“We have come to live in a society based on insults, on lies and on things that just aren’t true. It creates an environment where deranged people feel empowered.”
Colin Powell
“The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse.”
Eric Hoffer, THE TRUE BELIEVER
The COVID-19 pandemic is fake. Donald Trump is still president. Climate change is a hoax. These are some of the “truths” that nearly half of America’s voters believe. Some believers are my friends: kindhearted, likable, helpful; whose company I enjoy, when we avoid talking about politics. Unfortunately, they are skillful at switching the conversation around to political subjects, sooner or later. I have also noticed that disagreement always makes them mad. I confess that when they discuss politics, I mutter “Interesting,” or “Good point,” and try to change the subject back to something mundane. I feel uncomfortable around them, and have to believe I cause them discomfort. Small wonder we gradually find fewer and fewer reasons to get together. We occupy the same parts of the earth, go about living similarly comfortable lives—with the same sunrises and sunsets, the same moon—yet holding oppositional truths to be self-evident, as if we live in different dimensions. And as time passes, the likelihood grows that sadly, the twain shall never meet.
I long ago gave up searching for common ground with anyone on the other side of this political divide. Basic truths on which we could build compromises, mutual respect for differing viewpoints, even the ability to “agree to disagree”—are gone. One side fears the rise of dictatorship through corporate dominance and racial violence, while the other sees the loss of freedom through wearing masks. How can we compromise? I get my facts from science, literature, mainstream news, and general living experiences that teach me to use human reasoning powers. Those who believe COVID-19 is not real, that the election was fraudulent, that climate change is not happening, get their facts elsewhere. We no longer have differing takes on the same truth. The truths we hold are so different, they cannot both be true. The divide in America today is over two opposite realities, with each side accusing the other of believing and spreading falsehoods—which one side is actually doing.
We have reached an Orwellian place where reality can be ignored. Rightwing politicians and pundits would probably agree with O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984, who smugly told his beaten, emaciated captive, Winston Smith: “You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.” Unlike Big Brother’s Oceania, America remains a country where different opinions are tolerated, where natural laws are evident to those who choose to recognize them. In many other countries, people are allowed to believe only the State’s approved Big Lie. Billions of people living under such regimes probably feel a perverse sense of security, since the energy spent on critical thinking is not only unnecessary, but actually forbidden. Conversely, for people living there who are cursed with open minds, the future is grim.
Since in America we retain a useable Bill of Rights, we can still express our honest beliefs. But the organs of the corporate state have developed a program of Big Lies so completely effective, information not supportive of their creed can be totally ignored, allowing believers of “alternative facts” to go on living in their alternative universe, secure from bothersome reality. Humanity has experienced crises of faith before. During the Renaissance, established “absolute truths” and newfound ways of looking at the world were heavily conflicted. Faiths that even slightly deviated from ruling religions were brutally punished. Scientific research was similarly suppressed, excepting the invention of deadlier weapons. The same story goes on today—in the twenty-first century, not the sixteenth or seventeenth. Roles in the current struggles have been reversed, however. Practitioners of deep faith in unprovable dogmas now seek to bury the currently prevalent scientific method.
Beginning with primitive science to invent more efficient methods of destruction and death, discoveries and inventions were inadvertently made that improved mankind’s material condition. In the modern world everyone could be free from want, which would open the way for worldwide freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from fear. We would still have plenty of problems, but our ability to live with problems in comfort and peace would make a happy life at least possible for most of us, most of the time. Only opposition from upper classes worldwide, whose power would evaporate in such a world, blocks this auspicious outcome. In the United States and other democracies, the rulers are obligated to spend lavishly on rightwing media that can inundate the country with alternative facts. Since reason, for most of us, favors economic, political and social policies that would eliminate the power of the ruling class, the rulers must promote capitalism to a religion to retain the status quo. Powerful religions depend on closed minds, and fear is needed to close them.
Fear inspires the anger which believers in alternative facts tend to use when they deal with “infidels.” Believers in social and economic as well as political democracy did not trash the capitol, nor have they been desperately seeking to eliminate voters who might oppose politicians they like. Not even those in the Black Lives Matter movement, many of whom have immediate, personal reasons to be afraid, have gone over the top with their protests of routine, nationwide police killings. When demonstrations turned to rioting and vandalism, BLM leaders, determined to keep their cause peaceful, were quick to denounce the violence. Right-wingers invaded the Capitol on January 6—not Antifa, although that is another Big Lie that gets increasing credibility from the right. While the right-wingers’ general fears grow more destructive, what do they really have to fear? They fear destruction of their world, their country, their sense of self, due (in their perceptions) to immigrants, minorities, and poor people; and from scientific breakthroughs that would change their accustomed ways of life—imagined fears which they believe—fears that turn to anger.
People so fearful they feel compelled to fight are seldom disarmed by reason. And since we who accept nineteenth-century concepts like laws of nature are not fighting mad, we should avoid a pitched battle on their terms. Still, we need to challenge the offense on our democratic institutions, to protect our freedom now, and in the future. The hard right lost a close election, but they are mobilizing for the next one, and they mean to lie, cheat and steal, convinced that the ultimate righteousness of their holy cause justifies all means. Our strength is the coalition we built in 2020, made up of minorities, poor people, young people, and thoughtcrime-committing old white folks like myself. We need to keep the coalition together, and to actually strengthen it. The only way to do that is to push as hard as we can, peacefully yet forcefully, to change the government so that it actually serves people, not corporations. We can invite those from across the divide to join us, but past behavior says they probably will not. We are at the point where either we make America the country we brag about, or lose it entirely. The job is ours, and if we do it right, maybe the truth will out. Meanwhile, not voting is not an option.