Cheats and Liars

Regular readers may recall my mentioning the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, summarized by Michael Crichton thus:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well.

You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

A lot of this, I believe, stems from confirmation bias - our natural tendency to be less skeptical of stories and reports that validate our preferred conclusions. It also stems from “nature abhors a vacuum,” in that reports that purport to fill gaps in our knowledge are considered better than nothing. People are wired to fear and loathe the unknown, so much so that we often see patterns where none actually exist.

There’s a similar phenomenon in politics.

Politicians are, by and large, practiced obfuscators, dissemblers, and often outright liars.

We all know this.

But time and time again, we find ourselves believing - and repeating - things they claim that fall apart under the slightest critical scrutiny, because those things either confirm our preferences or advance policy in a direction we desire.

So it went with the recent government shutdown. A number of Democrats blamed the GOP for the skyrocketing cost of health care as they sought to preserve Obamacare subsidies for higher earners. Seriously. No matter that they created the program that now relies on those subsidies to mask how expensive it is. Without a single Republican vote and without a word of Republican input. Obama was proud of shutting the GOP out of the Affordable Care Act (a classic oxymoron, as are most government program titles), and it was only the untimely death of Ted Kennedy that kept it from being an even bigger disaster. Yet, because the blame came from Team Blue, was pointed at Team Red, and favored a particular policy outcome, many not only believed it, they repeated it. Then there are those blaming Trump, even though the GOP passed “reopen” bills over a dozen times, and even though he’s not a Senator.

Flip the script, and those same people would be screaming “LIAR!,” of course.

And, of course, it works both ways. Lying is a bipartisan behavior.

The people who believe in Good Government, including the academics and the young, affluent college grads who are the core of the leftist movement in America, face a major dilemma in the “all politicians are liars” premise. They choose to believe that their politicians are either not liars, or lie only when they need to snooker the unwashed masses into voting for them (unwashed masses that, of course, do not include themselves). There was much of that going on when Hillary Clinton ran against Trump, and there was much “she’s lying in order to win, and I know what she’s actually going to do once elected, so I’m voting for her,” whenever something that ran against progressive orthodoxy came out of her mouth.

We see similar behavior from the Trump-faithful. Just as one example, Trump has offered a laundry list of rationales for his tariff mania. Many contradict each other, so not all of them can be true. But rather than be skeptical about the whole mess, people choose which rationales they believe, and either ignore the rest or consider them part of his negotiating (he’s lying to get what I know his real aims are). While the latter can certainly be true, there’s no basis for you or me concluding that he’s secretly a free-trader who is using tariffs as leverage, rather than concluding he is thinking like a protectionist and ignoring the countless historical warnings against protectionism.

As with the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, people are inclined to trust what their preferred politicians tell them, even when those politicians have been outed as liars in the past. They (we) should, instead, distrust them to their and our core, and grant them so little power that the mischief they can get up to is inconsequential.