I am an expert. I have been qualified to testify as an expert in both federal and state courts. You could call me a litigation expert, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but that name carries a rather negative connotation — like a “hired gun”.
In my experience, most of the experts in my field (a moderately small corner of science and engineering) are not hired guns. They want to investigate the incident that led to the damages or injuries, and “get the right answer” about causation and responsibility. Alas, there are also plenty who are willing to adopt conclusions or deliver opinions that distort or even break the laws of physics.
I’ll never forget the time I sat in the gallery at a civil trial and listened to my counterpart (expert for the defense) flat-out lie to the jury. I desperately wanted the cross-examining attorney to expose the lies so the jury would see him as unreliable at best (or bribed at worst). I wanted to jump up and shout “he’s lying” (...and I did mouth those words silently, but no one saw me).
In a trial, there are two types of witnesses — fact witnesses and expert witnesses. Only the latter are permitted to state their opinions to the jury, because most jury members don’t have the expertise to form conclusions on their own based on tire skid marks or furniture burn patterns. A good expert will use factual data (e.g. photos, documents) to help the jury see the linkage between the known set of facts and the expert conclusions they proffer. Experts help juries reach good conclusions.
Ordinary people are thrown into jury boxes every day of their lives. They are faced with dilemmas they can’t solve on their own, and they must choose what course of action to take — often based on expert advice. It is a sad situation when someone decides which expert to trust based on that person’s membership in a tribe or their folksy mannerisms.
I recently saw an opinion piece (by Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield) in The Atlantic that really hit home. It was written on the 4th anniversary of January 6, 2021 — and it was titled, The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine.
The setting for the piece was the mob’s violent attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and the introduction rekindled all the feelings of horror I experienced that day.
The authors cited another Atlantic contributor (David Graham) who said on January 7, 2021:
Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like. Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different.
The authors went on to say that the whitewashing of January 6 has been attributed to a crisis of “misinformation”, but the actual nature of the deceit is worse.
Misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine.
It’s an interesting distinction. Someone who is interested in truth, will see the evidence and draw conclusions that follow logically from that evidence. But someone who has pledged loyalty to a demagogue, needs to deal with the “cognitive dissonance” of the first scenes they see played out in photos or video. They deal with it by tuning in to “experts” who walk them through a (fake) narrative that removes the dissonance — and removes or blurs most of the actual observations and facts.
The authors’ ending is quite depressing:
When the Democratic Party chose to make the 2024 election about Trump, his threat to the rule of law, and the “battle for the soul of this nation,” … it was under the assumption that the indelible images of January 6 would be able to maintain their resonance nearly four years later. That assumption, broadly speaking, was wrong.
But I continue to believe we can fight the justification machine by defending facts and refuting charlatan opinions. To many of our countrymen and countrywomen, it may be easier and more comforting to swallow lies, but you might just remind them about one of Jesus’s most famous quotes: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free”.
Even though the context for this quote seems to equate blind discipleship with knowing the truth, the point is that you must first know the truth (by doing the hard work of thinking), and only then will it set you free from the shackles of falsehoods.
The bottom line is this: There is a very good reason why no one ever said: Lies shall set you free.
