“At no time in history have words meant so little as they do today,” declared the philosopher John Dewey in 1941. Dewey, who at the time was one of America’s preeminent public intellectuals, was worried about what he called “complete inversions of truth” by authoritarians and their sympathizers at home. Repeated often enough, he warned, such obvious falsehoods end up producing a “state of daze” that persists “long enough to enable its creators to accomplish their will while darkness still prevails.”
Dewey’s words should haunt us now. Just in the last few months, the White House has declared that diversity is racist, climate change is a hoax, gender doesn’t exist, and attack plans aren’t classified. Peer-reviewed data, not to mention common sense, doesn’t support these claims, but as Dewey reminds us, when politicians tell obvious lies, convincing people—deceiving them—isn’t always the point. Outrageous lies sometimes just have the dazing effect Dewey noted; the idea is to pummel people with so much nonsense that they don’t see what is happening right in front of them.
Yet bald-faced falsehoods also do something else—something more insidious. They express a profound contempt for the basic rules of truth and falsity. And that contempt serves a long-term strategic goal of any authoritarian: to undermine common rules of truth and evidence—and the legal and academic institutions that employ those rules.
Contempt is a go-to attitude of the authoritarian-minded. A bully who refuses to acknowledge that he was tagged “out” in a ballgame—even though everyone else knows he was—is expressing his contempt for the rules. In saying they don’t apply to him, he thereby both asserts his power over those rules and encourages others to obey, or at least, to look away.
The contempt extends to what we might call the epistemic rules—rules having to do with evidence and the pursuit of truth. These are the rules that govern truth-seeking in law, journalism, education, and the practice of history, law, and science. They include, for example, the rules that journalists should use more than one source, that teachers should use accurate textbooks, that scientific and medical recommendations should be based on the data, and that criminal investigations should be concerned with the facts and evidence.
Individual human beings are often not great at following such rules when left to their own devices. We often seek convenience over conflict, which is precisely why we encode epistemic rules as professional norms of evidence in the various institutions that transmit information about important matters like the climate, crime, or the cause of wildfires. By encoding such rules and agreeing to abide by them, the members of such institutions—doctors, scientists, lawyers—agree to hold each other to account. Epistemic rules are how institutions help correct for our individual biases—for what Kant called the crooked timber of our humanity.
The political theorist Lisa Herzog calls our evidence-based institutions “epistemic infrastructure.” This includes public schools, universities, museums, regulated social media, and a free and fair press. Building and maintaining such infrastructure has long been thought to be a public democratic good. That’s why, for example, the U.S. decided after WW II it would share the costs of basic research with universities by means of institutions like the National Institutes of Health. Just as we need clean water and safe roads to get where we need to go, we need solid epistemic infrastructure to get accurate information.
Yet that is the very reason that authoritarians label the epistemic infrastructure of their country the “enemy” or “corrupt.” Reliable epistemic infrastructure—with its commitment to rules of truth and fact—supplies the public with the means to see through their lies. So authoritarians seek to destroy it. As Hannah Arendt writes, speaking across the decades, “before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion, fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.”
Contempt for epistemic rules has two corrosive effects on democracy. First, if the liar has enough authority and power, the political bald-faced lie can cause people to treat the lie as if it were true. The rule-breaking bully with enough brawn can force the game to go on under the assumption that he wasn’t out. Likewise, given sufficient political power, the political bald-faced liar can bring into being not the truth of what he says, but its passing for truth. It doesn’t matter whether anyone actually believes it. As rulers from Stalin to Orban have shown, getting people to pretend it’s true often serves just as well.
The second corrosive effect of contempt for epistemic rules is even more insidious. It’s one thing to pretend that you believe certain lies; it is another thing to give up on epistemic rules altogether. That can cause the public to question whether anybody should follow such rules—or listen to those who insist on playing by them. This is particularly so if the rule-breaker gets away with it—where the “it” is both the rule violation and the assertion that no such violation occurred. The rule begins to seem less important—not just to the liar, but to everyone.
Whenever humans abandon one set of rules, they inevitably replace them with others. Lose faith in the rules and norms we employ to pursue truth, and they’ll be replaced by rules of conformity to power. Soon, the only correct claims are those endorsed by the powerful. Once that happens, once we lose faith in the importance of truth in our political life, democratic politics in any meaningful sense slips away. You can’t speak truth to power when the power speaks truth by definition.
This is why it is crucial to see the connection between the bald-faced lies told by the administration and their attack on our scientific, legal and academic institutions. Undermine the courts and the universities and you undermine the institutions where critical thinking is taught and developed. Continued barrages of falsehoods can corrode people’s faith in anything—and any institution or rule—other than your own power.
As Dewey reminded us over eighty years ago, that’s when authoritarians can work their will—in the darkness that falls when we no longer respect evidence, when we ignore facts, when we shrug at the complete inversion of truth.
About the Author
Michael Patrick Lynch is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Provost Professor of the Humanities at the University of Connecticut; his new book is On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy Demands It (91ĚŇÉ«).