There is nothing new about falsehood. It is older than language, writing, telecommunications or social media, 'though each of these has vastly expanded its scope and reach. There is no silver bullet with which to oppose it: even when honest folk rigorously seek after truth, we sometimes err and arrive at conclusions that are mistaken, yet which we confidently believe thanks to the evidence we accumulated in our search for truth. The skilled liar knows how to garnish deception with enough truth to disguise the lies, the cunning trickster knows how to disguise distortion as logic. We argue for our delusions at least as convincingly as for anything else we truly believe.
Heresy sometimes does overturn orthodoxy, only to become orthodox in its turn. Most often, the ranting heretic is in error; yet sometimes, the proponents of novel truth may seem like wild-eyed lunatics to those confident in their out-dated certainties. When orthodoxies are over-turned, those who defended them may all too easily be portrayed as having refused to hear; yet the staunch defenders of established positions are just as susceptible to arrogance and closed-mindedness when correct as when they are not; and may appear to be so, despite sincerely listening and answering the challenge to orthodoxy, if only because their initial calm explanation of how the heresy errs gives way to impatience when the heretic continues preaching error to more gullible audiences.
Truth is all too often complicated, with subtleties and nuances that can be
hard to follow even for those who do understand them, harder yet to explain
clearly; falsehood, in contrast, can chose to be as simple and clear as crystal
so that those to be deceived will believe they understand. Every communication
is at some level propaganda – literally, that which it is right to
propagate
– as we all, honest or not, tell what we do with intent to
influence what others think, for better or worse. When we err, we propagate our
errors at least as effectively as we spread the truth when we happen to speak it
– and a lie could get around the world before the truth could get its
boots on, even before we had electromagnetically telecommunicating computers
with which to chat in real time with folk on the other side of the planet.
Discerning truth from falsehood is hard enough when we are told them by folk who sincerely believe them and are honestly open to considering the possibility that they may be mistaken. It is made significnatly harder by the reality that some voices do not live up to those standards of intellectual integrity.
It is important, first, to understand that (quite apart from the fact that liars dust their lies with truth when it makes a lie more plausible) not every falsehood is a lie: indeed, sometimes even truth may be a lie. To lie is to tell others something the teller does not actually believe. If the teller is mistaken, disbelieving something that is in fact true, but speaks that truth, then that telling of the truth is a lie. More commonly relevant, however, is the honest repetition of a falsehood by someone who believes it. While many liars are able to feign the same sincerity, even someone incapable of lying can sincerely tell you something untrue; and most folk find sincerity persuasive.
So we hear falsehoods not only from those who consciously chose to lie to us but also from those who sincerely believe a wrong thing or misguidedly repeat falsehoods they have heard from sources they trusted. There is a whole range of possibilities beyond these easily-described ones. Those who start out consciously lying may, over time, grow so used to repeating the lie that they come to believe it. Those who start out sincerely believing may be exposed to evidence of their belief's falsehood that leads to them beginning to suspect, perhaps only subconsciously, their error; yet, being habituated to the belief, they continue espousing it without necessarily being aware of their own doubts. The more invested they are in the belief, the longer they can go without recognising those doubts: such investment may be as minimal as the little pain to the ego of admitting to having been wrong, or the reputational loss of having to own up to having told others what they no longer believe; it is greater yet when their livelihood depends on the suspect article of faith.
There is, naturally, a matching spectrum on the side of truth: some who initially claim to believe something that they actually don't may, by repetition of it or the habit of living with its practical consequences, come to be persuaded of its truth after all. Some who believe truth may be lead to doubt it by the peddlers of falsehood. Others, particularly when espousing a truth they do not fully understand, may be lead into doubt by circumstances and events that do not fit their poor understanding of the truth, 'though a fuller understanding of all its subtleties would find no contradiction.
Given all this, then, it should be no surprise that those who disagree with one another often have trouble telling which is in error – even when all are acting in good faith and have the intellectual integrity to be honest and open to the others' views. That trouble is only exacerbated by the doubts each may reasonably entertain about the good faith of the others.
Furtheremore, most of us believe much of what we think we know by virtue of trusting others; by default, for example, I'll trust any orthodoxy I don't have strong reasons to doubt. I am a physicist and a computer programmer, so I have a tolerably clear idea of what climate scientists claim to be doing when they model the atmosphere's behaviour and I can be fairly confident that physicists and computer programmers have scrutinised those models and the software that is used so make predictions based on them; in the absence of respected physicists and computer programmers publicly objecting to the climate scientists' models and programs, I thus accept with moderate confidence that the orthodoxy of climate science is broadly correct. I am no climate scientist myself and scrutinising their work would take far more time and effort than I can afford to spare, so I thereby accept a position I cannot honestly claim to have personally verified: I merely have meta-information that leaves me willing to trust the orthodoxy.
So, when facts are in dispute, it is common for all parties to be basing their conflicting beliefs on incomplete understanding of the subject matter. Despite this, it is common for those with only such partial and indirect knowledge to hold very strongly to their beliefs. It's often hard to tell which side is peddling falsehood and which is reporting a position that is well supported by rigorous research. The academic literature that contains that research is inaccessible to most, simply by virtue of being published in expensive journals; furthermore, the language in which academic journal articles is written is often impenetrable to those outside the academic discipline in question; and a lay reader of the article will surely miss much nuance or subtlety in what is written. This makes it all too easy for the charlatans to misrepresent what the research really shows or simply talk their marks into ignoring hifaluting jargon in favour of easy-to-digest lies.
The situation is only made worse when there are liars on both
sides. Even those who accept the medical and pharmacological orthodoxy –
that the double-blindly tried and tested medicines that Big Pharma has developed
are actually good for what those trials and tests show they can do – have
to live with the painful truth that Big Pharma is no angel. The corporate
tendency to profit by any means we can get away with
genuinely has seen
Big Pharma down-playing or outright suppressing uncomfortable evidence, or
misrepresenting evidence, in pursuit of profits that they would lose if the full
truth were more widely known. Sometimes they get caught (as the tobacco
industry most famously was), from which we can fairly extrapolate that some of
the time they don't; which makes it very easy indeed for the snake-oil peddlers
brush aside any part of the medical orthodoxy that happens to stand in the way
of their efforts to profit by any means they can get away with
– which, undoubtedly, is what they are doing, whether consciously and
cynically or honestly
(by virtue of having neglected the intellectual
honesty needed to question their own beliefs).
It's important to understand that some folk sincerely believe the falsehoods they peddle; that doesn't make them any the less false. When someone is deeply invested – which needn't be financial, it may just be that they've espoused a position, so that admitting to having been wrong comes at a cost to their ego – in a position (true of false) it is hard to get them to honestly scrutinise the evidence against it. When that unscrutinised position is in fact false, the lack of scrutiny is an intellectual dishonesty that leads to self-delusion. As John Stuart Mill pointed out, orthodoxy too must be open to – nay, even welcome – hearing falsehood and answering it fairly and faithfully; only thereby do we truly learn to understand what our orthodoxies really do say and why we believe them.
Proponents of an orthodoxy all too often grow weary of repeating the refutation of a common heresy; it is not hard to see why many dismiss it as bunk without taking the time and effort to explain (yet again) what is wrong with it, especially when falsehoods mutate and warp all the time, so that each mark who has been gulled by one has a slightly different delusion, that requires a slightly different refutation. Yet dismissing the challenging view out of hand plays into the hands of the peddlers of falsehood: they only have to take a little effort, explaining away part of the orthodoxy that stands in their way, to appear to be listening to the mark's concerns, thereby seeming more open to questioning their beliefs and so more trustworthy.
It is easier to reject a contrary view as bunk than to take the time to study the case for it and pick apart the facts from the deceptions and delusions, to separate the fragments of truth – embedded in any competently-crafted lie to mask its deception – from the lies they are used to misleadingly bolster. It is easier to tell others not to listen to the heretics than to listen to why those others found the heresy plausible and steer them away from falsehood and help them find their way back to truth, help them learn how to discern truth for themselves. To those who sincerely believe one view, it is hard to keep an open mind when assessing the contrary claims; yet it is only by being open to the possibility of being wrong that we can avoid falling into the same error as those (honestly) invested in a falsehood. Science admits it might be wrong – while presenting, to the best of its admittedly fallible ability, conclusions that have been reached by a systematic process of searching for ways that those conclusions might be wrong; we have no better process for discovering truth – yet those who do not care to rigorously scrutinise their beliefs are less willing to admit the same for their own part; they are (at least) as confident of their correctness as any proponent of the truth they oppose.
At times, indeed, medical practitioners grow weary of the attempt and resign themselves to the futility of even trying to rescue their patients from delusion. On the other side, the quacks know when to give up on the patient with enough sense to doubt them and move on in their search for a more susceptible mark.
One of the things folk do is project our own errors onto others. Thus the peddlers of fake news declare that the truth they deny is propagated by a conspiracy – when, in effect, the delusional (perhaps unwittingly) and the cynics who prey on them constitute an actual conspiracy to peddle their falsehoods. Those advocates of an orthodoxy who refuse to discuss challenges to it accuse the challengers of intellectual dishonesty – and, in doing so, fail to live up to the standards of intellectual honesty that call on them to listen and answer fairly and faithfully, at least to the innocent dupes. (I will allow, though, that it is just to refuse to argue with those who do not appear to be acting in good faith.)
We all trust some sources of information in preference to others, to some
greater or lesser degree. However, there is a world of difference between the
authoritarian believe the voice of authority
position and that of
science, when truly followed: althoug, for the most part, we do simply accept
the word of scientific authorities, science always offers the resources to
scrutinise what those authorities tell us and invites us to do so. Even when
authoritarian belief does offer a basis for its beliefs (a book of scripture,
for example) the reason it gives for trusting that basis is always ultimately
inscrutible; they do not accept that it can be questioned. In particular, while
science allows one to just take the word of the experts,
authoritarians demand it; while authoritarians burn the heretics for
questioning their authority, science actively encourages questioning, even if
individual scientists do get so sick and tired of answering recurrent heresies
as to sometimes lose patience with those voicing them.
Written by Eddy.