Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one is entitled to their own facts.” Those are simple, deep, and true words.
Mr. Moynihan’s words are especially relevant for our country and society in the wake of Donald Trump’s shocking 2024 election victory. Directly speaking, Trump was able to win because he and his followers convinced most of the population of their beliefs. Falsehood of fact.
Factual truth is different from any kind of ideology, prejudice, or personal opinion. Rather, for example, the actual truth is that my name is Robert Jay Lifton, I’m a researcher psychiatrist who studies the psychological roots of war and political violence, and I write an article for a magazine. It means that it is. scientific american. This is a declarative statement that makes an irrefutable claim. That irrefutability is the source of the appeal of factual truth.
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In contrast, when factual truth collapses, for example, the results of a legitimate election can be denied, and factual falsehoods can flood society as a whole. That is because a falsehood of fact requires continued additional falsehoods to cover and maintain the original falsehood. And the defense against continued falsehood relies on more than repetition. It relies on intimidation and can quickly lead to violence. Philip Roth had both falsehood and violence in mind when he spoke of “the ferocity of the American Indians.”
What happens from this situation is malignant normality, The normalization of lies and destructive behavior in society. it can produce mental paralysis, You may not be able to feel it, or you may have difficulty moving it.
Children in Hiroshima one year after the atomic bomb was dropped.
Bettman Archive/Getty Images
Malignant normality has a lot of overlap with the term “brainwashing.” While the term certainly connects with a wide audience, it can be vague with lip service. In contrast, malignant normality is more suggestive of psychological experience on the part of individuals and groups.
Given how widespread falsehoods and lies are, it may seem counterintuitive to mention the value of telling the truth. However, communicating the factual truth can provide psychological comfort to the teller and free them from malicious falsehoods. In this way, telling the truth helps reduce mental paralysis.
I have also emphasized in my work how we humans are creatures hungry for meaning. This is fundamentally true for survivors of war, nuclear, conventional, or other extreme trauma. For such a meaning to be persuasive, it must be based on fact.
It is wrong and misleading to speak of us as a “post-truth” society. Rather, we are a society engaged in an ongoing struggle to tell the truth, and as the 2024 US election made all too clear, that can be a very difficult undertaking.
Addressing the disaster of the second Trump administration and countering the litany of lies requires every conceivable means of telling the truth. And telling the truth itself becomes an expression of activist resistance.
In each research study, I have tried to testify to the truths I encountered. The principle of telling the truth has been at the heart of all my work. For example, in Hiroshima, my research took the form of a scientific interview study. A-bomb survivors, A survivor of the atomic bomb. However, I felt that a broader ethical approach needed to be taken to convey the devastating human impact of the atomic bomb. That’s how I needed to be professional witness, This meant not only uncovering the full extent of the Hiroshima disaster, but also fighting against it. nuclearism That led to the acceptance of these weapons and the willingness to use them to solve humanity’s problems.
Truth was central to my research on anti-war Vietnam veterans and their anti-war movement. The veterans I interviewed came to find the meaning of war in its meaninglessness. Indeed, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) acknowledged its senselessness and its own dedicated efforts to oppose the war.
Hannah Arendt, a prominent philosopher known for her research on totalitarianism, pointed out that totalitarianism relies on “the systematic lies of groups.” She argues that leaders like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels encouraged what they called the “Big Lie” in order not only to oppress their people, but also to control their sense of reality. pointed out. In this way, Nazi leaders were able to pursue ownership of reality by achieving widespread public belief in falsehoods. There is a feeling that all of Germany has become a mystical cult with Hitler as its leader and savior. Telling the truth was also central to my own research into the murderous acts of Nazi doctors.
There is a kind of cult-like parallel between Mr. Trump’s claims to omniscience, which his ardent supporters believe, and his continued insistence on ownership of reality.
Despite losing the election, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz struck a nerve with the public when they began using the word “bizarre” to describe Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance. Because it has brought us collectively back to a democracy that operates based on factual truth. Weird people are people you should never follow. Because if you follow it, you’ll be taking on some of its weirdness, and you’ll lose your sense of reality and the overall truth of the facts. It is extremely dangerous for societies facing global threats such as nuclear war and global warming. Strangeness threatens our security, both individually and nationally. But instead of avoiding it, the election sustained and expanded our dangerous participation in strange behavior.
In contrast to Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance’s litany of falsehoods, the Harris Walz team sought to tell the truth throughout the election process and consistently pointed out those falsehoods. To be sure, Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz may have exaggerated their claims, ignored the uncomfortable shifts each of them have undergone in their claims, and avoided difficult topics. But they talked about factual issues and factual probabilities.
This election was the ultimate test of how much control our society has over facts. It turns out that’s not enough. But despite our electoral defeat, our society still yearns for these facts.
Trumpists are likely to continue creating. produce atrocities Whether it’s about “ungoverned” conditions, the climate, the threat of violence, or harmful policies that perpetuate the global threat of the coronavirus. But we are not helpless before them.
In response to my research on Nazi doctors, several friends asked me, “What do you think about your fellow humans now?” They expected me to say, “Not very much.” But my answer was, it doesn’t matter either way. We can perish in a catastrophe or survive by drawing on our “better angels” (in Lincoln’s words) who provide us with enough survivor wisdom to perpetuate the species. You can also.
We are not condemned by a death drive to destroy ourselves. Nor is it certain that we can maintain a truth-centered, life-enhancing mentality. But we have the ability to embrace that spirit, and that is a strong source of hope.
The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize winners are: A-bomb survivor Nippon Hidankyo’s anti-nuclear activities are a powerful expression of such hopes. So did Harris’ insistence that, despite her electoral concessions, she would never abandon the fight for “freedom, opportunity, fairness, and dignity for all people.”
We cannot hope to completely eliminate falsehoods. There is no absolute moment when a fact is recognized as true. Rather, we, as individuals and as a nation, are engaged in an ongoing struggle on behalf of the decency, necessity, and satisfaction of telling the truth.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. scientific american.
