Hack Gaps and Noble Lies

John, as someone who teaches and blogs, I’m sure that there are at least some times where you tell the simple lie instead of the much more complicated truth. At least, I find myself doing that when I’m pressed for time and my more complicated variation on political liberalism is irrelevant.

Consider, in public reason issues, I actually don’t think reasonable disagreement is possible. I have a more complicated story to tell about why we must tolerate beliefs and why this does not line up with any plausible version of the reasonable/unreasonable distinction. And even this specification of may not be just quite true: it may be just that no plausible version of the reasonable/unreasonable distinction that fits quite well with other stuff that political liberals have going on allows space for reasonable disagreement.

My actual view is really complicated. Sometimes, I find myself saying that people should respect the fact of reasonable disagreement. It may be false, but far simpler to just say reasonable disagreement than to talk about why we should tolerate views which are unreasonable.

In secondary school in chemistry, we learn that electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom in circles. But this is false. We learn in A-level chemistry that orbitals are not circular and electrons don’t just move in regular orbits.

The same applies with newtonian mechanics in physics. We initially learn to calculate relative velocities by simple addition and subtraction and a bit of trigonometry. Then we learn something a bit more complicated when we build up to velocities near c. At some point we learn that all these theories are not quite true and we have not yet found a true theory of physics

A lot of education is a matter of initially teaching a simple lie and then teaching them a somewhat more complicated lie which is nevertheless closer to the truth. I would be very surprised if none of that went on in intro to philosophy classes.

‘True’ story, insofar as anything is true anymore.

A friend of a friend (all true stories start like, obviously) went for some post in the Labour Party. This was a while ago, so it was Old Labour. In the course of the interview he was (he said) explicitly asked: ‘Would you tell an open lie, that is, would you deliberately state something that you knew to be false, to a journalist, if it was in the interests of the Labour Party?’.

He said ‘No’ of course, and didn’t get the job.

Of course he might have been lying. Or maybe the person who told me the story was lying. Or maybe I’m lying. Who knows?

In answer to your question:

‘How self-aware is Trump of his penchant for lying?’

I think that Trump, like the later Wittgenstein, does not believe that the key task of language is to tell ‘the truth’. I doubt very much that Trump has the cognitive capacity to understand Wittgenstein (although who knows. Perhaps he’s lying when he pretends to be stupid). But if it was explained to him that the later Wittgenstein believed that the key task of language was not to ‘tell the truth’ (in the simple ‘correspondence theory’ sense of that phrase) but instead was, more frequently, to ‘get things done’, he would probably agree with him.

In other words, I don’t think Trump (and those that surround him) thinks about lying when he lies. I simply don’t think that is a question that he asks himself. He would ask himself about whether or not his discourse was effective, whether it improved his opinion poll ratings, or helped his personal wealth etc. In other words, ‘what did my words achieve?’

Does an advertiser ask him or herself whether the claims in his/her advert are true? The question simply never arises. The purpose of advertising is neither to lie nor to tell the truth. It’s to sell commodities or services. Truth doesn’t come into it.

Trump, and the Republican Party more generally, are a product which are sold to the American public. Effectiveness is gauged via how many elections they win. Truth, beauty, morality etc. are simply not the criteria by which Republicans gauge their product. It’s true they sometimes use ‘moral jargon’. But that’s like the old joke:

‘The most important thing in politics is sincerity (pause). Once you can fake that, you can do anything.’

And this brings us yet again to the fact (or ‘fact’) that Trump is the logical end result of long term trends in American politics: the so to speak ‘capitalisation’ of politics (politics and politicians viewed as commodities, political discourse as a kind of advertising), the rise of the ironically named ‘reality’ TV (the very name of which is a lie), Trump’s origins in the notoriously truth free realm of New York real estate etc.

I was discussing this same thing last week. It’s perfectly clear that when one looks at e.g. climate change denial, there are rubes who believe that nonsense and there are charlatans who sell it. The rubes at least are easy to understand; they don’t know any better. But the charlatans who sell it? What goes on in their heads? How big a lie are they willing to tell, and for what reason?

Max Boot published an op ed last week claiming that he now knows he was wrong — mistaken — to be a skeptic on climate change. Are we to believe that Max Boot was one of the rubes fooled by the charlatans? Isn’t it more likely he was one of the charlatans?

“I’m a lawyer and I can’t lie to a court, but I can urge interpretations of the facts that I privately don’t believe.”

To my mind this is worse than lying. As extraordinarily awful as Trump and the right are in their policies this is something I find worse in moral intention and character, and it seems more frequent among Democratic politicians. They don’t have the decency to tell an honest lie. (Incedently, that very ordinary phrase, an honest lie, deserves serious contemplation.)

Contra Kant, a bald faced lie does not reduce people to a mere means. It’s not manipulation but challenge, not coercion but battle. It involves a degree of respect that suggestion, omission, and indirect deception do not. The bald lie says, “Believe me or don’t, it’s up to you.” It tells me I’m being confronted and invites me to defend myself. The suggestive lie doesn’t say or tell, it operates behind one’s back, it knows better than you and so does not let you know, it’s paternalistic, it plays people like instruments. The true noble lie does not lie, it nudges. It’s more dishonest because it pretends not to be.

Really good original post, but the comments have gotten horribly bogged down in epistemology and morality. I’ll try not to go there.

To give the OP my answers to his questions–I think there is a great deal of flawed self-awareness and dubious self justification implying self loathing with the political operatives he’s wondering about. They are not innocents. But, if they were good German boys and girls assigned to work in a concentration camp, they’d function better in accounting and logistics functions, maintenance and that sort of thing, than dealing with the prisoners personally. If you want a handle on the Fox News Culture, read or watch the book/movie Thank You for Smoking. Are these people conscious instruments of absolute evil, true believers in their own secret Wannsee plan? Good Lord no.

I’ve never been a particularly good liar and, until recently, never wanted to be. That said, for the last year, dealing with parents in their 90s, one with moderate to severe dementia, the other with mild dementia, both residing in an assisted living facility that is very caring and professional, I’ve developed a whole new appreciation for the social realities and a different relationship to social truths. Wowza. A little bit of exposure to that world Trumps (!) a boatload of philosophical exploration.

Do you think that Kevin Drum’s endless schtick of assuming the best about conservatives and worst about liberals at every turn, then being astonished when he’s proven wrong every day for decades, is a lie?

I kinda do.

I think dishonesty and ignorance are both inadequate to the task of explaining why there is so much falsehood in public life. Hidari has a key insight here:

I don’t think Trump (and those that surround him) thinks about lying when he lies. I simply don’t think that is a question that he asks himself.

Discerning the truth, in the sense that we’re talking about here, is not a particularly important task for many, many people. During the campaign, Trump was regarded as more honest than Hillary. The people who said that weren’t necessarily being ignorant or being dishonest themselves. They just have different ideas about what makes something true.

The more education Republicans have, the less likely they are to believe in climate change. Are the climate deniers lying? Are they engaged in motivated reasoning?

Maybe the latter, somewhat. But what they’re really doing is creating truth. Facts don’t exist, just interpretations of facts.

You give up a tremendous amount of control when you give facts an independent existence. Tomorrow, you could end up believing anything, merely because it’s true. A lot of folks don’t want to limit themselves that way.

I think a lot of people’s minds are so mercurial that they literally have no capacity to recognize the difference between what they have reason to believe and what they want to believe, unless someone sits them down and forces them to walk through it, step by painful step.

I have professional stories, but probably shouldn’t share them.

Not to sound all “internet white guy from 2003,” but a huge percentage of the country and the world profess a religious belief that once upon a time there were, for lack of a better word, wizards. Who ran around casting magical spells and communing with magical spirits, all of which very clearly and directly demonstrated the truth of their existence to loads of people, but don’t do so anymore for Reasons so you just have to believe.

I’ve been in churches where the reading has included lines 1, 2, and 4 from a section, and the sermon is about a conclusion that was directly contradicted by the omitted line 3. I didn’t say anything, except to my wife. So far as I know, I’m the only person who even noticed. Did the preacher even notice? Did he see it and have his brain just sort of glide off of something he didn’t want to see? I have no idea.

This is just life. People have a loose grasp on reality, but a very strong grasp of what they want to believe.

For a lot of people, truth is something we owe our friends but not our enemies.

I’ve mentioned this before, but the internal right-wing discourses aren’t any better/cleaner than the ones we get presented with. That strongly suggests epistemological problems, not knowing rhetorical strategy.

[and this also means we have to think about whether the causation is reversed: not people with right-wing beliefs adopting rhetorical strategies, but people with epistemological problems adopting right-wing positions.]

There are no charlatans, no knowingly-deceptive leaders.

@
”How self-aware is Trump of his penchant for lying”?

The problem is that he ”is” -(so obviously) and he ”isn’t” -(so obviously) –
like when he calls ”Paradise” – ”Pleasure” or denies ”grabbing” – while confessing ”grabbing” at the same time –
(whatever) –
and the real problem is – that he does all of it like a real a…hole – which makes it so unbearable – because he does all of this a…holery while walking completely aimlessly around and not knowing what HE -(or anybody else) is really talking about.

And – YES – at the same time – ”he tells lies to defend himself as, ”in general, when his ”interests demand it”.

And – Yes – his interests demand going online -(and offline) – telling deliberate lies to trick people into believing some supposed, larger truth – always at the same time ”a bit of trolling”- and out-and-out lies with NO ”sophistical shading and coloring and emphasizing and de-emphasizing” – as he can’t resist – as it’s not only recreational for him.

And lying about politics is never a-fun job – that’s why he is so YUUGE miserable and does -(and doesn’t) – enjoy the ”terrible hobby”. (But also the ”popular” roleplay)

I guess I really think I don’t know – either – how many liars are out there?
Even that I know that a lot of dudes who work for FOX News -(or any other Lie Factory) think that it’s a Noble Lie Factory -(like a lot of my American friends – who are currently ”absolutely miserable” but who lie to me – and tell me that they’re ”fine” – because ”only the French -(and ”them Germans”) tell everybody who doesn’t want to hear it – that they are ”toujours miserable”)

But as long as the pay – is ok and ”Non a…hole Democrats won’t take over… it’s fine to be the boss of any f… book.

And I can’t ”Tell me true” – as I never do on the ”Intertubes” – and that’s NOT ”lying” – it’s just that – why would anybody ”tell me true” on… ”teh Intertubes”?

I believe Terry Pratchett said it best in Hogsfather;

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.”

@JH:

“Am I weird?”

Yes, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong! : )

How self-aware is Trump of his penchant for lying?

I think more self-aware than Glen Tompkins does. He probably has lost some mental capacity, but I think he has developed a method over 60 years, an intuitive anti-rational method? A confidence in Will? He says what he wants (within limits, if he was senile we would hear the n-word the c-word more often.) He states what he wants to be true in the confidence that saying it long enough hard enough it will happen. He is in control. A violence of language?

There may be better comparisons, but I am reminded by Trump of Kingsley in Sexy Beast, although that character didn’t lie.

The better question for the crowd is How does Trump get away with it? If he is so dysfunctional, why is he rich and freaking President? Is this about to catch up with him, what now after 60 years? What a pathetic hope. Were Kasich and Jeb (or Clinton) that much smarter? It doesn’t work for me to say his followers are also crazy, cause a lot of them have benefited from Trump’s delirium, we need a frightened and frustrated opposition. Why isn’t Trump really scared of “getting caught?”

Part of liberal capitalism is making truth pay, making us dependent like little children on reason and intelligence, creating structures that make violence and unreason ineffective.

Thomas Disch said once that the science fiction fan was a case of arrested development, teenage intellectuals who believe that intelligence and honesty does rule and never growing out of that delusion. We are all sf fans now.

Force rules. Violence rules. Desires rule. Lies rule. Because reasonable truth-tellers live scared of emotions and violence. Fascists love this. Marxists hate it, but know the problem is not with the lying capitalists, but with the domesticated and intimidated truthers. It is about finding security in chains.

The French are showing us what “resistance” looks like. Trump could have been driven from office in first month. Am I lying? Nah I believe it, have to believe in popular power. I also believe that revealed preferences get revealed.

Birdie

Were classic Buddhists acquainted with children who could understand ‘golden elephant’ but who could not understand ‘the building is on FIRE!’?

John, you ask as great question. I’ve argued here on CT in bits and pieces that Trump is a functional–not a reflective–emotivist, using any means necessary to get his base in emotive attitudinal agreement with him. Concerns for truth are completely subservient to having his base in such “gut” lock-step. What I have not addressed in my brief remarks is his motivation and means for getting that done. His motivation is I think well-known–he’s a narcissist whose self-image has inflated to god-like proportions by the lucky fact that he has always evaded any serious consequences for anything immoral and unlawful that he has (no doubt many times over) done. His means for the success of his emotivist strategy lies (sorry) in the fact that he guessed–based on some experience with early political rallies–that there was a significant population of manipulable white males and increasingly desperate evangelical social conservatives who could share his emotional “gut”, and who, like him, cared more about their own anger and sense of alienated privilege than anything about abstract-able facts and truth that ran counter to that. Along with other factors of Russian interference and Comey’s stupidity about his own self-image, it all was just enough for Trump’s emotivism to become pragmatically successful as well as strategical.

The test will be what the public thinks about the strength of charges that will no doubt arise from the Mueller report. I do not underestimate Trump’s ability to push his functional emotivism to win the day, as he has done to make the Republican party also essentially functionally emotivist in service to the plutocracy of which he is also the de facto standard-bearer.

= = = The better question for the crowd is How does Trump get away with it? If he is so dysfunctional, why is he [Trump] rich = = =

Assumes facts not in evidence, although bringing up this point also generates a similar related question. All publicly available data for the last 10 years (possibly 20) shows that Donald Trump, son of Frederick Trump, no longer has much wealth and may be personally bankrupt. Over and above his standard tactic of drawing investors into a disposable LLC, skimming off cash, then “discovering” the LLC is bankrupt there is the possibility that the Trump Family’s master corporation may be bankrupt as well. Hence the refusal to release tax returns during the Presidential campaign.

The related question of course is how does Trump manage to convince people that he is stupendously wealthy when he is clearly not. Another question of interest is where does the money he spends so freely come from, but we’re not allowed to ask that.

There’s a line of expectation in all of us between the “real” (as in Dr Johnson’s stone – it doesn’t matter what you or anyone think, it still hurts to kick) and the rest. The real demands honesty, because you can’t lie to it, or safely about it. The rest is negotiable. The slick used car salesman may tell you this car get great mileage, but he does not lie to himself about how often he fills the tank, else he would spend a lot of time by the side of the road (failure to maintain this separation is one sign of mental dysfunction – Trump’s numerous bankruptcies suggest that he could not keep his salesman’s view of the accounts separate from the real numbers).

People who deal with the real every day – people who work with their hands, or with nature, or those whose disciplines rest on some agreed tests of the real, have to keep this line firm – they don’t fantasise about the bricks, whatever else they may dream about. Those, like politicians, who deal only with people, or with social rather than physical realities, may have more trouble. Stay long enough in those environments and you lose the awareness that some things are not negotiable. Some people cultivate this lack of awareness, as it is really not comfortable grappling with the fact that the physical universe pays no attention to your ego.

@ Murali 16

Are the imperfectly representative equations you reference really lies, or merely approximations?

Peter @37.
I don’t think your people who work with their hands, or otherwise are dealing with something real, which won’t respond to fakery are likely to do much better on average than anyone else, once they are outside of their domain. To many of these people Trump seemed authentic, his lies matched their own gut instincts, and didn’t sound like the typical double-speak they are used to getting from the political class. I don’t think are many professions that render people highly aware of the need to know the truth or suffer because your actions are ineffective or worse.

@
”If he is so dysfunctional, why is he rich and freaking President”?

BE-cause he always wanted to self-destruct.
-(like all a…holes)
And he always wanted all of these New Yorkers -(and all other Americans) being forced to talk about him as if he would be NOT be just a asocial a…hole.

eg @39

There are two ways one can present an approximation. The first way is by flagging that it is an approximation. This is not lying. The second way is by presenting it as not being an approximation. That is lying. I do not know of any secondary school physics syllabus which does the former.

The chemistry example with the circular orbitals is a more obvious example.

I’m glad you raised this, as I struggle with this myself. Like you, I reflexively care about the truth, and I have difficulty supposing other people don’t.

However, I’m pretty sure that many people, perhaps most, have a ‘flexible’ attitude to the truth, and I’m broadly with Peter T — people usually have at best a domain-specific grasp on truth (and do worse when, and b9n10nt — people who consistently care about truth the way we’re supposed to have to be trained to do it, although specialist training is, I think, neither necessary nor sufficient. Plenty of ordinary people do OK on this score. And I’m thoroughly in agreement with Hidari and others who say that the likes of Trump are just not even trying to give a picture of the world. A picture, maybe, but whether or not it corresponds to anything real is beside the point.

You see the world as consisting of largely people who have some care for the truth, so there’s a lot of deluded people and liars in your view, but not so many bullshitters. But I wonder why you think so.

If we operationalize ‘caring about the truth’, so that one cares about the truth insofar as one makes statements when one has warrant to do so but not otherwise, checks sources, is sensitive to contrary evidence, revises opinions, admits to mistakes, agrees with even enemies if they say something true, acts upon what they believe to be true, etc. then we see that few people actually do care about the truth consistently and across the board, and to do this requires the right background.

(Liars could ‘care about the truth’ in this sense if they do that kind of thing privately, so someone deliberately running a Ponzi scheme certainly cares about the truth (e.g. checks and rechecks, develops systems to track) of what’s happening to the money they’re taking in and giving out, although of course it can be difficult to tell)

Instead, beyond a practical reality they are competent with, people care about what they prefer to be true, what supports their favourite narratives, or care about being seen to be right, or ‘face’, or showing up their enemies.

I agree that many people probably think nevertheless that somehow they’re giving a picture of reality, but I also wonder what difference this really makes. If you look around it’s not that hard to see cases where the tire fails to hit the road. People who say they believe in the most dramatic of conspiracy theories involving the government, yet show no concern with making these opinions public on the internet. Pro life advocates who have no regard whatsoever for the huge number of early miscarriages. People who seem sure of some imminent apocalypse (or ‘the singularity’) yet who still save for their retirement, etc. I don’t think these people believe one thing and say another, so they’re not liars in the usual sense, but there’s nevertheless a sense in which they don’t entirely believe what they say they do.

There’s always a social game (and probably also a psychological one) being played when one makes a truth claim, and the best that one can hope for is that the social game happens to coincide with good epistemological practice, but one can see even when one has honest people with a good regard for truth how things apart from a regard to truth influence the discussion, and even the belief-holding — ego is an obvious one, but so to is sympathy with one’s fellows — often we don’t want to believe our friends are wrong. And that’s the best case scenario!

You say that the desire to be right counteracts bullshittery, but is that the desire to have the truth, or the desire to win the argument?

I wonder why it’s so tempting to think people care about the truth. Projection, perhaps? But I suspect it’s also just easier to model. It’s easier to understand and track Trump’s belief if he looks at the picture of his rally and says to himself “Oh, dear, a poor turnout. Oh, well, can’t have my followers thinking that! I’ll just say it was the greatest ever, that always works”, just like when you know it was you that stole the cookies, but tell Mother it was your sister. Much harder to work out what could be going on if he immediately goes into denial, says what he wants to say about it, and goes about believing what he just said, until that becomes awkward and he starts believing something else, and much harder still if he actually doesn’t believe anything at all about the numbers at his rally in the way that would connect with a photograph or an informed history, but rather just knows the statement that resonates emotionally with himself and his fans.

When we teach undergradute-level Fourier analysis, it usually comes with the disclaimer that what we are about to say is mathematically nonsense (Dirac delta functions aren’t actually functions, etc.); that it can be fixed up, but the audience hasn’t yet done the necessary courses to understand the fixed up explanation, but if you really care about justifying it you’re welcome to go read a book on measure theory.

This sort of pedgogical cheat (or forward reference) is arguably different from an actual lie.

@Faustus, I like that point about a certain “kind” of liar. It might be that people understand this brand of people. Or they think they understand, with good reasons. Exactly because have lots of experience with them,in positions of authority.

So it doesn’t quite feel that they are lying, because you can tell that they are lying. Because you know the type. Johnson disses up some story about the EU regulations on condoms, or the Germans planning to start the fourth Reich, or India begging for marvelous trade deals like in the glory days of the Empire. People know that he is lying or exaggerating. They also hear the deeper message, that Europe has inferior foreigners telling Brits what to do, and the superior Brits would do better on their own. They agree on that message, so the lies just become a colourful communication method.

At some point, there was a quote about taking Trump seriously, not literally. And its true! In a way, lies can help to build trust. I know he’s making it up, he knows he’s making it up, so we understand each other. And he’s willing to lie to achieve our common goal, good of him.

Of course, that kind of trust is ready for abuse by con-men. But the lies are not themselves the con.

“they keep social arrangements in a state of constant chaos where agreeing with the powerful narcissist/bpd person is essential for stability”

It seems to me one definition of “privilege,” or one component of privilege, is that one can formulate a strategy for participation that will lead to stability (both in the group and the individual sense). This is true even in a chaotic situation where the successful strategy will be morally or personally unacceptable to many of those who could nevertheless make use of it.

Most commenters here would presumably find it unacceptable to operate successfully and stably in an environment conditioned by Trump. The surprising thing seems to be how many people feel they could do so.

Bullshit would seem to be, in the best case, a strategy (unacceptable to some)that recognizes circumstances in which truth-telling wouldn’t be successful or stable. Lying and trolling would both seem to be attempts to free-ride on others’ normally successful, stable strategies. (I’d probably count reflective contrarian oneupmanship as a form of trolling.)

ISTM that historically, groups of people who’ve formed a self-image as “truth-tellers” have been people who lacked the social privilege to find a successful, stable strategy, and hoped that some ostensibly objective “the way things are” could substitute for that privilege. (People whose successful, stable strategy is to ignore others’ putative bullshit, but silently, are probably separate from that group.)

Professor Holbo raises this idea in order to debunk it:

Self-delusion squeezes the space for deliberate deceit. It is tempting, then, to believe that lies – that is, conscious untruths, told with deliberate intent to induce false belief in an audience – are … well, let’s start by saying: rarer than you might think.

And offers this as an illustration:

Obviously a lot of people are liars. Q is a liar, I assume. But Qanon is a broad base of delusion.

I am something of an extremist in the opposite direction — someone who thinks that lies are, in fact, much, much, much less common than is believed. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that Q is a liar. He may well be a bullshitter in the Frankfurtian sense.

The original post underestimates the power of motivated reasoning and the fact that many people place no value whatsoever in the truth — Frankfurt’s insight, essentially. Q may well be a liar, but it may be that Q has never paused to consider the distinction between truth and lies in this context. (I have acknowledged that my view on this is extreme.)

When you look at Trump and see how many lies he tells that are against his own interest* — and indeed, how many truths he tells that are against his own interest** — you come to realize that truth is a matter of complete indifference to him.

I don’t want to overstate my extremist case — Q probably is a liar in the conventional sense. I’m only arguing that it’s not necessarily so, and that Frankfurt’s insight is more powerful than the original post credits.

*Trump’s initial lie about Comey’s firing was that it took place because of Comey’s abusive treatment of Hillary.
**Trump says he wouldn’t rule out pardoning Manafort. “Why would I take it off the table?”

Further to my prior comment, bob asks the key question:

The better question for the crowd is How does Trump get away with it? If he is so dysfunctional, why is he rich and freaking President? Is this about to catch up with him, what now after 60 years?

Trump has very little agency in any of this. Ask yourself: Why did elephants grow trunks? Why do giraffes have long necks? The creatures themselves didn’t think it would be useful to have these characteristics. They evolved this way because their environment demanded it.

Better to ask: What is it about the modern environment that propels people like Trump to national leadership? Then you get a productive answer — one that involves the peculiarities of the US Constitution, the advantages of wealth, the biases of the Deep State, Trump’s ethnic background, and a media environment that actively promotes bullshit. We know this is true in part because much of Trump’s nonsense is so poorly thought out, so obviously a product of his idiosyncratic nature, rather than the result of a plan.

Had Sarah Palin had a slightly better attention span — and perhaps a bit more desire for the presidency — she could have been the Republican nominee in 2012, and therefore could have had a real shot at the presidency. The media (construed broadly to include Facebook and Twitter) in particular have worked very hard to produce someone like Trump.

Reiterating bob’s question:

Is this about to catch up with him, what now after 60 years?

My best guess is that it is, in fact, about to catch up with him in the sense that one way or another, he will not get a second term. He has entered an environment that is different from the environment of New York real estate, and somewhat different from a campaign environment.

But he’ll stay rich, and probably stay out of jail, not because of some peculiar genius, but because that’s just the way the world works. Take away one variable — the insane media environment, the Trump family’s wealth, Trump’s race, etc. — and the outcome for him would likely be wildly different.

I am not sure why people insist so strongly that truth, per se, is even in play.

Most arguments in politics, like salesmanship generally, is about inducing a trance state and feeding emotional associations only tangentially related, at best, to logic or facts.

Trump is a remarkably good hypnotist. Part of that ability is a certain flexibility in being willing to say almost anything that will get a response from his audience. Hypnotists have to do that, get a response and then train that response, leading the hearer from one “thought” or emotional association to another. What the hypnotist says may not make any more sense than a song lyric and for much the same reason: it is about emotion and a state of self-regard.

That human beings are readily and regularly hypnotized is just a fact of human psychology. It does not make the hypnotist — or salesman more likely, salesmanship and public relations being the most common applications of the arts of propaganda and persuasive communications — a psycho. Failure to persuade probably indicates someone else got there first with a different hypnotic pitch, not that the resistant subject is exceptionally woke.

With Trump, a remarkable feature is his apparent ability to fascinate the Media and enough of their audience so as to suck much of the oxygen out of room reserved for American politics. Watch CNN and you would be hard-pressed to find out anything else about the world than what various talking heads speculate concerning Robert Mueller’s probe and much of the speculation is very nearly mindless, so far is it from the perspective of critical thinking about facts and sound judgment. Is Trump’s ability to fascinate a property of Trump the Man, or of the highly concentrated and homogenized corporate Media ecology? Or, does the explanation lie with the psychology of the masses sucked into this nonsense for hours and hours, day after tedious day?

Trump is remarkably negative in his messaging, complaining and insulting, but he gets a lot of cooperation in monopolizing attention from institutions hostile to him personally and politically. It is a symbiosis to wonder at.

The whole truth is something to which we have no access, and we’d need eternity to tell it if we did, so we’re justified in leaving parts of it out when we argue. (IMO, we’re justified in leaving parts of it out, full stop — chiefly if not exclusively because we can’t help ourselves.) But the person who finds it necessary to tell whoppers consistently, on a day-to-day basis, either just plain likes to tell whoppers, or isn’t skilled enough to avoid them. Telling whoppers is like cursing in public: what it is, is proof that the person who does it isn’t very good at expressing himself or herself; and for that reason it ought to be inadmissible in people who make public self-expression their profession. JMO.

Orange Watch, I would love to agree with you, but I don’t just meet Americans in Japan (also FYI, most Americans here are not “expats”, they are employed in local business at local salaries). I meet Americans from America when working, sometimes I have to collaborate with them, and I see the same cynicism in them too. Also, your culture is quite widely broadcast through various forms of media, so people outside of America could probably say we get a greater exposure to your culture than others. Just this morning for example I stumbled on a long twitter thread about why Americans wear shoes inside and do other cultures do so? Hilarity, until today I only knew the shoe cultures of Japan and Australia, now I know America’s too (Ftr your shoe culture sounds disgusting). So I think it is a thing. And I think that this culture feeds and is in turn sustained by the ideals of both siderism that infect your political discourse, and manipulated with breathtaking cynicism by republicans. I should also note that a lot of ideas that are now spreading around the world (like the road to hell is paved with good intentions that I mentioned above, or the idea that tipping is a good way to get better service) are obviously pushed strongest and most clearly by Americans. It really is A Thing.

Bianca steele, I think you’re right about the role of privilege in “managing” bpd. In my experience the only people who endure bpd bosses for any length of time are people who have no choice at all, or people who are so independently wealthy and empowered that they can walk away at any time and see their time with the boss as useful. This means that bpd bosses tend to be surrounded by powerless victims and enduring grifters. You see this in the White House – everyone who started working there not understanding what they were in for left quickly, and everyone else either has no choice or is in it for their own grift. This I suspect is going to make the Chief of Staff position very hard to fill when Kelly exits (and I think he was only tolerating it for the racism, which seems to be a project very dear to him). Only a grifter or a hardcore white nationalist will be willing to tolerate the screwed up situation. Remember when Spicer was basically performing trump’s style of narcissistic viciousness on tv to get plaudits – that’s an example of Trump’s bpd infecting the discourse.

politicalfootball: “Had Sarah Palin had a slightly better attention span — and perhaps a bit more desire for the presidency — she could have been the Republican nominee in 2012, and therefore could have had a real shot at the presidency.”

Had Sarah Palin inherited a fortune from her father — a fortune kept largely whole in the transfer through tax fraud — she would actually be Donald Trump.

From the OP: “Honestly, I couldn’t do it if I tried”

I think this is doubtful. What you are most probably doing is filtering. I’d bet before 9 a.m. each day you have thoughts like “that driver is an idiot” , “that outfit looks shabby on him, he needs to loses some weight,” “can’t anyone else around here turn off a light”

These are all low key rants relative to what a politician might say, but if you spoke every one of them outloud you’d quickly be viewed as a bore to be avoided. Equally, ff every time you said them a circle of pundits swarmed the comment for policy implications (he wants to outlaw drivers, he thinks idiots should lose their rights) you’d quickly find that even things you are quite sure are true no longer seem that way to everyones eye.

As others have suggested there are only so many truths in world – all the rest is speculation on where a particular observation lies along a spectrum of possibility, some of which will accord with others world views and some not.

I’m not so much of a skeptic about Frankfurt’s bullshitter. Igo so far as to think that it may in fact represent a far more important feature of our epistemology than the comparatively trivial “keeps an eye on the truth”. My favourite demarcation theory is therefore that science is “serious” and pseudo-science is bullshit, in precisely Frankfurt’s terms.

So, read from my perspective John, what you’re describing when you call the world of the obvious lie “alien” is just what distinguishes a serious, scientific worldview from a pseudoscientific one. The right (and all the other people who lie for self-serving ends) are indulging in pseudoscience and everyone who knows the real thing can recognise that the fake stuff just doesn’t cut the mustard.

My point about the ordinary unassailable truths that everyone acknowledges is that one of the many jobs of politics is to connect complex domains of knowledge to ordinary understandings – to make comprehensible (or at least internally accepted) the key features of the landscape within which any politics operates. It was one of the keys to British success over two centuries that the combination of a a collegiate cabinet, a parliament connected to the key constituencies and a thoroughly professional civil service kept policy firmly anchored to realities most of the time. Relatively few expeditions to Syracuse, marches on Moscow and white elephant projects. Brexit tells us this formula no longer operates. But the need remains, and reality remains as intransigent as ever.

Peter T

It was one of the keys to British success over two centuries that the combination of a a collegiate cabinet, a parliament connected to the key constituencies and a thoroughly professional civil service kept policy firmly anchored to realities most of the time. Relatively few expeditions to Syracuse, marches on Moscow and white elephant projects.

Just off the top of my head I can think of the First Anglo-Afghan War, the Crimean War, and Concorde. If I can think of three examples just off the top of my head there must be more. But how many more than three do there have to be before they can no longer be dismissed as ‘relatively few’?

On the question of truth and knowing whether you’re indifferent to it, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of people:

1. People who feel ordinary language states, and is meant to state, straightforward truths that are easy for everyone to understand. People in this category who find themselves wanting to state what they believe to be truths, but which they can’t state straightforwardly in ordinary language, use scientific language, poetry and metaphor, narrative examples, logical and mathematical analysis, and extra verbiage to try to convey their meaning to other people. Lies, for them, are using a kind of language (especially ordinary language) to say something untrue.

2. People who feel ordinary language is all there is, and any other kind of language is automatically a lie. Poetry is an evasion and thus a lie. Scientific language is a lie unless and until it can be conveyed in ordinary terms. Extra verbiage is an evasion and reflects unwillingness to admit the speaker/writer is wrong. But these people also feel truthful ordinary language can contain metaphors, vaguenesses, and statements that might appear at first glance to be lies, and still be (in their opinion) true.

Maybe obviously, I’m in category 1. It’s possible that we might tend to overestimate the straightforward truthfulness (in our sense) of the apparently ordinary language we hear, and reject too much of what we hear or read that falls in category 2. But I don’t believe either science or poetry can exist unless category 1 is taken as assumed. People who prefer category 2 have lots of reasons why people in category 1 have something wrong with them, but it sounds a bit overdetermined to my ears. People who speak in the language of category 2 are, in my opinion, almost always talking bullshit (it would be interesting to know if they feel the same way about the other category).

I don’t know if a person in one category can be educated into being in the other. It does become tiresome when most of what goes on in a debate amounts to veiled accusations of being in the wrong category. Even if it were true, what is to be done about it?

J-D

When you’re talking major power politics over several centuries, “relative’ covers a lot. Getting through major change without a civil war that kills a significant fraction of the population. Being occupied and looted. Committing so many resources to a fruitless endeavour that your independence is severely constrained (see Scotland and Darien). Stuffing up your environment irrecoverably…

Bruce – the first question is “is this do-able and, if so, at what probable cost?” That’s the question the civil/military services are there to answer. There’s nothing in the Brexit process to suggest the question was even asked. There’s very little in the process since to suggest that the answers have been given any serious attention by a significant fraction of the ruling classes.

J-D @78

Not being devastated is definitely not too low a bar. Since history is littered with the remains of countries and civilisations being devastated, let us start with not being devastated and then see if we can move on from there once we have achieved that.

the first question is “is this do-able and, if so, at what probable cost?” That’s the question the civil/military services are there to answer. There’s nothing in the Brexit process to suggest the question was even asked.

I think the question was asked and answered during the referendum debate and again, in different terms, during the initial negotiations with the EU. Proponents and opponents in the referendum debate and since have accused the Other Side of lying and deception, of course, and all the phenomena that Holbo discussed in the OP above, applies, as far as the confusion of such cacophony. And, what is actually “do-able” depends in very practical terms on what the EU is willing to concede, but EU officials, while circumspect with regard to their intent to use their superior power position to punish the UK, were remarkably clear.

So, I think the premise of your narrative as stated cannot be supported. Whether the ruling classes or political classes — choose your terms carefully, oddly otherwise-powerful interests (industrial business generally or The City) seem to be on the sidelines — were listening to the answer and how they were taking account of it in their rhetoric and policy gambits remains a more open question.

From a detached distance, what seems “do-able” is, in the common parlance, a Hard Brexit, which would entail a considerable investment in reviving or revising administrative structures and related law, tolerance (and preparation) for a short-term period of commercial chaos, and, finally, the highly uncertain business of moving the U.K. to a different path and regime of economic development. There is no majority in Parliament for a Hard Brexit, nor for what May was able to negotiate, which appears to amount very nearly to no Brexit at all. There has been some major investments in revising law and reviving administrative structures though it would not surprise me if this investment has remained woefully inadequate to the case and there’s apparently some “emergency” preparation for the expected chaos.

I cannot reject the narrative hypothesis that says May, perhaps only semi-consciously, has simply been stage-managing the coming of a crisis, in which a Majority in Parliament, heretofor elusive, can be found either for a Hard Brexit or for backing out entirely.

Moving the U.K. to a post-neoliberal economic regime will remain politically contested. That’s the aspect of the political struggle likely to remain murky. You cannot usefully apply cost-benefit criteria to the evaluation of a regime change. These changes of course happen and can be of enormous importance to national income, development and status, but are seldom recognized for what they are by objective observers until years or decades later, if then. If they are not punctuated by a period of crisis, they may not even be marked out by historians and labeled. Merely asserting that contemporary ruling or political classes are fully self-conscious of what they are doing has a tendency to sound to many ears as rather like a conspiracy theory.

RE: Peter T v. J-D @ 73, 78

As J-D points out Peter T’s interpretative crediting of British political stability and adaptiveness to peculiar institutions would be difficult to prove as stated by reference to indicative facts. Peter T’s thesis is intelligible and plausible enough to my ears; I nodded to myself when I read it. I admit I am a big-time anglophile, a student of the British 17th century civil war and “glorious revolution”. But, I think Peter T’s comment stands as an example of how our understandings of political issues tend to inhabit the subjunctive. We think of this kind of understanding of politics as a “truth” and may argue in its favor. And, we may accuse those who fail to assent to our subjunctive “truth” of denying reality. And, stated in the subjunctive, a counterfactual “truth” can feel more like a true fact than an actual true fact, whose meaning and veracity are necessarily somewhat in doubt.

Peter T #77: “nothing in the Brexit process… to suggest that the answers have been given any serious attention by a significant fraction of the ruling classes.”

Sir Ivan Rogers appears to agree with you. A few days ago he gave a remarkable, detailed, damning speech examining Brexit, the lies, and the possible path going forward:
https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2018/12/13/full-speech-sir-ivan-rogers-on-brexit/

Well then orange watch, perhaps you can explain to me why the American “expats” are so much more cynical than other “expats” I meet and why their cynicism aligns so nearly with what I read in The NY Times, national review, etc?

I’ll comment again to add that this cynicism has very real consequences for how politics is discussed in the USA. When I speak with my US friends about politics I run into this wall of contempt – for politicians, for the political process, for any notion of meaningful change. This is disabling, it wrecks their judgment and their understanding of what needs to change and how. On this blog during the 2016 election we saw a very obvious manifestation of this: the rather simple and obvious point that Trump is lying about his care for workers and has a long history of being a liar and a con-artist was dismissed because all politicians lie, Clinton is a bigger liar, and probably because he’s not a politician he is more honest. We have all seen how that ended up! At that time Obama’s legacy was assessed not in terms of the very real constraints on political action that arise from your messed up political system, but in terms of the inherent dishonesty of all politicians. He dropped a single payer system not because it was politically impossible but because he lied about it. None of Clinton’s campaign promises or policy ideas mattered because she was a liar.

You don’t see this kind of thing in Australian politics. Nobody believes for a moment that the Labor party is dishonest about its support for workers and is just lying to keep the unions in line; nobody for a moment believes that the Liberals are lying about their tax and regulation agenda. When politicians do lie on major issues they are punished viciously at elections, because we assume that politicians are honest about their purpose and deal honestly with the electorate; we accept small lies and compromises on the assumption that they are fundamentally being honest with us. Sure, the far left has a belief that the labor party is lying, and the far right has a belief that the liberals are lying, but this is a consequence of a specific belief about the flaws in their political model, not a general belief about politics and politicians, and it’s not a widespread cultural phenomenon in any case.

This cynicism also makes the US electorate vulnerable to this outsider savior complex, because surely Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders or Trump are more honest than politicians and we should vote for them, even if in reality their goals are murky and their political prospects poor. Even today on Twitter I was reading some left wing rube who believes Trump is to the left of Clinton on healthcare. The only way you can believe that in 2018 is if you think everything politicians say is a lie, so even the thoroughgoing cruelty of Trump’s actual policies is easily dismissed because you know Clinton is lying. I can tell you with 100% certainty that in Australia after workchoices was introduced there was not a single person in the country who believed that the liberals were to the left of labor on industrial relations. That’s because we aren’t rendered comatose by cynicism.

Another consequence of this cynicism is “both sides do it”, which renders all political analysis and judgment moot. This is why, despite the existence of the Federalist Society and the obvious evidence of its actions over the past 30 years, Sebastian_H can come on here and still, repeatedly, claim that the left is too focused on using the supreme court to overturn legislation. I see this all the time from ordinary Americans too – it doesn’t matter that the GOP does this or that evil thing, because Dems do too. Even this week we have Vox claiming that the Dems are engaged in partisan gerrymandering when in fact they’re putting in place a system to prevent it. Because both sides do it! And everyone lies! So that policy must be cynical!

This also leads to this uniquely American pathology of thinking your system is perfect but it’s being undermined by cynical politicians. In fact your system is a joke, and it grinds down even perfect politicians, which is why you’re in the state you’re in. But because you think everything is the fault of cynical people doing bad things, you don’t see any point in trying to fix the system – it would be fine if people just acted with the high ideals the founders intended!

I pointed out repeatedly here in 2016 that if you believe politicians lie, and you refuse to accept that they mean what they say, you will be a victim of the worst kinds of frauds and con artists. At the time I thought Sanders was an honest and well-meaning loser, but now I am increasingly thinking that he was a self-aggrandizing princess who helped sink the election to feather his own ego. But so many people here believed he was the true coming of christ, that Trump was an honest interloper, and that Clinton was a lying evil hag. When you believe this kind of cynical stuff, you make the perfect the enemy of the good, you misunderstand people’s motivations, and you end up being ruled by a lying fraudster who will see you all in hell before he gives you even an iota of what you really want.

TM

“But history is even more extensively littered with examples of countries and civilisations going hundreds of years without being devastated.”

What are those examples?

I have not compiled a comprehensive list, but if I made the attempt I would begin with the Old Kingdom of Egypt. Do you think there would be a shortage of examples between then and now?

I don’t want to get into the “what makes Britain special” question

Fair enough; but that is one of the points at issue in this discussion.

Britain has exhibited an unusual level of political stability over a period of more than three centuries

It’s not clear to me that Peter T’s ‘combination of a a collegiate cabinet, a parliament connected to the key constituencies and a thoroughly professional civil service’ can fairly be said to extend back that far.

There are now I think 42 European countries (not counting ministates like Andorra). Only a handful of them can be said to have been “going hundreds of years”, and hardly without devastation. … And you’ll hardly find better examples in Asia or Africa.

I was not taking the discussion to be restricted to only the most recent few hundreds of years. If the question was about which currently existing political system has the longest record of stable existence, the UK political system is the one I would nominate, but I think that’s a different question: after all, at any given point in history it would always be possible to nominate one of the existing political systems as having the longest record of stable existence, but it’s not clear that it would be reasonable to draw a conclusion in each case about the special merits of that system. I recall reading that some in classical Greece wanted to draw conclusions about the special merits of the Spartan system on the basis of its record for endurance: would they have been right?

IMHO bianca’s 3:05 pm (#75 as of this writing) deserves a front page discussion.

I recently re-read Bob Altemeyer’s “The Authoritarians”, a book that was cited more than a few times here on CT, because I came to think that this book explains a lot about today’s politics, in the USA and elsewhere.
I’m a bit surprised that nobody spoke about it in this discussion, since Altemeyer has a lot to say about the relationship between authoritarians and lies.

I’ll premise that in general I’m very suspicious of psychological explanations of political movements.
However I came to think that the “authoritarian” mode of thinking became relevant for modern day politics for this reason:
Currently we are leaving in a period of slow growth in most of the rich world, and as the pie grows more slowly, there is more conflict about how to split it.
In particular right leaning theories of the free markets don’t sound convincing today, so the political right switched from economical liberism to the idea (that was already present but not as strongly as it is today) that various redistributive policies take away money from YOU, my dear potential voter, and give it to some UNDESERVING guy, either the undeserving poor or some embezzling politician (“corruption” is generally interpreted by right leaners as “embezzlement”, not as getting kickbacks), possibly both.
So this kind of worldview tends naturally to lead towards pandering to authoritarian voters, or more likely to the authoritarian side of each voter.

With regard to wether Trump believes what he says or not, it’s irrelevant as this is mostly a shibboleth, a symbol of being part of a group and sharing this group’s values.

Here is Altemeyer on his website about Trump’s supporters (from the same website it is possible to download a free version of Altemeyer’s study).
_________________
Susceptibility to Liars

One consequence of the followers’ strong need for consensual validation, experiments have found, is that they will trust someone who says things they believe, even if there is a lot of evidence that the person does not really believe what he says. They’re just so glad to hear their views coming back to them, they ignore solid reasons why the person might be insincere or outright lying. Relatively UNauthoritarian people, on the other hand, are downright suspicious of someone who might have ulterior motives for reinforcing their beliefs.

It is therefore much easier to “con” authoritarian followers, as many a TV evangelist, radio shock-jockey and flag-waving politician knows. It’s no accident that Donald Trump, who had only loosely organized and not particularly right-wing political beliefs, became a Republican politician when he decided to declare war on both the Democrats and Republicans. That’s where the “suckers” are most concentrated, the people you can fool all of the time. (It’s another story, but the GOP largely brought this on itself by deliberately courting these folks.)

There’s a hidden danger to authoritarian leaders in all this. When they discover their followers will believe anything they say, even things that contradict something they said earlier, they get sloppy with their lies. Maybe Donald Trump always was careless with the truth. But it seems that over the past two years he has become downright reckless. His base will swallow anything, he has learned, so he just says the first thing that comes to mind.

The trouble is, for him and the future of his presidency, Truth happens. Constantly. It may be seen differently by various folks, but things did happen as they happened, not something else. You can only ignore the truth so long, and then reality will inevitably catch up with you. It will destroy you if you have been massively denying it.
_________________
https://www.theauthoritarians.org/

—–

On the more philosophical matter of thruth, IMO:

1) there is reality;
2) there are representations of reality, including mind representations, that by definiton are something different from the reality they represent;
3) “truth” is the relation of conformity between one representation and the reality it is supposed to represent, through some aspects (because the representation is not reality, so at least in some aspect it will differ from the reality it represents).

It follows that there can be no absolute, complete truth, since the only thing that conforms completely and absolutely with reality is reality itself and not a representation on it.

So how do we choose between different representations of reality?
Mostly on practical grounds: if I have to calculate the trajectory of a ball thrown in the air, if I’m just playing volleyball I will use some intuitive understanding of reality, if I’m projecting a cannonball I will use more complex pallistic theories etc.; I will use Lorentz transformations only if the ball is supposed to travel really fast. All these three models are “true” in their practical range of application.

But there is a difference in how we conceive the “practical” test.

If by “practical” I mean – useful to reach a certain result that we all agree on – then I’m speaking thruthfully;
If by “practical” I mean – people will react to my statement in the way I want – then I’m manipulative, and I might be lying if I ignore the efficacy of my “truth” relative to the objective these people think are sharing with me;
If by “practical” I mean – people will tell me they agree with me and they love me – then I’m just bullshitting (not liing in the strict sense), however this is a very natural behaviour, children do this all the time with their parents and teachers for example, and adults in a whole set of situations.

But the difference between truth, lie and bullshit here is not the same as the difference between truth and falsehood: the difference between truth and falsehood relies on the conformity between representation and reality, whereas the distinction between truth, lie and bullshit relies on the more or less manipulative approach of the speaker to the listeners, so it’s perfectly possible to lie (2nd sense) by telling some truth (1st sense).