms, but it would have been just as applicable in a different situation if it had referred to Democrats. The idea is that in a split country, you don’t want to infuriate half your potential customer base.
Of course, even getting beyond day-to-day conversations, entertainment, and corporations, there were quite a few areas where politics wasn’t supposed to be part of the calculus. Schools were expected to teach students, not indoctrinate them. Scientists were expected to focus on the facts, not politics. The same goes for law enforcement at all levels and agencies like the IRS. The mainstream media in America may have never been totally fair, but journalists once prided themselves on being unbiased and serving the public good, not one party or the other. Even politicians, who were by definition quite interested in politics, at least tried to give the impression that they felt a certain duty to their country that they believed transcended mere political concerns.
All of this has changed dramatically in the last couple of decades. That stems from a couple of things. The first is that America has become increasingly tribalistic. This is the everyday reality we now all live with in a lot of areas.
The second is that politics has become a God substitute for a lot of liberals. Many of them don’t believe in God at all and almost all of them that do treat their religious beliefs as a distant second in importance to their political beliefs, not vice-versa. So, these people end up taking on the same fervency as a religious zealot, but they apply it to things like abortion, global warming, and Critical Race Theory. They’re like the sort of well-meaning, but irritating Christians you occasionally run across who seem incapable of having a conversation without shoehorning scripture or mentions of Jesus into every third sentence, except it’s much worse with the woke because they’re telling you their gender pronouns, calling everything racist, or trying to convince you how anti-capitalist they are as they wave their iPhones around.
These people insist on inserting their ideological beliefs into every facet of human existence. Schools? Entertainment? Religion? Science? Sports? Sneakers? What razor you buy? Liberals view all of it as useful only to the degree that it furthers their ideological goals. It’s that famous Stone Toss comic come to life:
The problem with all this is that if politics has both become almost completely tribal and is inserted into everything, then it makes it impossible to trust anything you hear. Over the last few years, we’ve heard a lot of talk about “fake news,” but the difference between sites that make up news from scratch and say, the WAPO or New York Times, is a lot smaller than most people acknowledge. Do those mainstream papers post stories based on anonymous sources that turn out to be false? That happened regularly during the Trump years, although most MSM stories are based on real-world events. That being said, does the MSM accurately describe what happens in those stories? Not at all. The stories are almost always slanted, twisted, and heavily distorted to further liberal narratives. In fact, stories in the mainstream media that aren’t heavily biased often make news on both the Right and Left for exactly that reason. Everyone is shocked that the truth actually slipped out.
Once you get past the MSM, the alternative media has its own problems. When you read Breitbart or Talking Points Memo, you start with the assumption that those websites have an ideological bias. Does that mean those websites are dishonest? Not necessarily (although they often are on the Left and sometimes are on the Right), but it does mean they’re not umpires calling it right down the middle. You’re simply not going to read positive takes on something the “other side” is doing on these websites.
Well, you may think, our media may be a mess, but our doctors and scientists wouldn’t lie to us, would they? We can trust what they have to say, right?
Wrong.
NOAA Scientists Falsify Data to Dupe World Leaders on Climate Change
White House puts ‘politicals’ at CDC to try to control info
Do you think the FBI is immune to this? The IRS? The corporations? Polling companies? The military? If so, then you are incredibly naïve. Once politics becomes infused into everything from law enforcement to global warming research, you can no longer trust the information you receive from it.
So, where does that leave us? Unfortunately, it puts us in a very bad position. There are some areas that are relatively untouched by politics. In those areas, we can generally trust that the information we’re getting from reputable sources is probably correct. There are even subsets of “infected” areas that don’t seem to be impacted. For example, you may have reason to be dubious of what a doctor tells you about COVID, but if you’re talking about heart surgery or the best way to deal with a broken leg, you’re probably getting their best advice. There may also be people that you feel you can trust to give it to you straight (I hope I am one of those people), but even the people that are willing to buck their tribes still have biases. I’m a diehard conservative. Ferocious media critics like Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi may infuriate other liberals with their comments about the mainstream media, but all of them are still in alignment with the rest of the Left on the vast majority of things.
With that in mind, how do you get unbiased information when there don’t appear to be any sources of information that seem to be putting in a good faith effort to present unbiased information?
You don’t.
You, me, and all the rest of America have been put in the unenviable position of either swallowing propaganda wholesale, trusting certain people and crossing our fingers, or trying to ferret out the truth based on an almost issue by issue basis. As a student of human nature who has been writing about politics and culture since 2001, I feel like I have a big advantage over most of the rest of the public in this area because I am familiar with the work of a lot of the players on both sides of the issues and have a better idea of which publications are accurate and which are reckless than 99% of the public. Even with all of that, I find it extremely difficult to definitively know what the truth is about a lot of subjects. If it’s not easy for me, it’s probably damn near impossible for most people who haven’t worked in this field for decades to navigate what they’re hearing on a daily basis.
That’s a terrible problem for our whole society because something G.K. Chesterton said about God also seems to apply to the truth in general:
When people don’t know where to turn to find the truth, sometimes a conspiracy theory or a malicious idea spread by propagandists becomes indistinguishable from the truth to them. It’s like being in the middle of the ocean and having no idea how to find North, South, East, or West. At that point, one direction is as good as another. When we’ve created this kind of atmosphere, is it any wonder so many people are angry, confused, or have started buying into wacky conspiracy theories?
The only bit of good news is that there is a way to start fixing all this and it’s called putting politics back in its place. Generally, that place shouldn’t be anywhere near unbiased journalism, positions taken by scientists, decisions by district attorneys, the military, or medical decisions made by doctors. Granted, those lines aren’t always perfectly clear, but even good faith efforts by everyone involved to be fair would do an awful lot to help restore people’s trust in our society. Will that actually happen? It doesn’t seem likely, but if we want a healthy society, we’re going to have to find a way to make it happen.