Modern Society Is Built on Common Understandings of What Is True, Based on Facts, Critical Thought, and Rational Debate. Trump Is Slowly Destroying This Foundation.
There are innumerable reasons each of which independently of the others are sufficient cause to vote for Joe Biden (or Brittany Spears or Donald Duck or an empty soup can or anyone other than Donald Trump). Mary Trump, his cousin and a clinical psychologist, diagnosed her Uncle as a sociopath. The dude is bad to bone, lacking any redeeming qualities whatsoever (unless you dig Mussolini poses). But in the chaotic miasma that is the Trump Administration, I fear we are losing sight of a paramount reason to ship him back to Florida. Trump is profoundly, uniquely, unprecedentedly damaging to the humanity because he has systematically destroyed the acceptance of truth, of facts. Four years has put a big dent in the fabric of American society and democracy. Another four years of Trump’s incessant lying is a threat to modern society.
Through mid-January, Trump is estimated to have made over 20,000 false or misleading comments during the first year and a half of his term. Yes, I know that’s a silly number – Trump lies so often and frequently does so in half-baked fragments, the exact size and shape of his epic mountain of dishonesty will never be known. And reasonable people can differ about what is a lie, what is an exaggeration, and what is true. But it is my contention that Trump lies more than any other President by a wide margin. If you don’t believe this is true, if you think that I am lying about Trump’s lies, this post and this blog are not for you. Try here.
This post is for those who admit/accept that Trump lies prodigiously but believe that this is acceptable for a US President because of Trump’s other “qualities”. As I wrote in my post, It’s Not the Tweets!, many Republicans are disgusted with Trump’s lies, racist comments, and grade school taunts but support him anyway because they perceive his policies on the economy (or whatever is most important to them) are superior to what they think Biden’s will be — and because they minimize the cost of his lies. They manage this intellectual twister move (right hand red, left leg orange) by putting all Trump’s lies and all the other toxic sludge that spews from his mouth into a tidy little breadbasket called, “persona” or “manner” or “personality” or “those darn tweets” where they can be efficiently filed away and hence forgotten. But they are wrong. Deeply, horribly wrong.
Words matter. Obviously, they matter. They clearly mattered when Churchill spoke of fighting Nazis on British beaches in the early days of WW II — but they also matter in a million more prosaic ways each and every day for each and every person on planet Earth. They matter when communicating with your boss and with those who call you boss. They matter when we read product reviews and safety warnings. They matter when teachers instruct and advise our children and when your doctor advises you. They matter during pandemics. Words matter. To speak is to act.
What we really mean when we say that words matter is that truth matters. Words that are lies have a negative impact (on us and on the world) and words that are true have a positive impact. We were all taught by our parents (except for Fred Senior.) not to lie and we teach our children the same. But why? What is the cost of a lie? What is the cost of a lie by a President? What is the cost of a President who lies about almost everything, almost all the time? What is the cost when truth is buried beneath oceans of lies?
The answer is actually quite simple but also quite profound. Readers may find the following sentence to be hyperbole. If lying becomes broadly acceptable, civilization will gradually decline. If the President of the United States, lies constantly and suffers no consequences as a result, then, obviously, many people around the world will copy him. Why tell the truth if it is advantageous to lie? And if the “leader of the free world” does it, it becomes, de facto, morally acceptable for hundreds of millions of people around the world. As more and more people lie as a matter of course, commerce, education, innovation, science, public safety, and many other activities of daily life become more and more difficult. Civilization won’t crumble overnight but it will degrade, slowly but surely. Endemic lying, popularized globally by an unleashed defiant second term Trump, will meaningfully erode the foundations of modern civilization. That is the cost of lying. Those are the stakes.
In 1637, the French philosopher Descartes wrote cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Many point to this as the beginning of what came to be known as the Western (or European) Enlightenment. This was the single most important and consequential development in the West for a thousand years and it marked the end of what we call the Dark Ages. What was it all about? In simple terms it was about truth. Or, more precisely, where truth comes from. Before the Enlightenment in Europe, truth came from one place: the Christian church. Bibles were only written in Latin which the vast majority of Europeans couldn’t read because Rome saw no need for the average person to do anything but believe what their Pope and their priests told them. Truth came from God as explained by the Catholic church. There was no science, there were no free markets, there was no free speech, there was no democracy, there were no human rights. The Enlightenment made all of these possible. It led to the world as it exists today.
I think, therefore I am. This is a declaration of independence for each individual human being to find and discover and discuss what is true and what is false. To think for themselves. To learn. The essence of the intellectual enlightenment which underpins the modern world is the idea that the truth is knowable, albeit imperfectly. That through study, research, facts, data, logic, discussion, debate – man can learn and know what is true and what is false. Former chess champion Garry Kasparov once wrote:
The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
I can think of no better description of what Trump does. What is Trump’s “fake news” except a claim that no truth exists except his truth? Trump and his semi-literate band of two-bit bullies and second rate grifters pump out a smog of crud that blankets and exhausts our power to think, our will to think. Where there are no facts, no truth (except one’s own), modern life lurches backward towards darkness.
This is what is at risk if Trump is reelected. These are the stakes. This election isn’t just about the next four years in America or even the next four years in the world. This election is about whether humanity advances or retreats.
More from American Carnage:
- Trump’s Pre-Covid Economic Miracle is Fake News
- The Crown Is Beautiful. And a Whitewash of Britain’s Colonial Crimes