Nebraskans are living large – the Cornhuskers went undefeated and the price of beans is $20/bushel!
One needn’t be a football fan or a farmer, of course, to know this isn’t true. But stories this crazy are being believed more and more often, and Time Magazine recently recognized this by naming a number of imprisoned or slain journalists as Persons of the Year. Time’s editor-in-chief, Edward Felsenthal, explained that “the manipulation and abuse of truth” is one of the most serious problems we currently face, adding that the persecution of journalists is “the first move in the authoritarian playbook.”
The second move in the authoritarian playbook is to spread false information. It’s well known that people who only hear that their leader is right, that all his actions justified, often come to believe it. And today, when all forms of information – real and unreal – are just a mouse click away, it’s become clear that not only do people tend to believe what they’re told, they often seek information that confirms these beliefs. Thus societies around the world – including the United States – are becoming increasingly factionalized with each side empowered by a steady feed of information it wants to hear. Journalists are being persecuted across the globe for challenging misinformation – in May a Republican Congressman actually body slammed a reporter in Montana. And Donald Trump, who praised this act, has made it clear he would like to silence the media for reporting unflattering information about him.
The Washington Post recently ran an article about a liberal blogger, Christopher Blair, who earns $15,000 a month by inventing fake stories for conservative audiences. Blair goes out of his way to explain that his stories are pure fiction – his website, America’s Last Line of Defense, says this explicitly in six places. Yet conservatives flock to his site day after day (hence his incredible earnings from ad revenue).
Blair recently posted a photo of Trump with his former aides Hope Hicks (who is white) and Omarosa Newman (who is black). Blair said they were Chelsea Clinton and Michelle Obama and that Trump had extended an olive branch to them. Blair said they’d responded by giving Trump ‘the finger’ and called for them to be locked up for treason.
The Washington Post then interviewed one of Blair’s followers, a woman in Nevada. The Post reported that this woman “looked at the photo and nothing about it surprised her. Of course Trump had invited Clinton and Obama to the White House in a generous act of patriotism. Of course the ‘Demoncrats’, as she called Democrats, had acted badly and disrespected America.” A man from Florida wrote on Blair’s website “Not surprising behavior for such ill-bred trash. Jail them now!”
This behavior is so irrational that a senior State Department official, Matt B. Chessen, recently warned that fake news could destroy Western society, explaining that “the possibility of a post-truth world directly undermines the Enlightenment ideals of a search for truth and reason.”
Chessen is right – modern society was founded on ideals of truth and reason, and never before has this foundation been in more danger. But as the Washington Post story illustrates, the problem isn’t just that people aren’t getting the truth, it’s that many willingly ignore it. And while humans are a mix of rational and irrational tendencies, when has abandoning the former in favor of the latter ever led to anything good? If wishful thinking is our only guide, the Huskers will go undefeated every season and farmers will be rich, but what good will that be if we’re living large only in our imagination?
This past Sunday marked the 40th anniversary of the infamous Jonestown massacre in Guyana. Followers of an increasingly deranged Jim Jones first shot the members of a Congressman Leo Ryan’s fact finding party and then, in fear of the consequences, committed mass suicide. And though some members were murdered for resisting this madness, many willingly drank poison, never questioning Jones’ wisdom.
Jones was a monster – in all, 918 people died because of him – and he serves as a sobering reminder that monsters are real. The questions still echo as strongly today as they did then: “How could such a thing happen?” “Why did so many people go along with his insanity?” Something obviously got very out-of-balance, yet no one seemed to notice until it was too late.
Today we try to trivialize monsters by turning them into movie stereotypes and letting our kids go door-to-door dressed as them at Halloween. Yet the irony of our view of monsters – that they are both props for our entertainment and actual threats – was particularly evident this Halloween when at the same time trick or treaters were proudly parading through our downtown certain politicians were doing their best to frighten us about a caravan of ragtag ‘monsters’ a thousand miles from our southern border.
Monsters have been with us forever, and our ancestors feared them at least as much as many fear asylum seekers today. Monsters tell us something about our world – the root of the word “monster” is also the root of the word “demonstrate.” To the ancients the appearance of a monster was a message that the world was badly out of balance and that unless society responded, terror and ruin lay ahead.
Jim Jones was not the first to warn us of the danger unscrupulous religious leaders pose; 40 years later we find ourselves enmeshed in a monstrous international sex scandal that calls into question the moral authority of the Catholic Church. Religious institutions are supposed to promote morality – something here is horribly wrong.
Monstrous gun violence is now commonplace – around 35,000 Americans are killed by guns every year with another 90,000 injured, including over 8,000 children. And it’s only getting worse. From 1984 to 2004 incidents where 10 or more people were killed occurred once every four years. In the past 4 years there have been 8; so far this year there’ve already been 4. Something is horribly wrong.
More monstrous yet is the increase in politically-motivated violence – just recently 11 Jewish worshippers were slaughtered in Pittsburg. And though this violence comes from both sides of the political spectrum, it’s a growing problem on the Right. The Right’s propensity for violence has become so serious that Rich Lowry recently warned on the conservative National Review’s website that those on his party’s far right believe “violence feels great” and that “fighting solves everything.” Something is horribly wrong.
And this threat isn’t coming just from the fringes – Washington state Republican lawmaker Matt Shea recently circulated a memo entitled “Biblical Basis for War” calling for the U.S. to become a Christian theocracy and nonbelievers to be killed. Are supporters of a politician like this much different than Jim Jones’ followers? Why can’t people see how dangerous this way of thinking is?
Every day we seem to encounter new monstrosities, but rarely do we do much about the problems they demonstrate. But we ignore monsters at our peril – as the ancients learned from experience, when monsters roam the land the best defense is to take a hard look in the mirror to see what it is within ourselves that makes such horrors possible.