On the Nature of Gullibility: A Crabby Boomer’s Rant

When I was a teenager in the early 1970s, I remember noticing that when we wanted to express an opinion, sometimes we began it with the phrase “I feel”: “I feel the movie didn’t really live up to the hype.”  It was a way of softening the statement and not coming off as a know-it-all.  People living in other cultural moments or those with slightly more confidence in the truth of their opinion might have simply said, “The movie didn’t really live up to the hype.”  Perhaps they assumed you knew it was an opinion, since it was you who was saying it.

Somewhere in the middle lay “I don’t think the movie really lived up to the hype,” which didn’t suggest the opinion was a matter of personal emotional response but did qualify the judgment as being to some extent subjective.

In those days, it was generally assumed that feelings per se said something about who we were and not necessarily (though sometimes it did) about something that existed or happened outside of ourselves.  The relationship between an event and how we felt and thought about it was what created an experience, which was not the same thing as what had actually happened.  If you felt something was true but you didn’t have factual evidence to back up your feeling, you might say that you “intuited” the truth of the statement.  This is pretty much the same thing we find in the mysticism of all ages: the truth we experience is ineffable, not because of the poverty of language in itself but because it isn’t fundamentally conceptual.  It is a felt conviction.

Time passed, as it does, and I noticed a new kid on the cultural block: the notion that feelings enjoy the same status as knowledge.  I first encountered this as a college professor, when I discovered that most of my students took it as axiomatic that all opinions were equally valid and that the guarantor of an opinion’s validity was simply that they “thought” it was valid.  Even as a child of the ‘60s, a period in which we questioned virtually every truism and conventional wisdom, I found this surprising, and not a little disturbing.  Of course, knowledge can, and often should, have its origin in a personal encounter with an idea, or even a feeling about it, but knowledge and feeling are not the same thing, and it’s useful to distinguish between them.  Like Plato, I would even go so far as to say it’s crucial to do so, on both the personal and political level.

Time again passed, as it does, and I observed that the elevated epistemological status of feeling had permeated the language of love and relationship.  In my experience, and perhaps not only in mine, the notion that feelings were not only important but that they were inherently true was expressed most frequently by women, who naturally, having had their perspectives and experiences sneered at and dismissed for centuries, wanted a voice, one that didn’t depend on logical proof and the rhetorical tools by which men had neutralized them for so long.  In this they were validated and supported by psychologists, therapists and psychoanalysts, who had long known that we can get into serious trouble if our feelings are repressed and that there is a very real truth to be found in our emotions.  By the 1990s it was a mainstream assumption, at least in the United States, that feelings were “true.”  Thus, the following familiar argument that arises between people in a romantic relationship: “But that’s not true!  It didn’t happen!  I didn’t do that!”  vs. “That’s how it felt, and if I felt it, it’s true!  You can’t tell me my feelings are wrong!”

Of course – and I can only hope this is obvious – the problem here lies in how we are using the word “true.”  If we are talking about the essential value of an emotion and the importance of taking it seriously, then it would be silly to question the validity of a feeling or to argue against it by saying “it’s not true.”  If someone feels something strongly, they should take it seriously, because it is telling them something, and if you care for someone who feels something strongly, you should take it seriously, too.  The feeling itself is a fact, apart from what may or may not have happened in the outside world.  In this sense, feelings are “true,” though I would probably use the words “valid” and “real” instead.

However, if we are using the word “true” to refer to the relationship between a statement and the reality it claims to refer to, then feelings – or rather, the assertions that arise from feelings – are not necessarily true. 

Truth is a quality that we look for in an expression, most often a verbal expression that claims to represent reality.  Etymologically, it carries the sense of “loyalty,” “firmness” and honesty.  It implies that the representation is accurate; it is “loyal” to reality.

Truth in this sense emerges from the application of reason to verifiable facts.  No amount or intensity of feeling can save a person from this requirement.  To be clear: I’m not saying that in every case this kind of truth is more valuable than the truth of feeling; I’m only saying they are different.  This is what allows me, in my dealings with my wife, to dispense with long arguments about what happened, what one of us did or what our motivations might have been.  It allows me to focus on what really matters, which is what she feels.  I can remain agnostic on questions of “what really happened” – as long, of course, as we don’t drift too insanely from the credible (e.g., I claimed to have been abducted by aliens) – and focus on the important truth of her experience.

But there is clearly a role for the other kind of truth, and I think some of the most troubling developments in our society lately spring from a widespread failure to draw the distinction I’ve described.

When Kellyanne Conway characterized the demonstrably false numbers Sean Spicer gave for Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration as “alternative facts,” most of us gasped.  (When she doubled down by defining “alternative facts” as “additional facts and alternative information,” we gasped again, because “alternative facts” doesn’t mean either of those things.)  We gasped not so much because she used the phrase as because she did it so blatantly – she actually said it in public, as though no one would blink an eye.  We are, it’s true, used to hearing politicians lie through their teeth (see Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld), but this was different.  It was a “meta-lie” – a lie about lying.  And not surprisingly, it became perhaps the hallmark of the Trump presidency: lie after lie after shameless lie.

But lest liberals and progressives get too smug, the lack of interest in objectively verifiable truth is an equal-opportunity problem.  Case in point, the “my truth” movement.  A statement is not only “true” because I say it is, but you are required to respect it as truth.  This is a depressing mutation of 1960s-style individualism.  I’m fully prepared to accept that “your truth” is important to you and represents a kind of personal truth that matters not only to you but maybe to others “similarly situated,” as the lawyers say.  I’m also prepared to listen to your truth and defend your right to express it.  But if you tell me I must accept “your truth” as truth in the faithful-representation-of-the-facts sense, you lose me.  I’ll make that decision for myself, thank you.

Similarly, the “believe women” movement in its most extreme forms verges on the silly.  Obviously, women victims of rape and other forms of sexual abuse have been dismissed, shamed and intimidated for … well, forever.  Obviously, there is a theory out there, mostly among men, that “she must have been asking for it.”  Obviously, our social institutions (police departments, hospitals, etc.) do not support victims of rape even close to adequately.  And obviously, we have to stop automatically disbelieving the woman who says she was sexually abused.

But isn’t it a little patronizing to apply a different standard to women’s accounts than we do to men’s?  Aren’t there sometimes reasons why both men and women make up stories?  Isn’t that one reason we have (admittedly flawed) law and courts and lawyers?  Isn’t this why we have the 5th and 14th Amendments, which guarantee due process?  Isn’t this why we have the word “alleged” – because an allegation is not true until it’s been proven?  It’s never a bad idea to take the position that “just because you say it don’t make it so.”

And Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump, “my truth” and “believe women” all have this in common: it is acceptable in our mainstream culture to forego the usual tests of the truthfulness of a statement: reliable sources of information and the drawing of logical inferences from that information.  We’re okay saying, “I feel it really strongly, so it must be true and you need to accept that it’s true.”  We implicitly accept that if something is repeated often enough, it must be true, whether the repetition comes in the form of media reports or as the refrains we hear from our circle of friends and acquaintances.  We allow ourselves to be bullied into self-censorship by our community, be it actual or virtual.  We do not want the tsuris that too often comes from thinking for oneself.  In a culture dominated by social media and the Internet, where we rarely discuss and debate issues face-to-actual-face, it’s easy to see how truth has become an indistinct and ennervated thing.

Which brings me to what sparked this train of thought in the first place.  I’ve often wondered why exactly the people who vote for Donald Trump don’t seem to have a problem believing the demonstrably false and frequently fatuous assertions he makes.  Can it be they simply don’t register them as false?  Do some or most of them know his statements are untrue but like him anyway because they don’t care?  Or is something else at work?

A couple of days ago Trump was interviewed by a Newsmax hack who served up every softball question imaginable.  Nonetheless, Trump launched into a series of off-script whoppers, one of which stuck with me.  “[Hillary Clinton] used all sorts of acid testing and everything else, they call it BleachBit but it’s essentially acid that will destroy everything, you know, within 10 miles.”  Wow.  Trump is referring to the allegation, long ago debunked but endlessly repeated by him, that Clinton had used acid to destroy emails on her computer.  The original accusation was that she had used a software program called BleachBit to erase emails (which I think is true), but soon – possibly because it seemed more dramatic – the software morphed into actual bleach that presumably was poured over the computer, which liquid was in turn upgraded later to acid.  It’s hard to imagine a collection of ones and zeroes, which is what emails are, being destroyed by a physical liquid, but there you have it.  Very soon, as Philip Bump notes in the March 14, 2024, Washington Post, the liquid in question transformed mysteriously from a base (bleach is a base) to an acid.  And in his interview, Trump adds that the “acid” will destroy everything within 10 miles.  I’m no expert, but I doubt there is an acid – or a bleach, for that matter – that will destroy everything within 10 miles, unless it’s a kind of acid tsunami, which I suppose is possible.  Still, I think most of us have observed the tendency of habitual liars to embellish their lies with unnecessary details that for some reason they think make them more believable.  In any case, no one will be surprised to learn that out there in Trump Land the acid fable was widely treated as truth, if not holy writ.  Even if five minutes of thought or five minutes with a high school science student could have told you it was hogwash. 

You can see where I’m going with this.  Many of us are appalled by what we deem the ignorance and willful stupidity of the Trump fanboys and -girls.  But what do we expect in a world where the standards of truth and fact have taken such a nose-dive?  It’s a world authorized by both left and right, by immigrant-haters and identity-politicians, by those who consider themselves virtue-and-justice warriors and those who just want to keep their status, power and wealth.  We live in a kingdom where reality is what we say it is, which is to say what we want it to be.  We denigrate those who ask impertinent questions like “How did you get from A to B?” or “What are your sources for this claim and why do you consider them reliable?”  Skepticism about the possibility of knowledge runs amok and actual experts are ignored.  People who occupy different spots on the ideological spectrum have, of course, their own versions of solipsism, but all the versions are problematic.  To claim the moral authority to push back against the barefaced lies of the far right, liberals and progressives and whatever might be left of something you could call “the left” have to interrogate their own abandonment of the notion of objective reality.  In other words, you can’t rake the Trumps and Jim Jordans and Elise Stefaniks over the coals for lying and spreading conspiracy theories if you insist that people accept “your truth” and “believe women” no matter what.  You’ve lost the high ground then and are part of the problem.  You are enabling the gullibility of an entire culture. Or at least that’s how I feel.