The Truth Isn't Out There

One of the many ways in which we are committing mass suicide is by squeezing our lives into evermore constrictive containers. These containers – call them silos if you want, but I’m a Jersey Jew; what do I know from silos? – hold our beliefs about the world. Social, political, religious, etc. As information increases and media credibility ebbs, the only way to make sense of the world is to attempt, somehow, to cut it down to size. The only way to do that is to minimize the content to which we’re exposed. Even if we do that, it’s overwhelming.

Couple the problem of torrential information downpours with the horrific polarization we’re experiencing and it’s easy to see why so many people have turned their back on “consensus reality.” Or, to put it another way, they’re creating – and have created – alternative realities.

Consensus reality is legacy media, science, academia, and a belief, for example, that the person occupying the Oval Office is exactly the current President of the United States. Alternate realities can be anything: flat earthers, QAnon, simulation theory, white supremacy, etc. Many alternate realities are easily disprovable but the only way to disprove them is to use exactly the kinds of sources – mainstream media, science, academia – that they reject. It’s the same way a fundamentalist Christian (another alternate reality) will attempt to prove that Jesus Christ was the son of God by using the Bible.

Image taken from the Atlantic article entitled “12 million Americans Believe Lizard People Run Our Country,” which you can read here: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/12-million-americans-believe-lizard-people-run-our-country/316706/

There’s also the conservative media landscape which popped up, piecemeal, over the last few decades. Some of that conservative media, like Fox News, is now the mainstream. Fox blurs the lines between consensus reality and alternative reality, which makes it especially insidious. As has been pointed out many times before, Fox News is, in some respects, a legitimate news source, relying on consensus reality for some of its reporting, but it also dredges the darker corners of conspiracy-addled sources with little or no credibility for more sinister content that paints their political opponents as Soros-backed, wild-eyed communistic agitators hellbent on taking your guns and changing your pronouns.

Yes, the left has propagandizing outlets as well, but they don’t have nearly the same reach as Fox. MSNBC is probably the closest analogue, but the influence of, say, Rachel Maddow, on the public is considerably less impactful than that of, say, Sean Hannity. Why? Because Maddow and her ilk still rely exclusively on consensus reality for their reporting while the Hannitys of the world do not. As such, they aren’t restricted in their sourcing which allows them to paint whatever version of the truth they want, all of it backed with the implicit promise of conservative media: they won’t tell you the truth, but we will.

I am speaking generally here, not about Maddow or Hannity specifically, and one could almost assuredly find clips that belie what I just said. My point, though, is larger than individual stories. It’s about the ethos of mistrust inherent in conservative media. It’s this mistrust that gives rise to the cults of personality we see in the modern conservative movement. The “I alone can fix it” crowd entrusts their futures to people who have demonstrated little competence in their work but who relieve their audiences of the need to sift through endless competing narratives. It’s a self-reinforcing worldview which ends up taking on all of the trappings of consensus reality with little of the evidence.

Which is why we’ve now reached a place in our culture in which consensus reality is becoming a thing of the past. Maybe it’s already past. Consensus about basic facts is no more. Is the border “wide open” or not? Did Anthony Fauci orchestrate a massive covid bioweapons cover-up or not? Did Donald Trump condemn white supremacy in Charlottesville or not? Ambiguity is exploited, nuance erased, and the unknown becomes backfilled with the most insidious explanations. The rest of us are left scratching our heads wondering at “the truth.”

Which gives rise to the “do your own research crowd,” who implore you to question the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust, for example. Doesn’t that 6,000,000 number strike you as a little high? What about the moon landing? Look at all the anomalies there – I’m not saying we didn’t land on the moon, but if you do your own research, you’ll discover all kinds of inconsistencies. And if they’re lying to you about those things, what else are “they” lying to you about?

I’ve encountered multiple people the last couple weeks who maintain that we are being lied to about everything. Everything. Here’s how one person put it:

Universe is a simulation. Technology being kept hidden from us. Government controls the media and academia. Every political narrative is pure propaganda. All the pop culture is just to distract us from things that matter.

Obviously, there are some countries where this is, more or less, true. But not here.

Look how neatly the conspiracy ties together: the government controls the media. The government controls academia. Even pop culture is in on it. Dua Lipa is a psyop. If you question them further about how all of this works, they don’t have much of an explanation. Consider, for a second, that governments change. If Donald Trump controlled the media, for example, why did they spend four years properly shitting on his presidency? Why are they now questioning Biden’s ability to serve?

The answer is that, for this worldview to make sense, the President cannot actually be the head of our nation. Instead, the country (and the world) is being run either by: a shadowy cabal of billionaires and corporations, the Deep State, the Illuminati, lizard people, or whichever bogeyman to whom you wish assign evil intent. Worldviews like this make no literal sense but they satisfy a fundamental human need: they fill in the gaps. If the Lord works in mysterious ways then we don’t need a full understanding of tectonic plates and hydrodynamics to make sense of a tsunami that just killed thousands; we just need to put our trust in the unknowable.

(Please don’t come at me with an actual explanation of tsunamis.)

There are advantages to putting one’s faith in the unknowable. The primary one is that you can make reality whatever you want it to be. Perhaps you told everybody that a hurricane is going to strike Alabama. But your pesky National Hurricane Center gives you a map that shows something else entirely. Simply remedy reality with a black Sharpie and call it a day. Everything is equally plausible and implausible. The truth becomes as ultimately unknowable as the location of an electron. If you even believe in electrons. Personally, I think they’re a hoax. But I would encourage everybody to do their own research.