Some Painful Truths

Others have said how, once a person has been duped, it is almost impossible to convince them they have been duped. They’ve bought in, hook, line and sinker. Never has this been more true than in the present day. Despite all our education and media and news report, our ‘advanced’ culture, nearly 40% of the U. S. population still holds a favorable view of Donald Trump.

Who are these people?

While they tasted the bait, times were glorious! They owned the world, vindicated in their every idea, belief, and prejudice. Racism wasn’t really racism while they tasted the bait, but rather the righteous validation of their belief in whiteness.

Thus it was for the role of women, made from Adam’s rib to be his helper. Subordinate. The weaker vessel, made to suffer the agony of childbirth to give man his offspring, a punishment for Eve’s original sin. Not to speak in the church of God Almighty—white male, of course.

It goes without saying that the homosexuals and transwhatever were scum of the earth. Hardly worth mentioning, not worthy of recognition much less any right to exist, work, marry, or enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Equally unworthy of mention were the heathen believers in Allah and other blasphemies, seeking to secretly infiltrate America with their insidious brown-skinned conspiracies to destroy the great God-given white nation we call America.

And so it continued for four glorious years as time after time Trump’s words and acts magnified and validated the prejudices. Never mind that God sent a plague, that over a million people died, under Trump’s watch. Never mind that he oversaw, indeed, implemented, a continuous scroll of misdeeds and treachery that threatened the very foundations of the U. S. Constitution. None of that mattered while the bait was ingested, while all the validations of hate surged through the hearts and minds of the true believers—the duped.

Now, with the efforts of honorable leaders eager to restore the nation to its solid foundations, its core philosophy that all of us were created equal, the duped refuse to accept the evidence. Refuse to read the indictments. Refuse to think that some, all, of the allegations might actually be true. No doubt even a trial and conviction will be denied by these folks.

Is this a matter of willful ignorance? Yes, but that’s not all.

In academic studies, subjects asked to distinguish truth from lies answer correctly, on average, only fifty-four per cent of the time. This is a result of several mitigating factors, not least of which is a sense of allegiance to the people and information sources we have already trusted. For example, in a Stanford University study,

• A third type of bias comes from our existing political alignment, in the form of partisanship. When it comes to news and information generally, one’s identification as a Democrat or Republican, or one’s self-image of being liberal vs. conservative, has a big impact on what we readily believe or reject in the news, regardless of its truthfulness. As uncomfortable as this may be to accept, abundant research shows that people frequently reject news that’s inconsistent with their political ideology, and are prone to accept news that’s consonant with their political orientation. Like it or not, research demonstrated quite clearly that most politically-oriented fake news during the 2016 US election campaigns was consumed by conservatives, with Donald Trump supporters being especially likely to encounter and visit fake news sites. …Hillary Clinton supporters were more likely to visit fact-checking websites and less likely to visit fake news websites. Trump supporters were less likely to visit fact-checking websites and more likely to visit fake news websites.[1]

Similar conclusions have been confirmed in multiple studies. Lee McIntyre, research fellow at Boston University, has published several books on the conundrum of duped people.

• One of the deepest roots of post-truth has been with us the longest, for it has been wired into our brains over the history of human evolution: cognitive bias. Psychologists for decades have been performing experiments that show that we are not quite as rational as we think. Some of this work bears directly on how we react in the face of unexpected or uncomfortable truths. A central concept of human psychology is that we strive to avoid psychic discomfort. It is not a pleasant thing to think badly of oneself. Some psychologists call this “ego defense” (after Freudian theory), but whether we frame it within this paradigm or not, the concept is clear. It just feels better for us to think that we are smart, well-informed, capable people than that we are not. What happens when we are confronted with information that suggests that something we believe is untrue? It creates psychological tension. How could I be an intelligent person yet believe a falsehood? Only the strongest egos can stand up very long under a withering assault of self-criticism: “What a fool I was! The answer was right there in front of me the whole time, but I never bothered to look. I must be an idiot.”[2]

Trump supporters are not the first group to suffer this terrible cognitive dysphoria. The Civil War is not over for many who cannot accept that what their ancestors fought and died for might have been wrong. In their multitude of righteous excuses for the Confederate cause, the war was not about slavery. Rather, the Lost Cause was based on six tenets:

1. Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War.

2. African Americans were “faithful slaves,” loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.

3. The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union’s overwhelming advantages in men and resources.

4. Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.

5. The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.

6. Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.[3]

The fundamental truth is that the war was about the South’s determination to continue its use of enslaved people to generate the bulk of its wealth. Tens of thousands of people of Southern heritage have bought into the falsehood of the Lost Cause, continuing to display the Confederate flag and nurse their invisible wounds.

Likewise, millions of people today are standing firm in their belief that Trump can do no wrong, that he was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, and other similar dross. Don’t bother them with facts. Their minds are made up and their egos depend on it. One can only hope that enough of them will overcome the cognitive dissonance to accept that Trump was not sent by God Almighty to bestow an all-white conservative dispensation on the United States of America, but rather that he was and is a corrupt man clever enough to dupe 61,943,670 voters (2016 election).          

                                                            

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[1] https://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/why-we-fall

[2] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-cognitive-bias-can-explain-post-truth/

[3] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the/