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Tribal Doublethink: The Third Option between Stupid and Liar
Adam Carolla is an American comedian with a tragic sense of humanity and life. One of his most famous starting points for a rant is to find people who say something inaccurate. Then asks the stupid or liar question and goes on to rave and complain in a manner that millions of Americans find amusing. There are complaints that he is overly harsh and mean, but that is not atypical in comedy.
In a recent podcast with Dave Rubin, however, he started to think about a third option beyond stupid or liar. He mentioned that Rashida Tlaib was calling for boycotts or UN sanctions or something against Israel because of the attack at the Gazan hospital. This was days after multiple confirmations by various sources that the hospital was exploded by a failed rocket attack by Hamas. Adam said something like, she has a phone like the rest of us, “why didn’t she look anything up?” he asked.
I think I figured out why. It’s not really stupidity and it’s not what we conventionally think of as a lie. I think Lenin said somewhere, “morality is whatever is in the interests of the party.” While I can’t find the specific quote, Trotsky came close, “To a revolutionary Marxist, there can be no contradiction between personal morality and the interests of the party, since the party embodies in his consciousness the very highest tasks and aims of mankind.”
As another member of Congress said, “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”
So whatever is actually true is not as important as the “moral truth.” Lying in the interest of the party is not actually lying to a Communist.
George Orwell coined the term doublethink in his book 1984. Forgive the longish but brilliant quotation.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
As an aside, I am impressed that I could not find one extraneous sentence to cut. Orwell’s writing style is always a pleasure, even if his content is bleak.
To Rashida Tlaib, the story of Israel as a racist apartheid state is so important that actual facts of the Gaza hospital bombing are nugatory. The importance of the narrative overwhelms the merely factual.
My personal favorite example of this is the rape charge against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. To summarize a long story, the rape accusation had the flimsiest of evidence and there was even some evidence to suggest it was wrong. Normally this would be laughed out of court and immediately dismissed as a nonsense accusation. However, Brett Kavanaugh was rightly suspected that he would vote against Roe v. Wade and return abortion rights to the states. Abortion rights are the most important thing to a significant minority of leftists, but it would be a bad tactic to vote against him.
In American tradition, senators vote for any Supreme Court Justice nominee regardless of party affiliation. However, pretending there was any merit to the rape accusation was more politically expedient and helped secure abortion rights.
Again, all the “facts” must conform to the narrative. Nancy Pelosi was informed by the FBI that the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh were nothing to take seriously. Then, midway through the confirmation hearings, she brought it up. Now, it is tempting to think of this as an all too typical partisan trick that doesn’t really need a psychological explanation. While none of us can see inside Nancy Pelosi’s mind (thankfully), it is entirely plausible that she holds abortion as being so sacred that focusing on nonsense accusations in service of a greater truth. Abortion to the American left is what the party was to Trotsky, after all.
To be fair, some of this can be viewed on the right. “I don’t like taxes on gasoline and the big government required to collect taxes, so I don’t believe in global warming. I don’t believe in the government forcing people to wear masks or to force vaccines, so I don’t believe they work.” However, these selective beliefs don’t technically require doublethink. They are a dismissal of inconvenient information. This is plain confirmation bias and it isn’t as psychologically complex or manipulative.
Racism of either the right or left variety seems to have strong elements of doublethink, though. People will work and cooperate with races they think little of to advance their interests while denying the value of those particular racial groups. They know that Sam, who belongs to a race they dislike, is capable and honest, but they don’t want to associate with others of Sam’s race. The fact that Sam and others of his race are fine workers and customers is subsumed by the narrative.
This brings us to some of the particular doublethink by some on Ricochet concerning Israel and the West broadly defined. I don’t think it’s about dishonesty, as some have accused. It’s about doublethink. The narrative that the West is not really any better than other cultures can crush all other evidence. Such a narrative is often held by people who have moved to the West and some who will never leave the West.
This is similar to folks who complain ceaselessly about how racist America is and then insist on having open borders to let as many people as possible into this terrible country. The beliefs are contradictory but serve the political interests of the left.
In conclusion, humans are made to fit into groups and not think logically or to pursue the truth as best as they are able. We were genetically designed by nature to adopt ideologies to fit into groups because humans most effectively survive in groups.* But as an admirer of the Scientific Revolution and the Scottish Enlightenment, I would like humanity to consciously try to be more logical and less tribal. We should struggle against our nature towards the better angels of reason. A shame it doesn’t come naturally.
*E.O. Wilson refers to humans as a super-organism and that the survival of the group is prioritized over the survival of the individual.
Published in General
Rashida Tlaib’s own religion permits her to lie to protect the faith. It’s called taqqiya, and I’ve read people who say that the definitions of it are usually too broad. I think the broadness is just what Islamists appreciate. Good post, Henry.
She probably does look things up, no doubt she has the Al-Jazeera app on her phone.
A couple of points:
You have some serous logical leaps at least one of which is a non sequitur. Your own assumption about our friend Sam vs the non-Samites underlies your conclusion about Samites who are not Sam, so there’s also potentially a begged question.
E.O. Wilson is done hard by your one-liner. I’ll check to see if that’s his take, but if it is, he’s speaking in an extended sense, not the hymenopteran sense. He would have been speaking largely as analogy, with a touch of evo-bio on the behavioral side.
More on this later. I’ve so far just power-skimmed.
I find it useful to ascribe human failure to one of three driving categories: evil, stupid, and weak. Walk around the office one day and test-fit those onto the usual suspects, or onto the suspects in a particular widespread failure. I find it illuminating.
Regarding speech and Carolla’s categories, “stupid” is easy to map into my categories, “liar” is difficult, and conformist sap (which seems to be the third category, especially as a form of moral laziness) maps pretty easily to “weak”. So this would map the “liar” types into evil, provided you mean willful, greed-based lies. The difficulty with assigning lies this way is that it’s fairly easy to imagine lying out of weakness, and it typically fails, so we might call it stupid as well. but if we assign lies to evil (or restrict the sort of lies we are talking about, or carefully prune the motives), game on!
Re: Orwell’s description of doublethink (agreed, brilliant), this is the skill that universities teach above all others. Post-modernism, critical anything, [blank] justice, Marxist “economics”, soft-on-crime “justice… these are all struggle sessions to train young people not to stop thinking, but to stop holding themselves accountable for any but the proper variety of plainly false just-so stories. The stupid march, the weak egg them on, and the evil “teach”.
All of us have things we’re sure we can’t be wrong about, and things that, we might privately allow, we might or might not be totally right about. I think that sometimes people are literally incapable of understanding a situation that their strong beliefs, and/or prejudices, filters out. This doesn’t let them off the hook, but it can explain things. The old expression applies: when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
So, on the left, I just read an article about brazen thefts from stores that was totally baffled by it. Maybe “further study” is required. But the author was sure of a cure: it’s the stores’ fault for not spending enough money. Perhaps if they hired more community members to guard the merchandise. But if nobody, uniformed or not, is allowed to so much as touch the thief to prevent the theft, how would more guards help? It’s just a kneejerk reaction to a situation that, according to their doctrine, should not be happening.
Not that we’re immune to this kind of thinking. On the right, the main solution to insane levels of lawlessness is always the same: if only black people had more guns! Yeah, sure, that’s the answer, because we’re hard-wired to always regard it as our go-to. Are we lying about that? No, but our built-in assumptions limit our ability to look at Harlem and say, sometimes a more armed society is not a more polite society.
I can’t find the article anymore, but John Derbyshire described doublethink as a kind of “protective stupidity” designed to avoid confronting unpleasant truths. He mentioned some characteristics such as inability to follow a logical train of thought, failure to grasp analogies, not understanding the idea of mutually exclusive concepts . . . I wish I could find the article just so I could accurately complete the list.
I can’t speak for everyone, but in my experience if I encounter a situation that might seem to contradict one of my basic principles, the issue is that it might only SEEM to contradict my principle because I just hadn’t considered that variation before.
Once considered, I can see how my principle actually does cover it. The only problem comes if some interlocuter insists that I immediately abandon the principle rather than deal with the new information.
For some reason, what first comes to mind is if someone were to insist that Newtonian physics principles must be abandoned because they don’t explain the orbit of Mercury. You need Einstein for that, because of – for lack of a simpler term here – the “gravity-well effect.” But Newtonian principles ARE Einsteinian, where the “gravity-well effect” is essentially zero. And extending Newtonian principles to include the “gravity-well effect” does NOT disprove the original principles.
This may be somewhat in line with my previous comment, but the actual rationale on the right – and some on the left caricature it as what you say – is “if only LAW-ABIDING PEOPLE had more guns.” That’s not the same as “black people.”
Since bad guys always have access to guns, and the worst black crime neighborhoods are in cities with strcit gun laws, good guys are critically outgunned there. The operating principle being that the bad guys know this of course, making the entire city a soft-target “gun-free zone”.
I heartily support improving conditions in our stereotypical bighted inner city based on faith that whatever our differences, decent black people are like decent white people in not wanting to live like that. So I’m definitely in the “arm blacks” camp. I do subscribe to the theory that making bad guys think twice has a “broken windows” effect.
So I don;t think that this is a good example of double-think on the right. I will get into some later, but kinda busy.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer explains.
This is part of an article on Alex Berenson’s Substack from a few weeks ago. I wonder just how this division might be affecting how societies approach solving problems. I also wonder about the introvert/extrovert personality trait between the smart people and the smartest people.
“(Two for one special today since I haven’t written since last week.)
My virtual German buddy Eugyppius has a fascinating Stack today on a paper showing smart people were more likely to take the mRNA jabs.
The study drew on 750,000 Swedish men who were tested for their intelligence as part of their mandatory military service. The findings are clear: “The smarter participants had higher uptake and they got vaccinated more quickly.”
But the study has one fascinating hole. It shows smart people were more likely to take the jab – but not that the smartest people were. As Eugyppius notes, the top group represented
The equivalent of an above-average university student – the kinds of people who work as doctors and lawyers. We hardly needed a study to tell us that the most enthusiastic vaccinees are to be found precisely in this population.
Yep.
—
What the study really explains, Eugyppius argues, is why near-compulsory mRNA jabs became national policy in wealthy democracies. In those countries, this smart-not-smartest group dominates politics and most businesses (if not startups).
He draws on a 1985 paper called “Intelligence and personal influence in groups” to argue that the most intelligent people cannot argue down persuasively and so have limited influence.
Instead, people who are somewhat smarter than average, with an IQ of about 120 (I’d go slightly higher, to 125-130), dominate debate. They can understand – if not formulate – somewhat complicated ideas and still argue them in ways less intelligent people can follow. The smart-not-brilliant range also contains enough people to form powerful and reinforcing social networks. The very top definitionally does not.”
Yep, that’s my problem. :-)
The collectivist view of salvation does not allow an examination of individual responsibility concerning good and evil actions. Therefore, they resent any disagreement with their beliefs in moral equivalency. An evil act is always the result of someone else’s action, not the result of the individual’s action to the collectivist.
George Orwell became a critic of the Soviet Union and Stalin when the NKVD started hunting down anyone who was not enough of a Stalinist during the Spanish Civil War. After Animal Farm and 1984 were published the Stalinists of England and other countries were enraged with Orwell for his critical view of Stalin.
While at the most basic level, the first priority of an organism is the survival of the species, I do not hold this to be true for humans. The left’s de facto worship of abortion is ample evidence of that. The problem is that our educational system has come to be antagonistic to thinking logically, and instead to indoctrinate its wards to be “good citizens.” Ref: Lenin & Trotsky, and finally Orwell above.
And Orwell again: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
For years now, anybody who dares to mention the obvious parallels between the things going on in our country now, and ’30’s and 40’s Germany, is instantly attacked, shamed, doxxed, and lots of other unpleasant things. And Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” So here we are – America is looking more and more like, what, the fourth reich?
With the left, the Marxists, having gained near total control of the public schools, I see our hope lying in homeschools, institutions building curriculum around the Classics, institutions of higher learning like Hillsdale, and maybe unconventional sources. These institutions are dedicated, not to turning out “good citizens,” but people who THINK.
Well, hold on… First off, there are a lot more possibilities than stupidity and lying.
When listening to someone speak, the context is important. Perhaps they’re providing a truthful account, perhaps they’re lying, perhaps they’re quoting someone else, perhaps they’re telling a joke, speaking for an organization, telling a story, acting out a part, playing a trick, offering an alternate reality, predicting the future, selling a product, or perhaps even talking total gibberish.
You, the listener, may or may not know the context. The context is important, not only in understanding the intent, but also to decide how seriously to take their words.
In today’s politics, those on the left are often just reciting talking points. The words are not their own, they may or may not believe them, it doesn’t matter, they’re just reciting the talking points. It’s a total giveaway when multiple speakers use the same phrases. (Recall those Rush Limbaugh compilations of numerous newscasts and politicians repeating the exact same phrases.)
The talking points were written by the party management for the sole purpose of persuasion. They don’t have to be accurate, they don’t have to be correct, they don’t even have to make sense.
And so the speaker doesn’t have to worry about figuring things out, or dealing with Orwell’s contradictory beliefs, all they have to do is read the talking points and they know it’s all been worked out for them to be maximally effective.
And that’s what you’re seeing here.
Exchange the word “Communist” with “Democrat” (there’s little daylight between them anyway these days) and you have modern U.S. politics in a nutshell hell.
The Democrats’ flying monkeys in the media will still insist that the Russia Collusion Hoax is true. Idiots from both parties will still use “insurrection” and “coup” to describe January 6th, even as more video inconvenient to that narrative trickles out.
Israel is a racist apartheid state. Whatever happened regarding the bombing of one particular hospital in Gaza doesn’t change that.
It is strange, to me, that so many of you seem to have accepted the Israeli and Mainstream Media story about that particular hospital bombing. I don’t know why people seem to be so certain about that. I don’t think that it’s been resolved at all. The Palestinian claims about the number of fatalities seems questionable, and the various competing claims about the cause seem questionable, too.
Fog of war. It may be hard to tell what happened in a particular incident.
What isn’t hard to understand is that the Israelis announced policy was to kill about 2.3 million people by hunger and thirst. That much is clear. You might say that they didn’t really want to kill everybody, but rather they just wanted the suffering and death to the civilian population to force capitulation by Hamas. That’s plausible, though I think it’s a war crime, too. So, that’s pretty ugly.
Then there are the roughly 11,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli bombing, including thousands of women and children. How accurate is that number? Well, I don’t know. It may be overstated, or it may be a lot higher due to bodies still buried in the rubble.
The killing of thousands of women and children, though, doesn’t seem deniable. Isn’t that bad enough?
So, why the focus on one particular hospital bombing? The answer seems clear. Focusing on one questionable incident distracts attention from the massacre of civilians that is undeniably being carried out by the Israelis.
You might think it’s justified. It’s definitely a massacre, though.
I reject Jerry’s comment utterly, in its entirety.
I am not even going to refute any lie within it. There’s no benefit. The untruths will not be retracted, corrected, or even reconsidered. This comment — like many similar — is a large untruth incorporating many smaller untruths.
I will not allow this sort of low-quality, high-quantity noise to get me going on an ugly tangent. Jerry has his right to speak and has done so. I will avoid the temptation to respond in detail to the numerous obvious untrue statements in order to chop away at the faulty conclusions, lest I tempt the Terrible Sea Lion.
Not doing it.
.
This is a disgusting, stupid, inaccurate, revolting, ignorant thing to say.
Jerry, what kind of church do you attend?
That’s from wikipedia. I believe Arabs in Israel have full voting rights. So, yeah, your description of the comment is accurate as far as I can tell.
I know. Thank you.
There are people who believe the worst of Israel. Every so often they are right.
There are people who believe the worst of Palestine. Every so often they are wrong.
So blacks can marry whites and Muslims can marry Jews in or Christians in Israel right? That is not very apartheid. Also, while I have never been, I hear that the gay bars are fabulous in Israel.
That particular pro-Israel angle is very unlikely to bring Jerry around.
Well I am a gosh darn classical liberal and and I want gay bars and religious freedom. The haters can go suck a lemon.
Indeed, you’d expect Jerry to be pro-apartheid. At least in some areas.
Famed auto writer “Uncle” Tom Cahill, describing Ford’s ill-fated Edsel: “It looks like an Oldsmobile sucking on a lemon.”
I thought Jerry meant this as a complement.