Let’s talk about Bob.

Bob is your average male adult citizen of a democracy. He has just received a piece of information that conflicts with his political views.

There are two possible ways to respond to this input :

A. Accept the input and change his views accordingly, or

B. Reject the input in order to maintain not just the belief but his own emotional and intellectual stability and integrity.

But rejection of this information is no mere act of will. Bob can’t just wish it away. After all, not even very intellectually compromised people can reject new information without some kind of justification.

That would be too much like consciously lying to yourself, and that dog don’t hunt. It is impossible for the human mind to knowingly believe what it knows not to be true.

So there has to be a process for negating the information. One way is to come up with well reasoned arguments as to why the information must be false.

But not everyone has that much brainpower to spare. The average person, in fact, just wants to get through their daily lives without spending a lot of time contemplating.

And that leads us to the real topic of today’s discussion : the means by which they negate the input they do not like.

They simply invent whatever information they need to refute it.

And then believe it.

It’s both horrifying and, in a sick way, fascinating.

Let’s go back to Bob. Let’s say Bob believes that everyone on welfare is a lazy bum mooching off the system. And in conversation with friends, he says this.

But then someone says they were on welfare for a year and they looked for jobs the whole time, and now they are successful and paying back into the system as a hard working taxpayer.and parent.

This is Bob’s moment of (un)truth. He could change his mind. But that’s scary and a lot of work. He goes with plan B instead.

In this case, plan B means Bob says. “Well, yeah, sure, but I saw this family in line at the grocery store wearing mink coats and buying steak and lobster and laughing at what suckers we all were for paying for it all. ”

THIS NEVER HAPPENED. EVER. Bob categoricall and definitively has never had an experience even remotely like this.

But because his friends have views similar to his, they accept this story as true despite its cartoonish absurdity.

And because they all believe it, now Bob believe it too. He now honestly believes this happened. Sure, a small part of his mind retains the fact that he made it up, but otherwise his imagining it happening is now equivalent to a memory of it happening.

If his friends had laughed and rejected it, it would not have become this pseudo-memory. But because they now believe it, and Bob has always taken his views from those around him in his efforts to fit in,. it’s now OK for him to believe it too.

For him, this was a successful social interaction. He fit in. He got positive feedback from his peer group. They all verified what they had in common this way.

Whether or not it is literally true is not particularly important.

And the thing is, Bob and his friends will now tell this story to other likeminded people, who, like bob’s friends, will also accept it as true because it fits with their existing views.

In fact, in this hyper-connected day and age, Bob’s completely ficticious (but believed) story can quickly spread all over the internet in a matter of minutes and be added to the arsenal of arguments right wingers use to justify their positions.

Right wing media’s job is to perform this same function on a mass media scale. Fox News works hard to find all the best ways to tell its viewers everything they need to know in order to suppress any and all facts they don’t like.

This provides the vital service of keeping their viewers safe from their moral enemy, doubt. A state of doubt terrifies conservatives and they want out of it ASAP, and are therefore not that fussy about what exit route they take.

It is, fundamentally, the resolution of an emotional state, not a function of logic, and therefore cannot be blunted or prevented via logic.

And once you know this, it is easy to see how enormous swathes of patently insane and absurd (and sometimes downright evil) beliefs are maintained in the right wing world.

Not that this is an exclusively right wing phenomenon. Bob could just as easily been a liberal hearing something good about nuclear power and inventing a news story about how that technology they were talking about is hyper toxic and made of baby seals and the tears of elephants.

However, I chose to lead with right wing examples because I think that’s the intellectual rot that is threatening the world at the moment. Modern conservatism has become an entire alternate reality as fictional as Narnia or Westeros, and that is largely because in this age of information, right wing beliefs become harder and harder to maintain and therefore require larger and larger departures from reality.

This puts a lot of strain on the right wing media and right wing politics in general. Reality continues to invade no matter how hard they work to keep it out. The kind of strongly emotional button-pushing rhetoric they normally use to club their reason into submission is not cutting it any more because Trump and his ilk have gotten so damn bad that even Fox News can’t explain it away.

When you say, “Go back to where you came from!” to 4 women, three of whom are American citizens, it’s hard for your followers to pretend that isn’t racist.

So even Fox News is starting to break down. They have no choice but to ask the usual pundits the tought questions at least some of the time because their audience is struggling with those very same questions.

And they are asking them in a way that reflects their struggle to find some kind of sanity in it all. Some kind of limit to how far this madness will take them.

And I find that very encouraging. This must be part of how a generation of conservatism finally breaks down. It breaks down when the masses, who have swallowed everything so far, are finally fed someone they simply cannot tolerate.

Only then do they finally have the strength to reject it.

And that honestly makes me want to give them a great big hug.

No “I told you so”. that will just chase them back to Trump.

These people are deeply unhappy and looking for a new source of safety.

Let’s be that source for them!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I definitely feel like my consciousness leveled up when I realized that my faith that you are always better off knowing the truth was just that : faith.

Not reason or logic or any sort of rational belief. Logic does not support this very foundational belief of mine.

After all, anyone with an imagination and a IQ above room temperature can come up with scenarios where you are definitely not better off knowing the truth.

For an off the cuff example, imagine that someone has been in a terrible accident and the only thing that will save their life is a risky and terrifying operation.

Like, they are going to take this guy’s entire brain out of his head, or something.

Then the patient regains consciousness, which is fine as long as they stay calm. Any rise in blood pressure, however, could kill them.

Are you going to tell them the truth that will probably kill, or lie and say that everything is fine and that they are just going to go back to sleep for a while and after that everything will be back to normal?

I get the feeling most people’s examples would be less imaginative and less gruesome.

Ah well, c’est la vie, c’est la guerre.

Anyhow…. my point (I do have one) is that my belief that I was always better off with the truth was not based on reasons so much as hope. Hope and a vague sense that I was probably better off knowing the truth more times than not.

That is a logical model known to statisticians as “guessing”.

In fact, in the final analysis, it seems to me that my faith in the truth was based mostly on the fact that my personality and cognitive style leaned in that direction anyhow, so I might as well spin that as a good thing.

I have always had a very analytical mind that relentlessly sought answers. I was, after all. the kid who found out Santa didn’t exist by bombarding my siblings with so many highly on-point questions that there was no way they could maintain the illusion and had to admit Santa was not real. It was just Mom and Dad.

To be honest, that was a huge relief. The world made sense again.

So no matter what, I was going to relentlessly seek the truth like a shark on the hunt. My belief that I am always better off with the truth, then, seems like that selfsame shark grandly proclaiming that the best food in the world is sushi.

Well what else was he gonna eat? Barbecue?

This error of faith seems relatively minor. Our society favours truth, at least in the abstract. Honesty is a virtue. We tell people to be realistic about things. Most people would agree that you’re better off with the truth than a lie most of the time.

And taken in that context. it is minor. But there is an underlying truth that represents something far more dire.

A inability to ever shield oneself from the truth.

I have made noises before about how a truly rational, logical person must be naked before the truth, without reservation or defense, and that sure sounds noble and brave and exactly what Western society teaches us to believe.

It’s also how someone like me boasts about what an intellectual badass they are.

That’s almost adorable. Sad, but adorable.

But for the most part, it’s feckless bullshit. All volts, no current. Sure, it sounds good, but any serious attempt to implement it will fail.

The human psyche is simply not capable of living like that.

That’s why most people have a certain amount of bullshit in their lives. Things that are not strictly true but that they have to belive in order to keep their psyche stable and their self-worth in functional shape.

This universaility of bullshit is something I have known all my life. To me, with my unusual mind, it was obvious that people protected themselves from the sharp corners and rough edges of life with beliefs that were not supportable by reason.

Of course, they didn’t know this. That would have defeated the whole purpose of it. This only worked if the person’s metaconsciousness could fool the conscious mind into accepting the beliefs without questioning them.

And as far as I can tell, that works perfectly well for most people.

But then there’s mental mutants like myself. I was born with that relentless hunger for the truth and the constant demand that thinjgs fit together and make sense before I can accept them as real.

This temperament makes self-delusion like I have been describing quite tricky. I think it’s the main thing that has kept me from developing the psychological defenses I see in others, and I think that has hurt me terribly in the long term.

Turns out that when you’re naked before the truth, you get real cold. Go fig.

I have little to no ability to shield myself from the dark truths of the world. I don’t have that little shard of consciousness that intercepts information on the way in and deflects, diffuses, or even destroys the stuff that will be injurious to the psyche.

I soak it all up like a sponge and add it to my worldview, without exception.

And sure, that leads to an interior world that’s cold as hell, but I have taught myself to ignore the cold, or see it as a good thing.

It just proves how much better I am than other people. You know, that I am not a delusional wimp like them.

And that’s all well and good, right?

Except, oh wait, I am crazy and miserable and full of pain.

Kind of suggests there might be something I have overlooked.

Like that sometimes cold comfort is just plain not enough. And that this hard edged mind of mine cuts me up and cuts me down far more than it hurts anyone else. And that the path to feeling truly alive and real is not one that can be predicted or planned, and it definitely cannot be verified.

To recover, then, is to risk believing things which are not “true.”

Now I am going to lie down and think about that for a while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.