House of Eratosthenes

They get caught at it an awful lot, and if you pay attention to any one subject of their repeated lying throughout its presence in the news cycle, you discover they have a need to do this lying; truth wouldn’t benefit them. Once they’re caught at it and confronted with it, they don’t seem to think there’s much of any ramification or consequence to it. Like they never stopped to think what it would be like to back something that would still look good, with the truth being known. John Hawkins notices this pattern:

If Liberals Are The Good Guys, Why Do They Lie So Much?
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Remember when the Trayvon Martin shooting hit the news? Most people thought a 12 year old kid was attacked by adult who had uttered racial slurs about him and then shot him to death for no good reason…
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You could ask the same question about the Mike Brown shooting. At first we heard that Mike Brown was just an innocent kid who was attacked by officer and then shot to death while he had his hands up and was pleading with the officer not to shoot…
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Then there’s Obamacare.

No piece of legislation in modern history has been sold with so many willful lies about what it would do. Obama told people they could keep their doctors, keep their health care plans and that Obamacare would save the average family $2500 a year.

None of that turned out to be true.

If liberals are the good guys, why did they have to lie to the American people about Obamacare? If liberals are good people, why aren’t they apologizing for the lies they told?

The frustrating thing about confronting any of this is that it quickly becomes apparent that some liberals are good people. Or at least, fully intend to be. If liberalism, as a political movement, relied on the nefarious schemes of people who really did intend to capitalize on such lies, or so casually shrugged off the devastating effects of such lies with full consciousness of the suffering they were choosing to ignore, it wouldn’t get anywhere.

So the first thing you always have to do when arguing with liberals, the most frustrating part, is to try to figure out if you’re looking into the face of pure evil. Or, if it’s just ignorance. Is this one of the deceivers, or one of the deceived? One of those who wouldn’t care if he could be made to understand that the policies are bad, and already knows anyway; or, one who would care, and a lot, but just doesn’t understand?

There are two obstacles: Ego and mob-rule. Ego is enough to confound the question, because if you simply tell a supporter of raising the minimum wage “This doesn’t actually raise the wage of any jobs, it just outlaws jobs that pay less” — you’re almost never going to get back a “Oh yeah that’s right, I hadn’t thought of that.” Even though, if we’re arguing with logic, reason, common sense, and concern about what happens to the poor, that’s about the only rebuttal that can be offered. No, the direction is not going to be changed so easily. There’s inertia here, lots of it.

On the plane of reality, what you can expect to have happen is civility will be lost at that point, and it will be all your fault. Good manners have evolved — devolved? — to mean, you should offer the liberal some chance to continue being a liberal.

The other obstacle is the intoxicating effect of climbing on a bandwagon. “I want to do this thing” carries with it some instinctive feeling of responsibility, some obligation to make amends if the “thing” turns out not to be right. “I want to be a part of this thing,” on the other hand…

This is part of the reason why, to me anyway, one of the most impressive lines in Judgment at Nuremberg is when Judge Dan Haywood says, “As far as I can make out, no one in this country knew.” The entire movie comes down to just that one line. That’s how liberalism works, right there: Lots of mob-enthusiasm, lots of excitement over a “chance to be a part of this thing,” and it seems always with a charismatic demigod at the front of it. Everyone’s got some excuse for doing their lying, but there certainly isn’t much truth going around; and after the parade rounds the corner and disappears from sight, and there’s nothing left in the streets but lots of debris, lots of damage, lots of suffering…nobody knew.

The frustrating thing about confronting any of this is that it quickly becomes apparent that some liberals are good people. Or at least, fully intend to be.

I have to respectfully disagree here. “Making the teeniest, tiniest effort to find out the truth of a proposition” seems to be a crucial part of making a moral judgment, especially when that effort costs nothing. In Judgment at Nuremberg terms: Nobody would claim that the “ordinary German” was a saint during the Third Reich, but it’s hard to hold somebody morally responsible for not knowing the truth when learning it carries such a heavy risk to both himself and his family.

Our Betters, on the other hand, have all the information they need at their fingertips. I can’t really blame a guy for not risking a Gestapo bullet in the back of the head to find out the truth, but I can and do blame him for avoiding the truth because he doesn’t want to sully the purity of his eyeballs with Faux News. To say that he “fully intends to be a good person” under those conditions is like me saying “I fully intend to learn Chinese in my spare time” — literally the only thing stopping me is a few clicks of the mouse. If I don’t click, I don’t get to crow about what a diligent student of Chinese I am, and I certainly don’t get to call you a jerk for pointing out that I haven’t learned word one.
- Severian | 03/31/2015 @ 06:43
But that’s the “benefit” to promoting laziness in a society, isn’t it? Once even a mouse-click is seen as something out of the ordinary, once bloggers are asked “How is it you have all this spare time to blog?” for putting up just one link to an article in the course of over a week, with maybe a couple short paragraphs of what they think about it…in such a setting in which complete sloth is the norm and any real work is the exception, and people don’t know what “work” is anymore. Can we really say your sweet Aunt Petunia doesn’t “fully intend” to be a good person, as she babbles on with a bunch of foolish nonsense she never understood about “fortifying and strengthening the middle class which is the backbone of the country”?

This is also the “benefit” of all those “‘Those People’ conversations.” What should we do with restrictions for those guns “those people” want to buy and collect, what can we do with affirmative action so “those people” have a “chance.” The above-mentioned minimum-wage laws are perfect examples of “those people” laws. Yes, you have a moral code against doing so much lever-pulling and knob-twiddling to affect intimate aspects of the lives of people you’ll never meet, without doing any work to learn about what’s really happening. But, that’s your code. Just like, if you take the time to talk to a thief about why he stole something, you come to find out he lives in a special world wherein property has a whole different meaning, and he didn’t steal anything at all, he just “took back” what was always rightfully his. Liberals are no different. And Aunt Petunia’s homemade apple pie is so delicious! And there’s cheesecake!
- mkfreeberg | 03/31/2015 @ 08:47
I think I’m missing something here. Let’s say that Aunt Petunia “fully intends” to be a good person, but for whatever cultural reasons, she makes not the slightest effort to find out what “fortifying and strengthening the middle class which is the backbone of the country” really means. Not to get all Hillary Clinton here, but what difference, at that point, does it make? She’s still morally culpable for the results of her foolishness. Catholic theologians call this “vincible ignorance” — you didn’t know something was morally or doctrinally wrong, but you had all the resources available to find out, so it’s still a sin.

Further, it’s clear that Aunt Petunia wouldn’t change her behavior even if she did know — as you note in your post, “Oh yeah that’s right, I hadn’t thought of that” is the only intellectually honest response… but you never, ever hear it from liberals, either the evil ones or the “fully intend to be good” ones. Instead, you get blithe disregard — cf. all the wymyns who are fully cognizant of Hillary Clinton’s many, many, many (many many many) illegal activities, but will vote for her anyway, because vagina. Or you get Cuttlefishy nonsense — the dictionary says X; she does the exact opposite of X but says she’s doing X; therefore not-X is really X.

I’m coming to believe that treating them all as if they’re willfully evil is the only answer. Does it matter that I “fully intend” to learn Chinese if I go around proclaiming to the world that I’m a serious student of Chinese, everyone should learn a foreign language, omigod why aren’t there government programs for this, but…. I’ve never actually learned a word? It doesn’t matter if I’m a super guy in every other respect; in this particular case I am lying, and a loser, and should be mocked mercilessly until I either pick up a Chinese dictionary or shut the fuck up about how much Chinese I fully intend to study someday.

Which is harsh on Aunt Petunia, I know, but until she stops vocally supporting — and voting for — stupid, culturally destructive bullshit, she needs to be publicly shamed.
- Severian | 03/31/2015 @ 09:53
No, I get it. We’re talking past each other because we’re applying different validation tests to moral reasoning, you’re applying an objective definition that rests mostly on the outcome of situations that have been affected by the actions. I’m applying a subjective one, in that I’m commenting on how things are perceived by the person doing the reasoning. In so doing, I’m essentially exploring the cobwebs in the mind of a lunatic. This essentially illustrates why “moral reasoning” doesn’t work when it’s limited to self-assessment, it’s like using a watch to figure out if that watch is telling the correct time.

I can certainly agree with the “public shame” part, since the way I see it this is a maturity problem. We’re not really ready to condemn a nine-year-old, or a six-year-old, are we, if he misses out on the lesson that what looks like the right thing to do, turns out to be the wrong thing to do if a bit more information comes to light. Are we? I’m sure I wasn’t too quick on the uptake there when I was nine. Well, that’s your Aunt Petunia for you. She never learned. Certainly it’s reasonable to expect this to have happened, since now she’s coming up on seventy-nine. Well it hasn’t happened. Does this mean she’s another Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi? Not necessarily. She’s just not hip to the idea that individual thought means much of anything; never had any reason to be. If people ALWAYS think in groups, womb-to-tomb, the thing we call “conscience” doesn’t do a lot of maturing because there’s no reason for it to mature.

And that’s my point. People say “I want to be a part of this thing,” but they don’t say “…but I’m going to stand ready to make amends, if later on it turns out not to be the right thing to do, after all I’d hate to be responsible for anybody suffering because I chose the wrong thing of which I wanted to be a part.” Nobody says that. They might feel an obligation to do such a thing when they say “I want to do this thing.” But not when they say “I want to be a part of this thing.” That’s just a way of avoiding responsibility, right there.
- mkfreeberg | 03/31/2015 @ 12:30
Sev: On the meta level, when dealing with dozens of Aunts Petunia, I don’t dispute your point. When it’s one’s own Aunt Petunia, the calculus changes. I know my own Aunt is a dear sweet lady, if somewhat sharp-tongued, and she grew up when this stuff was still in its nascent phase, still pretending to be sweetness and justice based on the examples of great pioneers of suffrage and equal pay.

It’s obvious to me and you that the wine has gone all vinegar – and in fact that what was sold as wine was probably one-third grape soda, one-third vinegar, and one-third antifreeze – but Aunt Petunia marinated in the stuff. It’s reflexive. As a result it becomes a tricky matter; every lie exposed becomes one more thing she was blind to in her youthful zeal and idealism, that becomes a part of her identity she has to lose, and that in protecting her intentions she blindly defends her theories.

And that’s another part of the problem. If there were concrete actions that led to bad outcomes then Aunt Petunia could simply stop doing that thing, even if she still “believed as firmly as ever in liberalism” or some such. And that would be a step gained. But not many of our Aunts did more than theorize, especially in the present day, so it’s harder to pin them down. “Oh, well, those kids got carried away, that’s not what it’s all about.”

To paraphrase sci-fi writer and blogger Sarah Hoyt: sometimes the best remedy to lunacy is to point, mock, and make duck noises at the lunatics – not for their sakes but for those who are afraid, by peer pressure or timidity, to admit that they disagree with the gatekeepers and trendsetters. We all, however, have our own would-be trendsetters we know personally, who fancy themselves higher up on the pecking order, masters of upholding the idealism of their youth tempered with the wisdom of their experience – always more than we have, because they are elders (often relatives) who by virtue of this position have a built-in trump card of sorts to deflect uncomfortable questions. One can’t simply hoot at them all the time. And it’s usually fatal to the discussion to point out that they are mistaking self-flattery for an actual cogent argument in favor of their particular lunacy.
- nightfly | 03/31/2015 @ 12:46
Ok, now I get it. I think. The reflex-like nature of liberals’ lies, then, is a feature not a bug. Even if the truth would better serve the long-term, real-world objective, the lie is more useful to the bandwagon short-term, and so that’s what they go with. To use Hawkins’s example, they want to “be part of the Obamacare Thing” much more than they want to pass the Affordable Care Act, and if forced to choose, they’d pick an ideologically pure bandwagon over a soiled political fait accompli (if the ACA could pass minus the aromatherapy provision, or fail with aromatherapy left in, they’d let it fail). Is that right?

If so, that’s a simpler explanation for the reflex-like lies liberals tell than mine. I theorized that, since they only want Good Things, liberals cannot tolerate the notion that their pet projects have any downsides whatsoever. Nationalized Health Care is a Good Thing, and saving money is a Good Thing (because the middle class), therefore nationalized health care saves money. Yours makes more sense, if I’m reading you correctly….
- Severian | 03/31/2015 @ 12:55
I think that’s the nature of all reflexive lies, liberal or otherwise. One needs a habit of catching them, which is where practicing concrete thought and reason serve so well. You can expose these impulses to something like Morgan’s Definitions Test: did what I wanted to do accomplish my goal? At what cost? Is it therefore worth my impulse to defend IT when what I really want to do is defend MYSELF? A lot of times what we mean by “It was a good idea!” is “I am a good person!” Well, the Venn diagram for those statements is not a single unbroken circle; in fact, the less of an overlap we admit to in our self-evaluations, the more likely it is that we have an accurate view of ourselves.
- nightfly | 03/31/2015 @ 13:40
Nightfly,

agreed, but the lying reflex itself seems much more prevalent on the left-hand side. Lying when it’s quite obviously unnecessary — or even clearly counterproductive — seems almost entirely lefty. And those same people — who lie like it’s an OCD tic — are quickest to announce to the world that they’re good people. It’s like the fact that they’re telling open, deliberate, easily-disprovable lies on a regular basis has no effect on their self-evaluation. Which is bizarre.

What’s the psychology there?
- Severian | 03/31/2015 @ 14:04
I have a few guesses at the psychology of it, Sev, but I think there’s a simpler explanation – one that I kind of circled without saying outright (my bad). The left is more prone to this because they lack the corrective I described. When I get the impulse to say something dumb and untrue to cover my ass, I stop and say to myself, “Self, you wanted X to happen, but you did Z and got stuck with a bunch of vowels and angry people. It’s no fun to have them all angry at you but they expected X and they didn’t get it.” And the thought that I can try to lie to them about it loses all appeal. First I’d have to lie to myself. Second, I’d have to try to convince these angry people that vowels really aren’t that bad, are they? Not good times. Besides, I still have to invest some thought into a better way of getting these people their Xs.

So without that “did it work? at what cost?” checklist, without the habit of seeing what’s actually there and connecting it to one’s own actions, it’s easier to slide further into this Cloud Cuckoo Land of “No, really, those vowels are just great, and they’re what you really wanted in the first place no matter what you said.” And from there it’s a much easier jump to “Those vowels ARE X’s, you ingrates, be glad you get letters at all.”

The thing is that if I do my checklist, I may well see why X didn’t happen, and whether it was a flaw in what I did or some other problem. I can then explain why X didn’t happen, and while people may still be angry and stuck with a bunch of vowels, they can see that I’m paying attention and trying to fix things – and in such a manner that they can have some confidence in eventually getting their Xs.

That’s where the psychology can come into it, I think. What makes one person willing to accept the discomfort in the moment for the long-term gain, versus someone unwilling to face any small consequence, piling them to one side in an unstable heap until they give way in an avalanche of bad judgment? Because they can easily point out this flaw in others and warn them not to do it; it just somehow never quite occurs to them to follow that plan. Sloth, as Morgan supposed in the main post? Childish unthinking, an inability to think ahead? Because avoidance seems to work, as a child thinks they’ve gotten away with it because it took you an extra hour to find the wall they’ve crayoned and the plates they’ve broken and the empty cookie jar. They wind up grounded just the same in the end, but somehow they just suspect that they should have just done a better job avoiding. (Call it the Hillary Corollary.)

Chess programs (especially the earliest ones) willingly enter lost positions so long as they find a line of play that pushes the consequence of their move beyond their search horizon. A true master actually knows chess and will rarely if ever fall for that sort of thing. That’s kind of the difference in the two approaches.
- nightfly | 03/31/2015 @ 14:33
The liberalism of the “uninformed” is essentially caused by 2 things, which I’ll explain in two posts here.

Now there is a stigma in this country of being an “uninformed voter” regardless of party. Yet I ask you, what is an uninformed voter? One estimate I’ve found of the total pages in the Code of Federal Regulations is 174,545. Now, how can name and explain say… 50% of the contents of that book? (without looking them up) 50% is a fair mark for being an informed voter, right? That’s only 87,272 and a half pages. That is a lot though so probably none of us. Ok who here can recite 10% of the book? (17,454 and a half pages) I’m betting none. What about just 1%? 1,746 pages of the CFR, who can name all that?

The simple fact is that the federal government has grown to the point that we are ALL uninformed voters (even the people running the thing are uninformed). Nobody has the time or the brain power to BE informed about it even to 50%. So we have a mass of rational ignorance (people choosing not to know things because of limited time and energy). Yet there is a widespread social stigma against being an uninformed voter.

So what do you think would happen? The left can place appeals for their policies in simplistic, emotional terms within the region of rational ignorance.

Think of it another way. Severian may have a point with his metaphor about learning Chinese, except a more accurate metaphor would be not talking about a language, but EVERY language. So then if the right tries arguing against something in Chinese, the left claims that one needs to be versed in Latin to fully grasp this point. If you start to learn enough Latin, then they’ll point out that you need to know Swahili for this argument over here. Repeat until even the most determined soul is exhausted (and the left doesn’t need to know it because they just believe whatever the people who speak that language tell them).

This is why one of my first laws is: “On average, people are conservatives about things they know, and liberal about things they don’t.” (and thus, gender students and the like are liberal in everything because they know nothing) So if someone comes up against a subject they don’t know, they have to rely on someone else to explain it to them. Once you think about that, the rest falls into place. Let’s return to the language metaphor. You need a translator for Chinese. Well how do you tell who’s a good translator and who isn’t? (perhaps someone who is swindling you) Let’s say you want help understanding the latest, greatest play from China. One guy (let’s call him Good T) tells you that it will be very difficult and that you’ll have to understand a lot of nuances and culture of the source to do justice to the work. Another guy (let’s call him Bad T) tells you, “I can totally do it! Oh Good T’s claims? Nah he’s just trying to swindle you.” Who would you end up choosing? Heck the rules of rational ignorance alone will encourage you to accept Bad T’s offer and pick him.

And that’s the first method ordinary folks fall to the lies.
- Nate Winchester | 04/01/2015 @ 07:17
The second reason why is… well pretty much this. People are indoctrinated over the years as “D=Good, R=Bad” and later, even if they learn and uncover the Left’s lies, they end up sticking with the D=G/R=B formula such that they cry “a pox on both houses.” So why does the left lie? Why not? Even if it’s uncovered, the disillusioned won’t run to their enemies, the disillusion will just quit and opt out of the fight.

There’s also the bit about how immoral discrimination of thought is portrayed and so people embrace sloth in their thinking because it’s a virtue now, but Evan goes over all that.
- Nate Winchester | 04/01/2015 @ 12:20
I think the basic issue is that the left is run on good intentions. What matters is that they have good intentions and “care” results, truth and actual consequences don’t matter. All that matters are the intentions that show you care.
- Fai Mao | 04/03/2015 @ 01:37
I say this article is proof that Dr Helen reads this blog. 😉
- Nate Winchester | 04/06/2015 @ 12:33

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Liberals, and Their Need to LieTuesday, March 31st, 2015

Liberals, and Their Need to Lie
Tuesday, March 31st, 2015