Swimming in a Pool of Lies

We need to at least get to the shallow end.

I wish I was surprised that there are people who are not swayed by the Durham report, direct testimony from eyewitnesses or provable statistical fact, but I'm not.

Almost every left-wing media outlet has given the Durham report the same treatment Cathy Newman gave Jordan Peterson in the infamous Channel 4 interview where Newman reframed everything Peterson said into something he didn't say. The headlines, especially those around the Durham report and the Biden family crime enterprise are telling:

NYT: "House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden"

Never mind that every single family member surrounding Lunch Bucket Joe received payments from Romania, Ukraine, Russia and China, Hunter was ferried to places on Air Force 2, and VP Robinette met directly with Hunter's associates - but there is no way the Big Guy knew anything about any of it.

NYT: "After Years of Political Hype, the Durham Inquiry Failed to Deliver"

Nothing to see here, we know what really happened, says the Times. Never mind all the documentation that the entire "collusion" episode began with people, including Hillary, Obama and Biden, who knew it was all a lie from the get-go.

Randy Weingarten: "I was never for closing schools, I wanted to keep them open."

Never mind the mountain of evidence, much in her own words, to the contrary.

Congressional Democrats: "You know, the Republicans are really the ones who want to defund the police."

Not even they really believe that. Any time I read, see or hear anything from the left-leaning media, I'm always reminded of the Channel 4 "What you are saying" interview of Jordan Peterson conducted by Cathy Newman in which she reframed everything Peterson said into something he didn't say.

With this sort of delusion so ubiquitous, one might ask why people 1) refuse to question things that obviously are in question and 2) believe things that are objectively untrue?

Psychiatrists think three things are involved: the availability heuristic, emotional reasoning and confirmation bias.

The media plays a huge role in the availability heuristic, a mental shortcut that can lead people to overestimate the frequency of an event when that event is more “available” or vivid in our memory. By continual reptation of a narrative, the media fools people into believing that the information is more "true". By virtue of sheer volume of coverage of the "collusion" hoax, the media has kept the idea that something really happened viable - even when there is direct evidence that it is not.

Emotional reasoning, something about which I have written extensively, is simply people wanting things to be true because they feel strongly they should be true. Emotional reasoning can be expressed with anger, but is often noticed in psychiatric patients who suffer from depression. Many of these patients drew obviously untrue conclusions about themselves based on how they feel, rather than from how things actually are.

Often expressed in the form of circular reasoning, it will be something like "I feel depressed, so there must be something objectively wrong with my job, my marriage, my children, or other parts of my life."

They so strongly feel that Trump must be guilty, he is guilty.

Last, but not least, is confirmation bias - the tendency to seek out information that supports what we already believe and to ignore or discount messages that disprove our beliefs.

I, like every human, am susceptible to these three things - but being aware of them, I continually seek ways to break through them. Decades of living part of my life online has taught me to never take anything at face value and to read leftist books, articles and media reports in conjunction with the right wing sources I actually prefer.

I get particularly nervous when I have convinced myself I am right because that is the point when I could be the most wrong.

But there are far too many who are comfortable with believing lies, living lives controlled by a narrative instead of facts and truth. They can't afford to let go of their narrative or their reality will collapse - but at some level, they must know they are swimming in a tidal pool of lies.

Some people lie out of expedience or spite - or in a quest for advantage or power - but there are still people who value the truth.

In my observations, there are far too few of those people in institutions of power these days. It is critical that we identify these people and make sure they never have the power to influence our lives.