The Orwellian Age of Trump

If you still care about truth this might be the most important article you read today: Why Nobody Cares the President is Lying. Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes explains how years of attacks on the main stream media have finally resulted, not just in opposition to what are considered media lies, but to a disregard for truth itself.

He writes: “For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.”

Sykes quotes former world chess champion and now Russian political activist Garry Kasparov: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Trump and his team are actively seeking to “annihilate truth.” When people say, “Don't take him literally, take him seriously,” when they talk about “alternative facts,” when the president tells his followers to automatically dismiss every negative poll about him as “fake news,” when he attacks the great American free press as “enemies of the people,” and when he won't even bother to tell the truth anymore about something as easily verified as which recent presidents got the most electoral votes because he knows that his followers just couldn't care less that he is lying yet again, then the destruction of truth is well under way.

When we no longer distinguish between truth and lies, when we no longer agree on the basic principles of logic, or even agree that facts are facts, then we can no longer make good decisions, we can no longer think straight about important issues, we can no longer even communicate in any meaningful way.

So what can we do to keep the truth alive in what Sykes refers to as the “Orwellian age of Donald Trump?”

These are my suggestions:

1. Read news articles and editorials from both the right and the left. Try the National Review for conservative views and The Nation for liberal ones.
2. Read just one article per day if that's all you have time for but don't keep reading the same side, alternate from right to left, keep exposing yourself to ideas you may not like or agree with.
3. As you read each article try to capture the main point in a statement or sentence.
4. If the main point is a factual statement can you verify that fact from one or two other sources? If you can't, be very cautious about accepting it. If you can, be very cautious about NOT accepting it.
5. If the main point of the article is a statement concluding a logical argument can you you identify the premises or inputs to the argument?
6. Once you have identified the premises can you verify they are true?
7. If the premises are true then analyze the argument to see if the conclusion stated in the article really follows from them.
8. If the conclusion does not follow from the premises then reject the argument. If it does, then accept the argument.

If we keep reading and thinking, about ideas we agree with as well as ideas we don't agree with we might still end up on opposite sides in political debates but at least we will be on the same side in respecting - and searching for - the truth.

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Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway