The Confabulator in Chief? (article)

On January 21, 2017, President Donald Trump launched a bitter attack on the press for underestimating the size of his… um, his… uh, his… wait a minute; that’s right! His inauguration. Why? Because photos of the Washington, D.C. Mall from the day before—January 20, 2017—show clearly and conclusively that the crowd that showed up for his inauguration was roughly one-third the size of the crowd that showed up the following day to protest his ascension to the highest office in the land. Undeterred by the evidence, Trump alleged that the crowd gathered to cheer for him on January 20^th was six times larger than the press reported, or roughly twice the size of the crowds that thronged the nation’s capital on the following day. All of which is demonstrably untrue (“Trump Claims Media ‘Dishonest’ Over Crowd Photos,” BBC News Online, January 22, 2017). On the same (deeply Orwellian) day, Trump was blaming the media for spreading the rumor that he has a problem with the U.S.A.’s intelligence services, when (he now claimed) this was never the case.

We live, we are told, in a “post-truth” age where facts do not matter. But in reality, they do matter—now more than ever. Even so, we can ask ourselves, was Donald Trump merely mistaken about the number of people attending the Women’s March on Washington? Or was he lying? Or was he deluding himself to the point that he actually believed his own spin? And either way, what difference does it make?

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Well, for the sake of clarity and convenience, let us define truth as parsimoniously as possible, as what actually is the case. Untruth, by contrast, is an assertion that negates the truth in some fashion. But there are different ways of doing this, and different reasons for doing so. Our language provides us with different words to describe untruths: errors, falsehoods, and illusions. Many of us use these words interchangeably, as if they are synonyms. This lax or promiscuous usage, while commonplace, is deeply unfortunate, because it obscures some important psychological truths that we ought to keep in mind as Trump’s presidency unfolds. Why? Because upon careful consideration, the differences between errors, falsehoods, and illusions raise questions about motivation, or what Søren Kierkegaard described as the person’s subjective mode of relatedness to the truth.

Let’s start with error. By and large, error is either innocent or inadvertent. It is the result of the person being in possession of false/inadequate information, logical lapses, or faulty reasoning that permits the person to draw mistaken conclusions from the information at hand. A person who is merely “in error” is unaware of that fact, of course, but will generally accept correction and acknowledge the truth because he or she has no stake in remaining estranged from reality, so to speak.

In stark contrast, the person who utters a deliberate falsehood is quite clear about what is actually the case, but has a personal investment in seeing that other people remain “in the dark.” There are rare circumstances when uttering falsehoods is necessary to protect innocent or vulnerable people, no doubt. But by and large, one’s motives for lying are base. People usually lie to mislead others, create a false impression, extort an unfair advantage, or arouse base passions in others to enhance their receptivity to suggestions of various kinds, including incitements to unfair punishment and/or violence.

By contrast with each of these, however, a person who cherishes an illusion has deceived him- or herself into believing that something is actually the case, when in fact it is not. Moreover, this process of self-deception necessarily precedes any efforts they undertake to persuade others that their illusions are real. Subjectively speaking, people under the sway of illusion can be perfectly sincere when they deny the truth, even if—at an unconscious level—they are in a state of motivated ignorance, avoiding a candid confrontation with reality (and themselves). Contrast this to the

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mental state of the deliberate liar, who knows the score perfectly but prefers to pretend otherwise, for his or her own advantage.

In “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943), George Orwell reminds us that according to Nazi doctrine, there is no such thing as “Science,” or even a body of facts that can be reliably ascertained irrespective of our respective biases (or how we are inclined to interpret them). Instead, there is merely “German Science” and “Jewish Science.” Where did the Nazis get this idea? Probably from Friederich Nietzsche. Toward the end of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche invoked the ideas of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer in an effort to discredit modern science completely. Later, in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), section 24, Nietzsche took this line of argument further, citing the medieval Muslim Society of Assassins. Their motto was: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” Nietzsche obviously thought the assassin’s creed was quite profound, because he then went on to say: “Here we have real freedom, for the notion of truth itself has been disposed of” (1956, section 24).

Here, then, was a radical new departure in the history of Western thought. Prior to this point, most philosophers, scientists, and educators believed in the emancipatory power of truth; the idea that the truth, once grasped fully, can liberate us from the shackles of ignorance and oppression. The flip-side of that belief, of course, is that lies and illusions enslave us, or keep us mired in subjection, because they clutter or obstruct our vision and must be cleared away before we can act in accordance with the truth. That was certainly Freud’s view. That being so, it is instructive to note that, by his own admission, Nietzsche’s main objective in writing The Genealogy of Morals was to demonstrate that a slavish mentality, warped by rancor, is far more prone to self-deception and distorting reality than the noble aristocrat’s gaze, and that the slave’s propensity to self-deception is motivated by feelings and fantasies that he is (largely) unconscious of. But in so saying, Nietzsche obviously presupposed that there actually are ways of ascertaining what actually is true and false, and what motives prompt individuals or cultural collectives to embrace illusions. Yet, by the end of the book, Nietzsche invalidates his own premise, describing truth, or more precisely, the “notion of truth,” as an obstacle to freedom, rather than its vital pre-condition. Leaving ethics aside, for the moment, the problem with this proposition is that if we treat the concept of truth as an impediment to freedom, we have to abandon the concept

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of “untruth” as well. Why? Because the concepts of truth and untruth always presuppose one another, and the inability (or unwillingness) to differentiate between them brings us swiftly to the brink of absurdity and nihilism, where we can no longer discriminate between error, falsehood, and illusions, or make informed judgments about their unconscious provenance.

Of course, truth is not always obvious, and is often moot, or undecidable, when we cannot ascertain all of the pertinent facts, or determine what actually is the case with absolute certainty. For example, many of us would like to know whether Trump’s claim that “the media” lied about the number of people attending his inauguration and the Women’s March on Washington is a bold-faced lie, or whether he actually believed his own “spin.” Similarly, one wonders whether his eagerness to credit alt-right blogger Gregg Phillips’ ridiculous claim about voter fraud—namely, that three million people voted illegally for Hillary—is rooted in grandiosity and a (quasi-delusional) fear of persecution and animosity toward all his critics, i.e. whether he really believes Phillips’ preposterous claim or merely pretends to believe it because it is politically expedient to do so. Finally, one wonders whether he really believes that President Obama wiretapped his conversations in Trump Tower before the election, as he has repeatedly alleged.

Of course, it is simplest to assume that Trump is merely lying, or being “strategic” by providing followers with “alternative facts.” Moreover, some would say that, from a pragmatic standpoint, it really makes no difference whether he is deluding himself or merely trying to pull the wool over our eyes. I beg to differ. Hitler and Stalin furnish two terrifying examples of national leaders who lied without inhibition or remorse, but who also believed their own spin very often as well. That, I maintain, made them far more dangerous than your average con man. Consider Hitler’s sincere belief in an international Jewish conspiracy against the Aryan race, and his consequent unwillingness to surrender and save millions of German lives when the war was already lost. Consider Stalin’s galloping paranoia, the show trials, and the millions of people who were murdered as a result, or who died of starvation, exposure, and disease in the Gulags. When it comes to foreign or domestic policy, internal policing or defense against external threats, a leader who lies freely, but is not taken in by his own deceptions, may be less prone to making catastrophic decisions that result in mass slaughter than one who believes his own fictions.

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In other words, odd as it sounds, we may be slightly better off if Trump is merely a clever, manipulative, and cynical liar than if he really believes his own fictions, whether from vanity, fear, or some combination of these. Why? Because when confronted with reality-constraints that inhibit his freedom of action, or threaten to inflict grave harm on the United States, he may be more realistic in his decisions and less prone to escape to some fantasy-saturated bubble of his own making. So, what are we dealing with here? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, regardless of their source or motivation, we all have a responsibility to reject the Trump administration’s ceaseless torrent of untruths in a principled and consistent way and to defend all those who expose them, even (or especially) when they do so at great cost.

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