As many here know, I am finishing up my year-long MacArthur-Fellow sabbatical (yay!), for which I crisscrossed the nation in order to fully understand today’s unprecedentedly malignant erosion of truthfulness in civic discourse.
My first major essay on the topic is slated to appear in the upcoming Feb-Mar issue of the New York Review of Books (fully sourced and annotated). I offer the following brief teaser here to introduce a new strain of strategic theory, which I call Über Liberalism.
After interviewing scores of political philosophers and practitioners from Left, Right and Middle, I have found that our current greatest challenge, as liberals, can be boiled down thusly:
The liberal brain is not natively optimized for competition in the Post-Truth Era. However, there is a viable workaround. The liberal brain can effectively be rewired for greater competitiveness – without sacrificing the qualities that make it a liberal brain in the first place.
The rewiring (healing) process begins with an in-depth understanding of the complex principles presented below.
As the old saying goes, “You can’t fix it if you don’t know it’s broke!”
The Conservative “Dirty Little Secret”
With the invaluable assistance of renowned German civic philosopher Jürgen Habermas (founder of the “swamp-bubble theory”), I crafted the following three axioms as a dialectic entry ramp to Über Liberalism:
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Facts (and science) are not The Truth. They are merely data points that may or may not be employed in the construction of Truth.
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The conservative brain natively accepts this paradigm, while the liberal brain is limited by a significantly smaller conception of reality (one that is bound by facts).
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Still, liberals are proven capable of un-tethering from reality. privileging this capability is key to our future political competitiveness.
These axioms actually describe the “dirty little secret,” as Habermas describes it [citation], which conservatives have leveraged since the dawn of ages. But now, as predicted by the Mayan calendar, [source] we find ourselves at the dawn of a new age of agonistic parity — assuming we successfully assimilate the fundamentals of Über Liberalism.
To help grasp the immensity of the task ahead, I queried Dr. Matthew Wolfsan, director of MIT’s newly formed Institute for the Study of Political Psychology.
Professor Wolfsan lamented the current debate among Democrats about whether to “work constructively with Republicans, where possible” (as New Jersey Senator Cory Booker has suggested) [citation] or to “give them a dose of their own medicine; obstruct, obstruct, obstruct,” as outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has proclaimed. [citation]
“Both sides are utterly oblivious to the big picture,” Professor Wolfsan lamented, offering the following flow chart on the conservative mind, for our “cautionary contemplation.”
(See image, right.)
Armed with scientifically proven data, Wolfsan observed that liberal insistence on rational discourse stems from a deep-seated conviction that it is up to them to be the “adults in the room” — a sentiment that conservatives routinely portray as elitist and condescending. [see Gingrich et al.]
Simply put, liberals do not harness emotions as effectively as conservatives. The liberal reliance on rationality and evidence, as well as a complex matrix of empathic relationships, causes far too many internal conflicts and cognitive dissonance to effectively battle conservatives in the poli-emotional arena.
Exhibit A
Needing no evidence, Donald Trump states with conviction that “The Clinton Foundation is the most corrupt pay-for-play enterprise in the history of the country.”
But when MSNBC liberal anchor Chris Hayes analyzes an enormous array of ethical conflicts concerning the incoming Trump administration, he appears, to conservative eyes, to be primarily defensive and mendacious, shrouding his attack in a torrent of words and facts, suggesting there’s only one reasonable way to interpret those facts.
Unfortunately, this type of analysis is all too easily dismissed by “flyover country” as “pointy-headed bullying” [source]
Can Liberals Shake the Shackles of Reason?
This is where the Über Liberalism Project comes into play.
The key for liberals is that we learn to bifurcate our thinking so that we stop attempting to explain our internal motivations (which are “reasonable”) to the other side.
We must understand that the other side is incapable of absorbing and digesting such language and logic. We must learn to set aside our instinctive drive to argue transparently and sensibly.
The Über Liberal will develop the conscious capacity to separate strategy from motivation — a rather sophisticated maneuver that conservatives have been effectively executing since the dawn of conservatism.*
* Excerpted from the Über Liberal Manifesto, 2016
Project Background
My interest in “truthiness” was piqued during the summer of 2014, while I was advising an Evangelical agricultural cooperative on the outskirts of Kandahar. Most Taliban graffiti had, by that time, been painted over except for one slogan that was still ubiquitous due to its popular appeal:
“Throw reason to the dogs — it stinks of corruption.” [source] When I asked my interpreter whether this attitude was partly responsible for Afghanistan’s glacial progress in modernizing its politics, Sahar, who had studied romantic languages at Duke, shrugged, likening the slogan to American bromides such as “Follow your heart,” or “Trust your intuition.”
I asked Sahar to join me for the trip across the pond, where we met up with renowned linguist Noam Chomsky at his Cambridge home for a series of discussions that greatly informed my research.
Strolling around Harvard Square that fall, the three of us made a game out of spotting Western expressions, iconography, and cultural norms that served to “feminize” the role of rationality, facts, science, and honesty in daily life. Chomsky went wild photographing the sides of buses and billboard fronts.
(See image at right.)
By the time election season rolled around I was already losing confidence in my lifelong assumption that fidelity to reality was one of society’s universal values. But I realized we were entering an unprecedented period of license when I heard a Trump surrogate state, unabashedly, that “Fact-based campaigning is over-rated and elitist.” [source] For a hot minute, I felt like I was in Kandahar again!
When I later interviewed Newt Gingrich (on the condition that his remarks remain embargoed until after the election) he chortled at my late-in-life enlightenment about what he dubbed “productive narrativization.”
“You’ve been a chump all your life,” he said with a wink. “Congratulations, you now know the secret of success.”
As a lifelong liberal humanist with a verily Kantian relationship to honesty I was not yet ready to accept Gingrich’s contention that “reality is only one tool among many in effective argumentation.”
I had always assumed acknowledging reality was a prerequisite for entering debate, but, Gingrich informed me, “That’s precisely why guys like you are snobs.”
The Pedanticism Conundrum
The gravity of this crucial disparity, which I’ve dubbed “the pedanticism conundrum,” is not always apparent to liberal laymen. It can be quite painful — almost like giving birth — to recognize that the practice of sharing non-reality-based narratives is actually deeply rooted in our humanity, rather than our respective ideologies.
We liberals don’t like hearing this, but the evidence clearly suggests we are at particular risk of responding pedantically to the narratives of others while ignoring our own romantic forays into hyperbole and speculation, precisely because we habitually base our own narratives on a greater number of facts. [source]
This is what Carl Jung referred to as “the pedantic ego.” [citation]
People whose identities are fashioned primarily from a scientific worldview are more likely to perceive themselves as unconstrained by narratives, whereas those with, say, religious identities are more likely to voluntarily surrender themselves to narratives with little-to-no risk of collateral ego damage.
THE Liberal Blind Spot
In a phone interview last month, Habermas deemed the problem of the pedantic ego “THE liberal blind spot,” which leads “not only to political ineffectuality, but also diseases of both the body and the mind!” [emphasis and exclamation mine]
While no one disputes that conservatives in the United States rely far less upon reality-based facts to support their arguments than do liberals (a 2012 study by the USC Annenberg School of Communications quantified the differential at a 8:17 ratio) [citation], it is also clear that lower-than-median-level-intelligence members of both groups routinely conflate their fanciful narratives with facts. [source]
As Gingrich has suggested, conservatives feel that they possess one of life’s greatest secrets; for they have far greater confidence in the power of their narratives (versus the smallness of facts).
The most elite conservatives describe such power as a type of “magic,” capable of actually bending the material world to their will. [source] Thus they are not likely to think of fact-beholden arguments as particularly “honorable” (the way we liberals think of ourselves); rather they simply think of us as “fools, weak, unimaginative, and generally limited in mental capacity” [source: Luntz survey].
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell confirmed this recently in a phone interview:
“There’s one quality,” he told me, “shared by all successful people who ever lived on this planet: the absence of a sense of shame.”
The Pedantic Family of Diseases
But are we liberals really so limited in mental capacity?
Let’s dive a little deeper into our cognitive functioning.
Take a look at the question to the right. It’s actually “ripped” from a popular brain cognitive-function test, which researchers have dubbed “The Pedantry Test” (after the test-makers revealed some astonishing statistics about respondent patterns).
While 86 percent of the general population answered this particular question correctly (i.e., exhibiting normal cognitive functions), a whopping 80 percent of respondents who had previously been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease answered the question incorrectly!
Whoa.
I asked Parkinson’s patient and writer Michael Kinsley what he thought of this startling data (he had already taken the test, failing miserably). He told me he was “outraged” that a provably false answer was scientifically considered a sign of proper brain functioning.
Kinsley is objectively correct that that one cannot determine whether Hermione was more upset than Consuela. What if Consuela’s mother had been assaulted at the same location when Consuela was a little girl? What if Hermione takes a powerful dose of a mood-leveling drug that leaves her incapable of anxiety?
The test-makers, as far as Kinsley was concerned, clearly invited test-takers to account for such unknowns when they offered the catch-all option of “Don’t know / Can’t tell.” Instead of manufacturing a subjective narrative about Hermione and Consuela, Kinsley, certain that his cognition was firing on all four cylinders, felt fully comfortable relying on “Can’t tell” as representative of an objective, factual (Kantian) truth.
But, it turns out, the test-makers concluded that Kinsley’s response was a clear sign of a highly pedantic condition. A correctly functioning brain, they explained to me in an email, treats the test as a sort of game, contextualizing the questions as stories with intended meanings, rather than artifacts to pick over relentlessly.
Researchers describe brains that natively contextualize in this manner as “street-smart capable.”
It should come as no surprise that medical experts recognize Parkinson’s as belonging to the “Pedantic Family” of diseases [source] (along with MS, ME, FM, ALS, IBS, RLS, and GERD).
In a “live chat” exchange with Dr. Ben Carson, the renowned neurosurgeon told me he believed pedantry “was causal, a priori, NOT a disease response!”
In other words, people who overly bind themselves to facts create an unnatural excitation on the neural-muscular system, leading to chronic inflammation and damage of certain circuitry in the frontal lobe.
Carson, who of course is a devoted Christian, believes our natural state is one in which our humility (in the face of God) keeps our synapses firing freely, immune to “the self-imprisonment of ‘facts.’”
You might be surprised to learn that neurologist Oliver Sacks (“the man who mistook his wife for a hat”) agrees — at least in part. [source]
Sacks says that, while there is certainly a relationship between neural conditions and pedantry, he is reluctant to determine cause and effect. There is ample evidence, he says, that, for whatever reason, brains that are “overly wired for facts” are indeed susceptible to deterioration in the mode of pedantic-family diseases. But, curiously, he adds, other brains — one’s that are under-wired for facts — are susceptible to very different modes of deterioration, leading to non-PF diseases such as Alzheimer’s, autism, and hives. [citation]
[footnote] A fascinating new study by a team of Texas A&M sociology researchers focuses on traits common to those who share political identities.
Libertarians, it turns out, have a highly unusual cognitive profile. While they pride themselves more than any other major group on their “fact-based analysis” of issues, in actuality their narrative assumptions are the furthest removed from reality. Is it, then, coincidental that libertarians, by a whopping 67 percent margin, were the group with the highest percentages of substance abuse, social isolation, and road rage? [source]
(For what it’s worth, in an August interview via Skype, Libertarian Gary Johnson revealed to me that he has relied on medical marijuana for several years to alleviate his chronic irritable bowel syndrome — a known pedantic disease.)
The Liberal Counterfactual
So, with this background, let’s back up a bit, and try to [re]illuminate the mechanics behind the semantics.
As Noam Chomsky has repeated ad nauseam: “Facts are not The Truth, for The Truth is a narrative, and a narrative is not a fact.”
Just as one can edit a recorded conversation to present a counter-factual reality based on actual events, one can pick and choose among facts (or muddy the waters by alternating between facts and falsehoods) to present an argument that appears (structurally) to be fact-based but that actually fails any reasonable test of logic.
While discussing this with Habermas in May I found myself literally incapable of coming up with any examples of mainstream liberal narratives that are undermined by facts or science. Habermas attributed this to confirmation bias, and then quickly rattled off three big ones, insisting that their counterfactual qualities in no way undermined their value. (To the most elite liberals, even the very term “counterfactual” is considered derogatory.)
To the contrary, Habermas’ purpose in labeling these liberal narratives counterfactual was merely to prove that productive political/cultural agonism should be more a competition of ethics than of facts.
“Fierce ethical opponents,” he said, “can only respect each others’ common commitment to their respective visions when they are essentially speaking the same language.” That, Habermas, told me, has been a lost art in modern times, especially since the advent of science.
The Transgender Story: Liberals, Habermas began, have led the way in forging greater societal acceptance of transgender individuals. That’s a good thing. But it has left conservatives shaking their collective head, because, to their collective eye, the progress is coming at the expense of scientific reality (someone born with a penis is not female). If liberals choose to defend their position in scientific terms, they have to resort to the soft science of psychology (one’s self-identification trumps biology).
So, instead, they employ a combination of “social-glue” pragmatism (lack of transgender acceptance leads to greater overall suffering) and a decidedly postmodern (deconstructionist) analysis of gender itself (which maintains that gender, to the extent that it is socially relevant, is performed, rather than inborn).
The Abortion Story was Habermas’ second example. To many conservatives, abortion is murder. And they feel bolstered by science (“the taking of a human life” is not a scientifically inaccurate summary of the event).
To many liberals, on the other hand, an unborn fetus, having not been thoroughly socialized, is not a complete human being.
Thus, the killing of a fetus is an inferior transgression to the murder of people who were born — not on scientific grounds, but on narrative grounds. (The most virulent anti-choice conservatives, on the other hand, tend to rely upon their own non-scientific narrative that a fetus contains a human soul — a highly energizing story, needless to say.)
Habermas’ third, and most unsettling, example of a useful, non-scientific, narrative cuts across ideologies. (Although there have always been forces that reject it for pragmatic purposes.) This is The Story That Human Life Is Valuable.
Since the natural world would inarguably be better off without us, [citation] it’s hard to maintain that this narrative is supported by science. But it is also one of our most fundamental regulators of civilization, culture, and politics.
So is it True (with a capital T)? Or is “just another manipulation of society by the elites”?
The French Connection: A Parable from the Way-Back Machine
It’s well documented that Karl Marx was moved to pen his Communist Manifesto (1848) when his friend and mentor, the popular Danish serialist Hans Christian Andersen, snail-mailed him a parcel containing a small brown glass tub of whale-based wood wax alongside an early draft of what was to become the legendary pseudo-folk tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” [source]
What’s less well-known is that a disagreement over the portrayal of two central characters in the story, sadly, marked the end of the Marx/Andersen relationship. Marx grew so bitter over what he perceived as disrespect from “that writer of trivialities” that he vowed to “reconstruct” the narrative in “such a manner as befitting the dignity of future man, whither scholar or scoundrel!” [citation]
A Marxist reading of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” prevails to this day among authoritative cultural academic researchers of Western children’s folklore.
It should be noted that Andersen never fully rejected Marx’ celebration of the two “scalawag weavers” who managed to convince an entire town that their naked emperor was wearing silken fabrics so fine that only the most elite, refined, wise, and intelligent amongst them could perceive the delicate clothing. (As Harvard University mythologist and public intellectual Maria Tatar pointed out to me via Twitter, the swindlers were merely insisting that "the value of their labor be recognized apart from its material embodiment.")
Andersen rightly recognized that a more conventionally constructed moralistic tale about speaking truth to power would be more commercially viable, especially in the aftermath of the Danish sea fleet's near victory over Napoleon's navy. Paradoxically, Andersen's egalitarianistic tendencies, fostered by brutal childhood poverty (documented in his thinly fictionalized short portrayal of “The Little Match Girl”), were kept decidedly in check by his obsessive lifelong pursuit of wealth, pelf, and fame. Indeed, his keen instincts for popular success are evidenced today by Hollywood movies based on his works, such as Pixar’s “Finding Nemo,” and Disney’s “Toy Story,” both of which were adaptations of Andersen’s “The Tin Soldier.” [citation] Interestingly, Anderson, on the eve of his death, finally confessed to his brother-in-law, the neo-Viking and proto-existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, that he indeed fashioned “The Tin Soldier” as a satirical paean to Marx, who, of course, was forced to limp through the last half of his life on a wooden leg after a reported fishing accident-cum-duel involving the tragically hirsute and avoirdupois man-child Herman Melville. [source]
“But he has nothing on!” a little child cried out at last.
“But he has nothing on!” said the whole people at length.
This climactic episode has survived as the most vivid, moralistic scene remembered by non-Marxist readers through the years.
However, Tatar warns us, “we cannot overlook the tale’s actual denouement, which Andersen intentionally crafted as a performative misdirection.”
That touched the Emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right; but the thought within himself was, “I must go through with the procession.”
And so he held himself a little higher, and the chamberlains held on tighter than ever, and carried the train which did not exist at all.
Varying translations, based on multiple Andersen drafts, stress the town’s resumption of normalcy (i.e., pretending the emperor’s clothes were real) with varying degrees of emphasis. But only the (Marxist) Polevoi translation concludes with,
And when all the peoples of the City rose up once again to cheer in earnest the Emperor’s glorious, gold and silver-threaded clothing, the little child smiled, understanding at last what was good and true. [as translated from the Russian by Edith Hodgetts]
We examine this tale of the tale to remind us that, historically, there have always been compelling social reasons to adhere to narratives — independent of how fact-based they are — even to the extent that these narratives become widely identified as The Truth.
Fiction Generates Human competitive Energy
Of course, one of the least appetizing of these reasons to modern liberals who have shunned Marxism is political manipulation (aka propaganda). But Habermas points out other legitimate functions of tale-telling. Stories, he insists, are precisely what connect us and generate empathy. Without narratives we are left with pure awareness, just like any other animal.
Stories also provide enormous psychological energy. Jacques Lacan was an early adopter of the now widely accepted notion in modern psychology that our ego (the story we tell ourselves about ourselves) is, in fact, the main driver of our emotions, and that our emotions are the main fuel source for the very mitochondria in our cells.
Remove emotion and we become static.
So, remove stories from your existence if you want to ensure you live a low-impact life.
[footnote] This, ostensibly, is the goal of Zen Buddhism — an amoral approach to the problem of life. It’s a goal that is nearly impossible to reach precisely because the human mind has become so hardwired for storytelling over the millennia; most practitioners can’t bridge the paradoxical riddle of how to strive toward the goal of living without stories while at the same time realizing that the goal itself is a story. The purported path to success involves a three-day orgasm of constant laughter when the full absurdity of the task is finally recognized — which explains the iconic fat, laughing Buddha.
While few people can actually live without stories, many liberals tell themselves the story that they are living without stories. This typically creates an inner conflict (which the mental philosopher J. Krishnamurti dubbed “inner violence”) which tends to erupt as socially maladaptive behavior and emotional instability (as well as pedantic disease).
Obviously, it is precisely liberal maladaptivity that fuels liberals’ superior capacity for empathy (leading to their liberal politics).
What may be less obvious is that conservatives’ inferior empathy stems from their “dirty little secret” — that facts only serve to dampen one’s enthusiasm. Conservatives, most of whom were raised according to exceedingly simple life principles (“be the best,” “never look back,” “never give up,” “always play to win,” etc) cannot understand why liberals would voluntarily allow their personal power to leak away by refusing to embrace such axioms, hence they consider liberalism strictly a mental disease (rather than physiological pedantic illness).
Luckily, conservatives are equipped with handy axioms that instruct them how to interact with the diseased liberals amongst them: “survival of the fittest,” “law of the jungle,” “eat or be eaten.”
In an October airplane interview, Mitch McConnell admitted that GOP obstructionism, deceit, malice, and “downright hypocrisy” had risen to a level “we haven’t seen since the days of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior,” but he expressed confidence that history would view today’s Republicans in a positive light because “we are merely meting out tons and tons of tough love.”
McConnell sees competitive success as the highest possible form of human self-actualization. Therefore, when Republicans “win at all cost” they are modelling enlightened behavior they hope liberals will one day be capable of performing.
To less elite conservatives, however, liberals are merely chumps to be brushed aside, exploited, or, at best, pitied for our inferior energy. When conservatives are told that the liberal mind sees value in pure, open-ended exploration, even if such exploration stymies personal empowerment, they literally cannot understand the meaning of the words.
So conservatives are forced to relegate liberal political values to the trash-bin category of pesky welfare (for the weak).
Liberals, on the other hand, purposely seek out meta perspectives — artistic and scientific inquiries, for example — and expect society as a whole to support such pursuits, not as welfare, but as for the general interest and expansion of humanity.
Expecting conservatives to understand this age-old liberal perspective is like expecting them to make sense out of a Buñuel film sans subtitles!
The Über Liberal
Some critics of Über Liberalism express trepidation that the project may erode liberals’ identification with their historical lineage (as expressed above), but I am confident that when the liberal learns to traffic in storytelling on par with conservatives, she will not completely abandon her fidelity to facts, science, and reality. She will keep these propensities in pocket, as it were, understanding that, while they are important to her, they are meaningless to the conservatives with whom she is negotiating. She understands that the currency of negotiation is the narrative, not a set of facts.
In the Post-Truth Era, the Über Liberal, retaining his native ethical and political propensities in pocket, will [re]discover the sorcery contained within epic narratives. [from The Über Liberal Manifesto]
For example, driven internally by the science of climate change, yet knowing that conservatives are incapable of being energized by science, the Über Liberal enters the debate with the story of Noah’s Ark, imploring, nay, commanding her fellow citizens to get on board, to participate in the construction of an ark so strong and impenetrable no creature of land, sea, or sky will be left behind! When conservatives, predictably, ask how much this “ark” will cost, the Über Liberal will only roar. No numbers, charts, extinction rates, or sea-level figures. Just a command from God.
Only then will liberals have entered the arena in earnest.
Conservatives will articulate their fears about lost business opportunities in a climate-change economy with one powerful word: “Freedom.” But this will not cow the Über Liberal. He will trump conservatives with stories of Freedom for our Children, and Freedom for our Grandchildren, and Freedom Forever!
You may have plenty of evidence (for example) that building an impenetrable wall along the entire U.S. border with Mexico is an absurd waste of money, but you must understand that the wall — even if it is never built — is a performative Truth for many.
Donald Trump describes the wall solely in emotional terms. It will be beautiful and powerful and grand. To argue against it in rational terms (e.g., it won’t address the problem, etc) is just speaking an incomprehensible language, which comes across as defensive, snobby, and obfuscative.
The point is, despite the reckless, ignorant, destructive, hateful actions of the Right recently, liberals do bear some responsibility for reengagement.
[side bar] In a July text-message exchange with Newt Gingrich I was lamenting the Balkanization of the news and the resultant vanishing of shared facts, as well as the increasing ignorance about major world events. When I suggested revamping the Fairness Doctrine for today’s world, Gingrich was predictably dismissive.
My proposal was to mandate that the first three minutes of every broadcast news hour (including cable news, radio talk, etc) be dedicated to a non-commercial newscast comprised solely of eventful facts. The operation could begin almost immediately, simply by handing the mandate to PBS.
On a whim, I responded to Gingrich’s dismissal of my idea with this suggestion: “How about, throughout the three-minute newscast, we devote the bottom third of the TV screen to a shot of soldiers saluting the flag?”
Gingrich’s response? “Interesting. Interesting. That I would definitely consider.”
What will Reengagement Look Like under Über Liberalism?
We hear about the good-old days when Republicans and Democrats drank whiskey together and hammered out deals — when there was an actual respect for the opposing party. Today we give lip-service to the importance of having two strong parties, but do we really believe it?
Discretionary spending in the form of earmarks, while always widely maligned, was the social glue that kept these opposing personalities in a functioning conversation. The reintroduction of “pork,” as a form of communication, would be a big first step in getting the ball rolling again.
Then we could start to tackle larger, national issues.
Do conservatives believe in “The Truth” that a trillion-dollar partial border wall would magically make us a stronger country? Do they believe it enough to trade it for Medicare For All? We won’t know unless we reestablish lines of communication.
But what about facts, reality, science, and evidence?
Throughout my research for my Über Liberalism project, the gnawing question of whether our embrace of tale-telling might erode our special relationship to facts kept biting at my ankles. After all, liberals are the remaining sole protectors of reality. Will the Über Liberal become The Night’s Watch that abandoned Greyguard? Will we inevitably give up the quest to make facts matter again? Will we reach the point where a fact is equal to a falsehood — as long as either one contributes to a desired narrative that is True to the speaker?
I brought the question to Noam Chomsky on Thanksgiving (he had prepared a delightful vegan turkey for Sahar and me — complete with a rosemary Tuscan gravy and gluten-free bamboo dressing). Donald Trump, I offered, has shown us that if one’s essential Truth is all that matters (e.g., that Donald Trump is great) then any combination of non-facts and facts to support one’s story is not only acceptable, it is powerful and desirable — even magical.
Noam shook his head.
“Trump is a disrupter,” he said. “And like all disrupters he will soon fall to the wayside.”
As a linguist Chomsky believes communication is most productive when it combines a rich variety of metaphor, poetry, prose, evidence, hyperbole, humor, etc.
“After all,” he told me, paraphrasing Tristan Tzara, “Sense and nonsense need to be partners in order to mirror the absurdities of the world.” The key, though, is that language should be clear about its creative intentions. To argue that “billions” of cars were waiting in line at a toll bridge is not lying, it is simply a colorful data point in a narrative — flagged (as hyperbole) every bit as clearly as a snark tag in blog entry.
But, in this period of disruption, we have temporarily lost such clarity. And we all have a part to play in rediscovering it. We cannot afford to play the role of passive observer in a world of objective facts, as if we’re incapable of adjusting those facts according to our needs. That would be pedantic. Or Zen. Whatever.
The point is, when we relinquish control over the manipulation of facts we make it easy for the Trumps of the world to dismiss us as “weak losers.”
Ignore The Negative Nancys, The Debbie Downers, The Nervous Nellies, and the Nattering Nabobs of Negativism
Almost all the experts with whom I spoke about Über Liberalism agreed that the strategies outlined here had a probability of success within the 90th percentile, and they all volunteered to contribute their considerable talents to the project. For transparency’s sake, however, I should mention one notable dissenter.
While not a political expert per se, Hollywood producer Michelle King excels at political imagination, and has researched pathologies of the human brain. So when I visited her on the second-season set of her hit ABC TV show Braindead, I expected to find a soul mate and ally. Instead, King appeared burned out, mean, and cynical.
After hearing my “elevator pitch” on Über Liberalism, she sighed, rolling her eyes, and then attempted, weakly, to debunk the entire premise of my plan.
“You want to tie yourself in knots trying to compete with right-wing hysteria?” she said, revealing an obvious undercurrent of hysteria herself. I tried to explain to her that, with a thorough intellectual understanding of all the premises underlying Über Liberalism, we will eventually become competent storytellers ourselves. But King interrupted me.
“News flash: Just because conservatives don’t give a shit about facts or science doesn’t mean they’re stupid. It’s not the flag waving or the roars from God that make them believe their stories. The conservative brain only cares about one thing. And that’s whether or not a story makes them feel special, separate, and better than everyone else. There’s nothing you, or I, or anyone else can do to change that. And their stories are not liberal stories. They never will be.”
It was a pretty harsh assessment. But, to reiterate, King is not a political expert, just a satirical Hollywood storyteller, so her pessimism about Über Liberalism should be considered poetic malaise.
Did she really think liberals should react to the Post-Truth era by doing nothing? By just doggedly sticking to facts and science, hoping and waiting for everything to get better while conservatives run roughshod over the Constitution?
King did not answer my question directly. She only provided this tidbit about the climax of Season Two of Braindead (spoiler alert): a mega-computer programmed by Utilitarians takes over all functions of government.