Man people are nonplussed (can you be plussed?) that something like 30% of Americans believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen despite 60 failed court cases, multiple audits and recounts, no evidence whatsoever to support the claim and overwhelming evidence that it is false. How can this be?
David Rothkopf at the Daily Beast is not so puzzled.
[E]ven the most modest amount of analysis and introspection will reveal that buying into the nonsense peddled by the former president and his clown college of cronies is not an aberration, not due to some momentary lapse on the part of the American electorate. We were raised on lies—including many lies that are much, much bigger than the big one that troubles us today.
That’s the problem. We are as a society—and by “we” I mean virtually all of us on the planet —brought up to believe howling absurdities, ridiculous impossibilities, and insupportable malarkey from our very first moments on Earth. We have massive lie-delivery systems that are the core institutions of our society. And we have created cultural barriers to even questioning those fabrications which are most deserving of skeptical scrutiny. For example, we regularly label as sacred those ideas that are least able to stand up to scrutiny. (Heck, we have folks in our society who can’t even handle the idea that the history we teach our kids might actually be based on what happened, you know, back in the past.)
The most pervasive and pernicious lie, of course, is that there is a magical all-powerful guy up in the sky, and if you believe the right nonsense, say the right mumbo jumbo, and perform the correct rituals, you will get to live with him forever after you die. It's probably worth noting that most of the people who believe the election was stolen are also powerfully committed to this belief and make specific forms of ritual and mumbo jumbo central to their lives and world view. So yeah, if you believe that, you can believe anything.
This got me to thinking, regarding the previous post. For most of the 20th Century, people were able to simultaneously adhere to religion and accept the legitimacy and power of medical science. Jonas Salk was a national hero. But if you think about it this was cognitive dissonance. I think one reason science has lost some cultural authority is that scientists have become more outspoken about the incompatibility of science and religion. We had a number of books to that effect, in fact.
Many people want to be told what to believe. It's easier. I'm not sure what we can do about that.
3 comments:
I think it's more to do with the general distrust of authority figures which has been growing over the past 30-odd years. Having assholes like Christopher Hitchens piss all over the only thing that gives many people comfort doesn't help, but that's just the icing. Scientists are part of "the establishment" which has demonstrably failed us all for two generations. These people, having a seperate and distinct center of emotional gravity, are merely the first to cut loose from authority. The rest of us, having neither god nor a real community, are going to have a much harder time of it.
Obviously this isn't a good thing, either collectively or individually, but it's inevitable as the great ponzi scheme that is america becomes too obvious to ignore.
Well of course Hitchens wasn't a scientist, just a lay asshole. Whether scientists in general are part of "the establishment" is not clear. What do you mean by that? The don't have any particular political power and for the most part make fairly modest incomes, although I suppose any people think otherwise.
The "establishment," estemado Cervantes, is a term of popular media and discourse with a plastic definition. In general you could say it's those make and enforce the rules and those to whom they listen. Scientists, being the ones who write the books and set the terms of modernist discourse, are firmly within the establishment. The point is not that they as a group have let us down (though there are some spectacular examples) but rather that they are adjudged guilty by association with the authorities who have. Vis a vis Hitchens, it's irrelevant that he wasn't a scientist, he was a high profile "public intellectual" and is merely used here as a place holder for the kind of sneering arrogance toward religion that turns these people off.
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