Why aren't people interested in facts anymore?
Has it always this way? Lessons from the Tower of Babel, and an open thread...
This has happened a thousand times. I don’t know why this time bothered me more than others, but I’m really concerned about how we’re losing the ability to reason without being hijacked by our own amygdala.
The backdrop is Zelensky, Trump, and Vance going at each other in a meeting at the White House, which has been all over the news for days. American conservatives generally thought it was great. Elite media and the globalist establishment thought it was terrible. The memes have flowed forth.
Amongst the coverage, I saw a clip of MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace on Instagram claiming to ‘fact-check’ JD Vance for ‘lying’ during the meeting.
“I just want to fact-check JD Vance… he lied about Zelensky not thanking the American people,” she said. “Here is that message of gratitude.”
Cut to an old clip of Zelensky thanking the American people, the Biden Administration, Congress, and the House across both parties for their support in the war.
The post, from a few days ago, has over 200K likes and thousands of comments, mostly variations of “Thank you for fact-checking!” and “Shame on JD Vance!”
(MSNBC also ran a whole segment spinning the idea that Trump and Vance implied that Zelensky had never thanked America.)
Slam dunk for MSNBC?
It would be, if Wallace had represented Vance’s statements truthfully. Except, she didn’t. Here’s what Vance actually said:
VANCE: Have you said thank you once?
ZELENSKY: A lot of times.
VANCE: No in this entire meeting, one time? No. In this entire meeting have you said thank you? You went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October. Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the President who’s trying to save your country.
As is plain to see from the video and transcript, Vance criticised Zelensky for rolling up to what was supposed to be a press conference announcing their new deal to end the bloody war with a list of demands rather than an attitude of gratitude.
Say what you will about Vance’s demand for thanks (Aaron Maté had some good commentary on this), but the fact is that at no point did Vance suggest that Zelensky had never thanked America. His criticism was explicitly related to Zelenksy’s conduct during the press conference in the context of the Trump administration’s new negotiations for a peace deal with Russia.
There are two layers to this.
First, Nicole Wallace - what the hell. Your job is to bring clarity and work with the facts, not mislead and obscure the facts. Note that Wallace did not play the clip of what Vance actually said, which would have debunked her phony ‘fact-check’ before it even got started.
However, we’ve been bemoaning the dishonesty of legacy media on Substack for some time, and it’s why they’re tanking. That’s not my main concern here (although it’s a huge concern).
The second layer is the utter puerility and stupidity on the part of the audience.
Because most people will not have the time or interest to have watched the full 50-minute press conference to fact check Wallace’s dodgy ‘fact-check,’ I added a comment for anyone who cares, actually, about the facts:
(After leaving this comment I went back to check the transcript and added an update that Vance’s statement applied to the press conference only, not the whole trip.)
I’m not here with an axe to grind; I just care about people being given the facts so that they can make up their own minds. So if people want to engage me on the facts, great!
That’s not what happened.
Replies to my neutral fact-based comment included entirely partisan, emotionally motivated arguments about how Zelensky doesn’t owe any thanks, insults (to me, and to the current administration), and accusations of me being either ‘right-wing’ or a ‘conspiracy theorist.’
That, or arguing that I should shut up and watch the clip because SEE HE IS THANKING US, presumably because they had not read my comment before responding to it.
I’m not personally bothered by the insults. But I’m really bothered by the complete lack of engagement with the facts not only on the part of the journalist, but also the audience, which clearly loves this pig slop and is begging for more.
I think it’s time we stop only whinging about how crap the media are and take a look at the people who still engage with this rubbish, defending it at every turn.
Yes, this is social media, not offline real life, but refusal to engage with the facts has been a hallmark of conversation with people I know who are plugged into legacy media since Covid times - possibly before that, but I was not as attuned to the propaganda at that time.
How many conversations have you had where people glaze over or suddenly shut down the conversation when you challenge one of their ‘facts’? For me, many.
How many times have you been called right-wing or an antisemite or a cooker for wanting to discuss the evidence behind any given propaganda point?
The insults fly faster on social media, where people say to your face what they would otherwise say behind your back, but the impulse is the same offline - refusal to take in evidence-based information if it doesn’t align with one’s dogma or emotional feelings about the world.
I don’t think this is purely a left or right thing either - in so far as these terms are even relevant anymore, which I doubt.
I tend to get coded as right-wing because I took a stand on vaccine mandates, am a free speech maximalist, and am anti-war (ironically, all traditionally concerns of the left-wing domain), so I cop this behaviour more often from the left than the right.
But equally, I have seen all sorts of mental gymnastics alleging 5D chess rather than admit Trump’s fallibility, and knee-jerk name-calling (woke! leftie!) from conservatives who would prefer to sweep aside inconvenient facts and arguments than engage with them.
True, emotional hijacking tends to be more of a problem for the left (broadbrushing wildly here), but conservatives are also prone to motivated reasoning, albeit often presented in less hysterical fashion.
This particular vignette of Nicole Wallace’s bogus ‘fact-check’ being cheered on regardless of the facts is just one of thousands I’ve encountered both on and offline - a thousand cuts that cumulatively are making me worry we’re hemorrhaging out as a species.
If we can’t talk to each other, if we can’t honestly engage with facts or separate out facts from how we feel about their narrative context, what comes next?
I keep thinking of the Tower of Babel, a Biblical story (Genesis 11:1-9) which may give a clue. Incidentally, while I know the story from the Bible, versions feature in other religious and cultural texts too, suggesting a resonance across peoples and times.
In the story, which takes place not long after the OG ‘great reset’ of Noah’s flood, the people all spoke one language. They set about building a tower that would reach to the heavens to immortalise their legacy - many interpretations view this project as motivated by hubris, thinking themselves equal to God.
God found this unsatisfactory, and confused their language so that they could no longer collaborate - the project was abandoned and the people were scattered across the earth with their various languages.
I talked at the Brownstone conference (cue to 46:20) in Pittsburgh last November about how I see this story mapping onto our era of technocratic globalism, of which the defining feature could be said to be hubris. We set out to conquer not just nature - pills for every ill, creating life in a dish, ending it with an injection, changing sex with drugs and surgery, controlling the weather - but human nature itself, reducing people down to units to be managed by centralised, globalised power structures that operate independent of the people’s desire for them.
These structures have tried to impose a common language - ‘One Health’, ‘Whole-of-society-approach,’ ‘Build Back Better,’ and so on - but it seems to me that we are advancing well past the stage of voluntary cooperation based on mutual understandings of the world (which is another way to view language).
Increasingly, we cannot talk to each other because we can’t even agree on what the facts are - or, we are not even interested in what the facts are. We can’t find common ground on the nature of reality, so we can’t talk about it.
One person’s compassion is unbridled immigration, another’s is controlled immigration. One person’s ethics is informed consent, another’s is forced vaccination. One hears smart city and thinks community and carbon reduction, another flinches at the connotations of surveillance and control. We use the same words but we’re speaking different languages.
If the ancient tale of the Tower of Babel holds any wisdom for us today, it may be that the confusion and babble will continue until the whole globalist project is abandoned.
Where does that leave people like you and me? And here I’m assuming that you, readers, are interested in facts; otherwise I doubt you would bother with this Substack.
Viewing the confusion as it is unfolding now in the context of all time, it comforts me to imagine that these cycles have taken place before, and that perhaps this is not the end of the world, but just a phase in the cycle.
I don’t think that needs to lead to apathy. I think Mattias Desmet is right - we must speak what we believe to be true, with sincerity.
For the people who appear to have completely abandoned any interest in speaking reasonably across aisles, I am inclined to offer compassion and consider them to be confused individuals.
I’m less inclined to extend this compassion to people in leadership roles who are perpetuating the confusion when their job is ostensibly to do the opposite (journalists, bureaucrats, politicians, and academics included) - from them I will continue to pursue accountability.
I’d like to hear your thoughts in the comments. How are we to think about the decline of people’s ability to rationally parse the facts? Or do you reject the premise of my question?
To support my work, share, subscribe, and/or make a one-off contribution to my Kofi account. Thanks!
Excellent article Rebekah.
I agree that the "Left/Right" division is now meaningless.
To me, the division is between those who see life as fundamentally complex, and strive to find truth using a version of the Socratic method or even Popper's falsifiability principle, and those for whom everything is black and white.
The mainstream media has evolved from the former to the latter.
Many decent people, including most of my family, adhere to the latter.
I suspect most conservatives by nature appreciate complexity and nuance.
Have you come across the field of cognitive inoculation, Rebekah? I encountered it personally when I did a course in "debunking" "climate deniers" (ie, before the pandemonium when I was a useful idiot for the climate emergency brigade) by John Cook, originator of the "Cranky Uncle" app (used to make sure our children and young people don't believe those nutters who don't believe in the climate "97% consensus", which Cook had "proven" in his PhD thesis).
During the Covid debacle I suddenly noticed John Cook had become an aspiring "pre bunker" of all manner of other topics (https://researchmgt.monash.edu/ws/portalfiles/portal/344861133/338159045_oa.pdf),
such as "misinformation" about the "vaccines", as well as GMOs, etc. With the hubris that seems to be proliferating these days, cognitive inoculators like Cook seem to think that they "know the Truth, The Science" (or else they are cynical social engineers for governments, or both).
That's actually one of the discoveries that woke me up: if he was lying about the transfection injections now, what else had he lied about?
My point is that much of the inability of people to even tolerate information that conflicts with their beliefs about "vaccines" or "climate change" may be due to the cognitive inoculation now proliferating in mass media. The public (or even students of immunology/vaccinology in a recent example) are warned that they "may encounter people who say....", and not to believe them, in fact, they are best just ignored rather than engaged with.