Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” That is a simple, profound and true statement.
Moynihan’s words have particular significance for our country and society in the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning 2024 election victory. To put things bluntly, Trump was able to win because he and his supporters convinced most of the country to believe in him. falsification of factual truth.
Factual truth is distinguished from ideology or bias or personal opinion. Rather, for example, the real truth is that my name is Robert Jay Lifton, I’m a research psychiatrist studying the psychological roots of war and political violence, and I’m writing an article. American scientific. It’s a statement phrase that makes an undeniable point. This irrefutability is the source of the appeal of factual truth.
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On the contrary, when the factual truth is broken—by denying the result of a legitimate election, for example—factual falsehoods can occur that overwhelm an entire society. Because the true fake requires constant additional lies to cover up and maintain the original. And the defense of persistent falsehoods is based on more than repetition; It is based on fear and can easily lead to violence. Philip Roth had falsehood and violence in mind”native american berserk“.
It is due to this situation evil normality, society’s routinization of falsehood and destructive behavior. This can cause psychic luck, inability to feel or dislination, which can reach the point of immobilization.
Children in Hiroshima one year after the bomb.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Malicious normality has a lot of overlap with the term “sanewashing”. That term connects with a wider audience, but can become light and vague. Evil normality, on the other hand, is more suggestive of a psychological experience of individuals and groups.
Given how widespread falsehoods and lies have become, any mention of the value of telling the truth may seem counterintuitive. But telling the real truth can bring psychological relief to the teller who can turn him away from malicious falsehoods. In this way, telling the truth helps reduce psychic disempowerment.
I have also emphasized in my work how we humans are creatures hungry for meaning. This is absolutely true for survivors of war, nuclear or conventional, or other extreme trauma. For this meaning to be convincing, it must be based on factual truth.
It is wrong and misleading to talk about us as a “post-truth” society. Rather, it is a society constantly engaged in a struggle to tell the truth, which can be a very difficult enterprise, as the 2024 US election made all too clear.
To combat the disaster of a second Trump administration and combat serial lying, we need every means imaginable to tell the truth. And telling the truth itself becomes an expression of activist resistance.
In each of my research studies, I have sought to bear witness to the truths I have discovered. The principle of telling the truth was central to all my work. In Hiroshima, for example, my work took the form of a scientific interview analysis of hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bomb. But I felt it necessary to add a broader ethical commitment to telling the story of the bomb’s devastating human impact. In that way I had to become a professional testimony, this meant not only exposing, but also confronting, the entire Hiroshima disaster nuclearism which led to the willingness to embrace and use these weapons to solve human problems.
It was true to the core study of anti-war Vietnam veterans and the anti-war movement. The veterans I interviewed came to find the meaning of war in its meaninglessness. Indeed, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) asserted that this is nonsense, as well as a committed effort to fight their own war.
Hannah Arendt, the famous philosopher known for her the study of totalitarianismHe stated that it was based on “organised group lies”. He noted that leaders such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels promoted what they themselves called the “big lie” not only to oppress their people, but also to control their sense of reality. In this way, the Nazi leaders could seek ownership of reality, achieving a widespread national belief in the lie. There is the whole of Germany that became a mystical cult with Hitler as its guru and savior. Telling the truth was also central my exam about the murderous behavior of Nazi doctors.
There is a kind of worship parallel Trump’s claim of omnisciencehis die-hard followers believed, and his constant claims to ownership of reality.
Despite losing the election, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz touched a national nerve when they started using the word “weird” to describe Trump and his running mate JD Vance. This is because it has collectively returned us to a democracy that operates on factual truths. A queer person is one you should never follow, because if you do, you’ll pick up some of that queerness, a loss of reality, and a general obliviousness to factual truth. This becomes very dangerous for a society facing planetary threats like nuclear war and global warming. Curiosity threatens our security, individually and nationally. But instead of avoiding it, the election maintained and prolonged our dangerous participation in the oddity.
In stark contrast to the serial falsehoods of Trump and Vance, the Harris-Walz team sought to tell the truth throughout the election process and consistently regurgitated those lies. Sure, Harris and Walz could expand their claims, leave out the awkward changes each has made to their claims, and avoid difficult issues. But they talked about factual issues and factual options.
The election was the ultimate test of how much real truth our society could handle. Not enough, it turned out. But even with the electoral defeat, our society is still hungry for these factual truths.
The Trumpists are likely to continue in their wake which creates cruelty situations, whether “ungovernable”, harmful policies related to climate, threatened violence or the persistent planetary threat of COVID. But we are not without them.
In response to my examination of the Nazi doctors, some friends would ask me, “Now what do you think of your friends?” They expected him to say “not much”. But my answer was that we could go either way. By using our “better angels” (in Lincoln’s words) to survive or die from our disasters, they give us enough wisdom to survive to advance the species.
We are not condemned to self-destruction by a death drive; nor is it certain that we will sustain a truth-centered, life-enhancing ethos. But we have the capacity for that ethos, which provides a strong source of hope.
Awarding the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize hibakusha The Nihon Hidankyo group is a powerful affirmation of this hope through its anti-nuclear activism. Although Harris accepted the election, he insisted that he would never stop fighting “for freedom, opportunity, justice and the dignity of all people.”
We cannot hope to eliminate falsehood entirely. There is no absolute moment of real truth realization. On the contrary, we are constantly fighting, as individuals and as a country, for the dignity, necessity and satisfaction of telling the truth.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific
