Fact and Falsehood in an Age of Truthiness

Autistic elites (like me) should remember we don't have a monopoly on truth

One of the most pervasive laments in American life today concerns the epidemic of misinformation and disinformation, the emergence of a “post-truth society.” I myself have shared in this worry, for instance in my Substack a couple of months ago, or my recent column on the ascent of conspiracy theories in the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Such laments, however, can often have an air of elitism about them, betraying a neurotic or pedantic literalism that inadvertently reinforces the very phenomenon they complain about.

Think about the ubiquity of “fact-checkers” now in the age of Trump. Inspired by the Politifact Truth-o-Meter launched by the Tampa Bay Times in 2007, with its memorable “Pants on Fire” label, nearly every national news outlet has made the checking and truth-labeling of candidates’ statements a regular feature of its reporting since—including in the middle of live presidential debates. The exasperation of journalists at just how many pinocchios (WaPo’s falsehood rating) Donald Trump would rack up every week was matched only by the exasperation of average Americans at the (to them) obvious double-standard on display. After all, for all the apparent objectivity of the language of “facts,” very few of the statements in question could be assessed quite that straightforwardly.

If a candidate says something like “illegal border crossings have tripled under the current administration” that’s a statistical claim that should be pretty readily verifiable or falsifiable, even if there may be some wiggle room based on different definitions or statistical sources. But many other claims made by candidates or elected officials are not so simple. “My opponent’s policies have led to out-of-control inflation; you can’t even buy eggs anymore!” for instance, leaves a lot more room for bias in the fact-checker. A liberal politician making such a statement is likely to be interpreted charitably so as to render the statement “Mostly true,” whereas a conservative making the statement might be subjected to scrupulous dissection: inflation was already on its way up; inflation is now on its way down; the biggest factor was policies by the Federal Reserve, outside the control of the elected official, etc. Indeed, an overly pedantic fact-checker might even feel the need to respond, “ACK-tually…the vast majority of Americans can still afford to buy eggs, and are still buying them.”

The disproportionate use of such pedantry against candidates like Trump need not reflect overt bias, however, even if it often does. In part, I suspect it is the result of different speaking and thinking styles. Elites have been trained in what Iain McGilchrist would characterize as hyper-left-brained approaches to the world: the use of data, statistics, and precise, logically-consistent language to sort the world into neat boxes which can be effectively fact-checked. They are very bad with metaphors, similes, and folksy saying which reflect a more traditional “right-brained” approach, which thinks in pictures and impressions and is concerned with giving an account of the whole rather than its parts. This has been accentuated by the differences between oral and digital communication, the former more characteristic of less-educated voters, the latter of elites. As Barba-Kay writes: “Oral words are just one way in which I know you as an agent in the world; your digital words, unsettled from any other way of knowing you, are asked to bear the total burden of your identity.” “When our main way of knowing each other is a matter of words alone, we are thus driven to use words as an unambiguous index of culpability, to judge them beyond a shadow of a doubt at the expense of possible nuance” (116).

This, I suspect, explains much of the difference between how Trump’s supporters and Trump’s opponents interpret his words. The latter, often highly-educated urban-dwelling digital natives trained in various forms of symbol-manipulation, turn to each other horrified, “Did you hear what he said? He’s going to suspend the rule of law/end democracy/deport non-whites/etc.!” Whereas his supporters, throatily cheering on the controversial statements, might shrug off their more radical interpretations when pressed: “Well, what he’s really sayin’ is just that it’s time we stood up for hard-workin’ Americans and started securin’ our borders again.”

Now, that’s not to say that the metaphor-loving Trump supporters are right and the literalistic Trump opponents are wrong. In a world in which words have lost their ability to signify, speech can no longer be held accountable to an objective standard, rendering “truth” an increasingly fuzzy and slippery notion. As a result, we find ourselves sliding into a culture of “truthiness,” the term Stephen Colbert coined in 2005: “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.” I wrote about this phenomenon a couple months ago:

“Searching for certainty and clarity in an increasingly chaotic world, we try to connect the few dots we see (or we think we see) into a Narrative. The Narrative makes sense of things—it explains a bunch of seemingly disparate phenomena, it accounts for unpleasant experiences we’ve had, it gives us the satisfying clarity of Good Guys and Bad Guys, and best of all, it supplies plausible motivations for the actions of the Bad Guys.  

The Narrative makes so much sense of so many things that, once it comes into focus for us, it just feels true. Mistaking coherence for correspondence to reality, explanatory power for facticity, we know it must be true. Armed with the Narrative, we set out to connect more dots, and explain more phenomena. When we find an inconvenient number of data points that just don’t seem to fit, we convince ourselves that that’s exactly what we should expect if the Narrative were in fact true—of course the Bad Guys would cover their tracks and sweeten their words with plausible deniability. Thus, we come to take the non-correspondence of the facts as further proof of the Narrative—not realizing that in doing so, we have rendered the Narrative completely unfalsifiable, and locked ourselves within a sealed epistemic capsule. When we go to share the Narrative with others, however, we worry that they, not yet being True Believers, may be overly swayed by those pesky facts which don’t seem to conform. Accordingly, we shade or slant the truth, distorting the facts and lying about others, and convincing ourselves all the while that these lies are more true—in a poetic sense, at least—than the facts themselves.”

I stand by all of that, and yet the problem is that there really is such a thing as “poetic truth.” We make use of it all the time when telling stories, adding vivid details or fast-forwarding for narrative effect, and summarizing people’s words rather than quoting verbatim. Indeed, because we know that most of communication is unspoken—a matter of body language and gesture, tone of voice and demeanor—we may sometimes “put words into someone’s mouth” when relating how they reacted or came across in a tense situation, as a shorthand way of describing to others what their nonverbals were communicating. Or else we might deliberately soften someone’s language when recounting an intemperate remark, because the original context made it clear they were being hyperbolic. Obviously, there is a time and place where such imprecision is inappropriate, such as the witness stand in a court of law, where to be quite truthful, I would need to meticulously recount which words were said and which words were unsaid even if strongly implied. A good attorney, judge, and jury, however, will seek to re-integrate such literal details within a more holistic picture of the situation.

Today’s fact-checking journalists, however, never seem to get beyond pedantic dissection. Consider this passage from an otherwise fairly good recent article in The Atlantic on the post-hurricane misinformation epidemic:

“It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene. Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. ‘Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,’ Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. ‘I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.’”

There are plenty of good evidences one might cite of “the nihilism of the current moment.” But I’m not sure that this is one of them. It seems almost certain that, of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who had to flee Helene, a few thousand probably took their puppies with them, with maybe a few hundred little girls at some point during the ordeal cradling their favorite pet to their chests. If no one actually captured such an image, and instead shared an AI-generated stand-in signifying the plight of these evacuees, is this an occasion for national hand-wringing? Not really. Would I share such an image? Probably not. Do I think it’s a sign of late-stage nihilism? I rather doubt it. And would it have been cited as such if Amy Kremer had represented Georgia on the Democratic National Committee? Almost certainly not.

Republican voters reading such articles cannot help but feel that the fetish for fact-checking is being weaponized against them. Consider this AP Fact Check story after Helene, which proceeded to methodically walk through a series of false claims made about the situation in western North Carolina. It began with the heading “the government cannot create or manage hurricanes” and proceeded to “the federal government was falsely accused of a lack of response following Helene.” But obviously, these two statements are not dealing with “facts” in remotely the same sense of the word. The former is addressed to a genuine (and appalling) case of disinformation and conspiracy theory; the latter to a widely-felt sense of outrage at the genuine (and appalling) slowness of the federal government’s response in western North Carolina. Could one rattle of a list of facts about various pieces of paper that Biden had signed? Sure. “Biden approved major disaster declarations for Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia, allowing survivors to access funds and resources to jumpstart their recovery immediately. The White House announced that the president spoke by phone on Sept. 29 with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp; North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper; Scott Matheson, mayor of Valdosta, Georgia, and Florida Emergency Management Director John Louk.” Does this in any way invalidate the broadly-felt sense of betrayal among many in storm-affected areas? No.

Again, it is hard not to feel that “facts” in our current environment have been reduced to all-purpose ass-covering tools for elite institutions and governing authorities. The result is that disgruntled populists lean ever harder into metaphors, anecdotes, and “truthiness,” rendering them easier and easier for elites to dismiss. I’m reminded of Trump’s 2016 nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, where he painted a dark picture of a nation engulfed in a wave of violent crime, provoking fits of apoplexy from the fact-checkers. When one of his surrogates, Newt Gingrich, was pressed by CNN’s Alysin Camerota with statistics showing a decline in crime, he responded, “"The average American, I will bet you this morning, does not think that crime is down, does not think that we are safer….People feel more threatened. As a political candidate, I'll go with what people feel.” Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel responded at Forbes with a fervid denunciation of such demagoguery, and damning charts such as this one:

At the time, my sympathies were mostly with Siegel, and they still are: feeling something doesn’t make it true. That said, while feelings are a poor index of hard facts, they sometimes point us to deeper realities that a fixation on data can conceal. Or, put differently, while a feeling or hunch usually can’t put its finger on the exact source of a problem, it can often alert you that there’s a real problem somewhere in the neighborhood. The wise response is to start digging until you find the problem, not to scornfully dismiss the feeling until it can express itself in an empirically-rigorous form. If Americans think crime is rising, that means they feel less secure, more fragmented as a society, and less confident that the rule of law is doing its job. Why might that be? Is that something a presidential candidate should be concerned about?

Trump won in 2016 because he told ordinary people that he took their ordinary fears and worries seriously, rather than autistically lecturing them about how they just didn’t know how to read a graph. Were many of those worries paranoid? Sure. Did he stoke and encourage even more paranoia? Absolutely! But are elites really going to win back the trust of ordinary folks by insisting that only those with advanced degrees understand how the world works? Hardly.