Reaching People Who Have Discarded the Truth

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

They say that the truth hurts. I'm inclined to agree.

Recently, in trying to talk about the state of our nation with people whose primary source of information is Fox News, I’ve been reminded once again that they are living in an alternate reality. They are operating with core truths that simply do not exist.

In this media-constructed fictional narrative in which they now live, Trump is not a convicted felon or court-adjudicated rapist; he is not indiscriminately targeting people of color through ICE; he is not in the Epstein files, his party is not dismantling our systems and safeguards to consolidate wealth and power in the hands of a few, and we are not seeing all the markers of a fascist regime.

Everything is immediately rationalized away or dismissed.

When trying to reach another person across a divide of disagreement, it's virtually impossible to compete with a firmly planted and fully thriving lie. Right now, our most formidable adversary is not the person who is devious, dishonest, or even immoral—it is the person who no longer needs the truth; who does not require the existence of data or the veracity of a claim in order to believe what they believe.

When someone has arrived at this place of delusion, their most pressing commitment is preserving the myth they've chosen to embrace, and so their minds, for all practical purposes, are rendered nearly unreachable with the methods previously used to bridge differences.

They are fully invested in the conclusions they’ve come to. For them to reach different ones would involve them rewriting the false story they've already convinced themselves of and vigorously defended, sometimes for years. To consider another alternative reality becomes a threat to their very identity, and so, rather than confronting an existential crisis or admitting an error, the much less complicated and time-consuming task is to simply double down on the old story, regardless of whether or not it is real.

The person who has discarded truth in this way is insulated from rationality. He or she will not respond to the presence of a cogent argument or the proffering of measurable facts. Any information not corresponding to the narrative they've predetermined will be immediately labeled "woke nonsense" and quickly rejected.

You cannot win a debate with such a person, you cannot craft a compromise with them, and you cannot appeal to reason, unless you, too, are willing to entertain fantasy in order to reach them where they are—and this is a steep and slippery slope.

When we encounter someone whose opinion doesn't match our own, there is great wisdom in seeking to understand the other person, in attempting to see the matter through their eyes. But when their assumption is based on fraudulent information, when they refuse to weigh the evidence at hand, when they choose simply to adopt the opinion of least resistance, this can be an impossibility.

Yesterday, I was speaking with a woman named Donna. She was reiterating a well-traveled Conservative talking point about the supposed dangers of undocumented immigrants in America. I asked her to take a look at a couple of well-researched articles by major news outlets, and to compare the numbers there with her perception. "Pshht!" she blurted out, rolling her eyes, "I'm not interested in fake news!" Donna had no desire to engage with information or to entertain the possibility of contrary evidence. It was much easier to devalue that information and dismiss it out of hand.

This is the Fox News effect on America. The network, along with extremist social media, has done its most cancerous work by making critical thinking irrelevant, by counting on a populace predisposed to certain fear triggers and dog whistles, and by exploiting these people’s need for confirmation bias. Right-wing media has long understood that once they craft a story in the head of another human being, they only need to reaffirm that story; to reassure them that whatever lie they've embraced is true. After a short time, facts are not at all necessary to sustain believability, only the words themselves.

And so today we're faced with the task of wrestling with some gut-wrenching questions:

How do we engage people standing opposite us on an issue when they no longer seem to value, desire, or entertain factual information?

What does a country become when its leaders, responsible for stewarding reality in times of adversity and matters of great consequence, have no use for it?

How does America endure a President who is mortally allergic to the truth and fluent in lies?

The answer isn't in abandoning the truth ourselves. In fact, these days require us to be people who guard it more fiercely than ever; to keep seeking to know what is real, and to speak those things loudly and repeatedly in the hopes they will find fertile ground, even in the hardest of hearts. The answer is to raise children who believe honesty and integrity to be the bedrock of our humanity.

I want to believe all people can be reached, that there can be a place of common understanding in which to begin brokering compromise, even across the most vast of spaces.

I wake up every day seeking to do this work, but with far too many of those in my neighborhood, in my family, and on my timeline, it is getting more and more difficult not to conclude that it is a fruitless endeavor.

As more and more people are pulled further into a Conservative mythology that has very little to do with the reality of America, I'm afraid that reaching them may never again be an option and that the only hope going forward may be to outnumber them.

This may be the truth that hurts the most.

How are you bridging differences with people who seem reluctant to establish a baseline of truth? Are you finding ways of having productive conversations with those steeped in Conservative media, or are you finding them unreachable with facts and data? Let me know in the comments.