At the beginning of her political career, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a very remarkable comment. In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he was asked about a claim he made about the Pentagon’s use of “four Pinocchios” by fact-checkers at the Washington Post. Although he admits his mistake, he has this to say:
If people want to blast one person here or one name there, I would argue that they are missing the forest for the trees. I think there are a lot of people who are more concerned with accuracy, truth, and statistical correctness than being ethical.
In a bad way, one might interpret this as saying, “it doesn’t matter if what you say is true, what matters is that what you say shows that you are a good person.” But a more useful explanation is that he meant “morally correct” here to mean something like when someone is said to be “morally certain.” Moral certainty falls short of fully guaranteed certainty, but is close enough to it to justify acting on that basis. So perhaps “morally correct” in this context means that the claim accurately conveys some kind of big-picture truth even if the details don’t hold up to scrutiny.
A recently published study suggests that supporters are more likely to notice when their organization’s leaders make false claims. As the authors summarize, they found that, “voters tend to notice when their party’s claims are not supported by direct evidence. Yet they still respond well, if they believe that these inaccurate statements evoke a deeper, more important ‘truth’.” For example, they found that many Trump supporters who support the former President’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him know full well that this claim is not true. Nevertheless, they still request these claims because “they see these allegations as important to ‘America’s priorities,’ because they believe that the political system is illegitimate and aligned with their interests.” In their minds, it doesn’t matter that Trump’s allegations that the election was stolen are “untrue” because they see it as “moral well” – it speaks to the “deep truth” about the corrupt political process, the bureaucrats who want to thwart the will of the people, and so on.
Of course, people often use this freedom in terms of factual accuracy rather than inequality. The authors point out that, “Voters of both parties were more concerned with ‘moral truth’ when evaluating their favorite politician. On the other hand, when evaluating a politician they did not like, voters relied more on hard facts.” If you’re progressive, you’ll tend to ignore Ocasio-Cortez’s many factual errors because you’ll think his statements still touch on important facts — just as Trump supporters tend to ignore his factual inaccuracies for the same reason.
I think there is another factor at play as to why people seem to accept and repeat political claims they know to be wrong. Making these types of statements serves as a kind of credibility signal. In a nation, loyalty is expressed by saying too strongly that one expects to be taken “seriously but not literally.” For this reason, fact-checking can often be ineffective because people who make or repeat such claims do not consider them to be statements of fact in the first place.
As many Trump supporters make claims about a rigged election they know to be untrue in order to demonstrate their commitment to other ideologies, I suspect that many of the people who repeat the words “he woke up” are doing so as a way to show their progressiveness. bone fides, not because they actually believe the statements themselves to be true in any way. This runs counter to another idea I’ve called “political hypocrisy” – the idea that people’s political claims are often intended to express attitudes and are not intended as statements of fact.
If these types of statements are intended to show political loyalty and gain status within the party, this creates negative situations. Status is a zero-sum game – one can rise in status only by rising in status above others. To get a position in this kind of loyalty signing game, there is competitive pressure to make statements that are too disconnected from reality, to differentiate yourself. In a way, this sends a strong loyalty signal.
You do not show your loyalty to the group by making statements that anyone in any group can agree with. “The sky is blue” will not earn you any points for any team. But consider what Ibrahim Kendi says in his book Stamped From the Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideology in Americawhen he said “When you really believe that races are equal, then you also believe that races are different.” it should it could be the result of racism.” Kendi says that all the differences in the combined results between different people can be only defined by racism, and if you believe it can be anywhere the other definition is even part of the difference, then you are a racial elite of some kind. A person’s willingness to support this feeling sends a very strong loyalty signal because of its strong connection to reality. In the same way, when it is obvious that Trump’s claims of a stolen election are nonsense, the credibility signal is strengthened when someone is willing to confirm and repeat those claims.
But there is an external problem here. Posting these kinds of signs elevates one’s status at the expense of polluting public discourse. When ninety-nine persons repeat these words when they do not personally believe them to be true, the one person in a hundred who sincerely makes such statements both gains confidence in the truth of their abstracted opinions, and loses any chance of finding a conflict between truth and reality. error, as John Stuart Mill said. People who humbly repeat these statements provide an intellectual cover for true believers in these ideas to seize power in institutions and implement these ideas.
One surprising case of these changes, I believe, can be seen in the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In 2016, conspiracy theorists spread the idea that there was an extensive child-trafficking operation among officials, and that children were being held as part of this operation in the basement of Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in Washington DC – despite the fact that. this institution did not even have a basement. Finally, a true believer went there with a gun, intending to free the children. Fortunately, he was caught by the police and no one was hurt. But what stands out to me about this case is that even though thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of people online say they believe this child trafficking platform exists, and even though many send harassing calls or leave nasty comments online, only. one actually someone tried to do something to stop it. This suggests to me that many – perhaps most – of the people who endorsed this conspiracy theory on the internet did not indeed believe that it is truly true. They say they approve and promote it as a way of showing loyalty, and doing so will send a strong loyalty signal to the group precisely because the whole idea was absurd. But when enough people are willing to do this, it opens up the occasional person who really believes in doing something really bad.
Recently, I saw the following claim on Twitter: “A good sign that wakeism is about to go out of fashion is that even the zealots, who once allowed the wakes to boycott their movement, are starting to act as if they saw the wake, as if they were fighting Eastasia.” I have a slightly different opinion here. I suspect that most leftists, in private, he did in fact “seeing in wokeism all the time,” but nevertheless confirmed it by voice for reasons of status and sign of loyalty. As the halo surrounding Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo begins to wear off, many who leave are now willing to say outright that they never really were. he believed any of those things. But still, some people actually believe it. And many of those true believers, with the cover given to them as a sign of loyalty, have entered positions of great institutional power. Much of Kendi and DiAngelo’s corpus has become official policy for governments, large corporations, and medical institutions — even if most of the people who publicly endorsed those ideas never believed them to be true.
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