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.