Living in the Empire of Lies

This post from Andrew Gelman deals with a crucial topic, which is the explosion or epidemic of lying that is overwhelming public discourse. Gelman is discussing the general phenomenon rather than changes in its rate, so he doesn’t frame the issue explicitly in the context of the present political situation, but it’s pretty clear that:

(1) Continual lying is a constitutive feature of authoritarian/totalitarian ideologies and political systems.

(2) This is especially true of fascist and fascist-adjacent thought and action.

(3) The rise to power of Trumpism illustrates the first two points with special force.

Gelman gives examples that include scientists publishing a study in a peer-reviewed journal that they described as “long term” although it lasted three days, a professor of medicine testifying in court in 2002 that he had no opinion “as an expert” on whether cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, and ICE officials claiming that assaults against ICE officers were up 413%, when there was no evidence for this purported statistic, and at the same time that many if not all of the “assaults” that were being reported consisted of things like New York City comptroller Brad Lander assaulting ICE agents, which Ezra Klein described in this way:

The Department of Homeland Security says Lander was “arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer,” a lie so brazen, given that this is all on tape for everyone to see, that it makes the whole episode even more chilling.

For multiple reasons, the professor of medicine who claims in the context of giving expert testimony in litigation that he has no opinion on whether smoking causes lung cancer is especially interesting to me. Heavy smokers have a relative risk of developing lung cancer of 35 relative to never-smokers, meaning that in two otherwise comparable pools of heavy smokers and never smokers, you are likely to find about 35 cases of lung cancer among the heavy smokers for every case among the never smokers.

What’s interesting about this is that that’s the sort of epidemiological statistic that’s genuinely definitive all by itself, which is a pretty rare thing in epidemiology. The more common thing is for a study to report that there’s a 50% increase in risk of heart attacks in Group A compared to Group B, meaning an RR of 1.5 as opposed to the RR of 35 in the smokers and lung cancer example. This sounds like a lot, except the baseline risk turns out to be 10 heart attacks among 10,000 people in Group A and 15 heart attacks among 10,000 people in Group B, and meanwhile there are about a million uncontrolled confounding variables between the members of the two groups, which in turn means that the 50% increase in risk is pretty much a garbage statistic in terms of social, as opposed to p-value statistical, significance, but it sounds impressive enough to get the paper into JAMA or what have you.

And that’s when people are being honest, as opposed to the kind of “reckless disregard for the truth” — Gelman’s phrase borrowed from a commenter to a related earlier post — that he’s discussing.

Gelman points out that there’s a kind of collective action/tragedy of the commons problem here, which is that in the short term lying pays, quite literally:

On one hand, I’m saying this deplorable behavior is common, it’s accepted, and there are lots of incentives to do it, to the extent that when the cops say someone’s resisting arrest or a social psychologist says he did a long-term study, we should know not to believe it–at least, not when the evidence in front of our goddam face contradicts it.

On the other hand, if, as Leonard Cohen sang, “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed, Everybody knows that the boat is leaking, Everybody knows that the captain lied,” etc., then why does it matter? Can we just renormalize all the untruthful statements and return to where we should be?

My answer is no, because not everybody lies. Some of us are very careful with our words! But in a form of Gresham’s Law, liars win. At least in the short term, it’s easier to make a compelling argument if you’re willing to make shit up. And it’s very hard to argue against someone who’s willing to make shit up, partly because you have to waste a lot of your time pushing against the shit and partly because anyone who’s willing to make up shit might also be willing to do other underhanded things.

Another way of saying it is that lying is a negative-sum action: it might help you win the debate right now, or help you get that umpteenth publication on your resume or get on NPR or Freakonomics or Ted, it might help you get through a news cycle–but it’s also degrading public discourse, it’s adding noise to the communication channel. The same with the cops: if everyone assumes the secret police agency is going to lie, that makes it harder for the police officials who, for whatever reason, feel bound to the truth in their public statements.

And all the others who accept this behavior, who say Not my problem or But the general point is correct or But the other side does it too . . . all those bystanders are part of the problem by tipping the incentives toward more reckless disregard for the truth.

This is why Fox News and Donald Trump both exist and are symbiotically related to each other.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The audience holds “every statement to be a lie anyhow.” This is the empire of lying, and of the prostitution of the truth for money (side point for another post: we probably need to come up with another word other than “prostitution” for selling something that it’s axiomatically wrong to sell, since the metaphorical use of the term depends on the once-universal moral judgment, now collapsing or collapsed, that sex work is itself always immoral).

As Gelman points out, not everybody lies, but in a society in which not being willing to lie puts one at an increasingly massive disadvantage — see again the battle of the right wing scream machine in particular and the internet in general against all truthful media — the problem of endemic lying is going to be structural, rather than individual. And that indeed is one of the critical features of life here in Trumpland.