Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made one particularly notable statement early in her political career: in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, she was asked about a claim that gave the Department of Defense spending a “four Pinocchios” rating. Fact Checker While acknowledging his mistake, the Washington Post reporter said:
If people really want to exaggerate a number here or a word there, I would argue that they’re not seeing the forest for the trees. I think a lot of people are more interested in accuracy, factual accuracy, semantic accuracy than they are in what is morally right.
An unkind interpretation might be that she is saying “It doesn’t matter if what you’re saying is true; what matters is that by saying it you show that you’re a good person,” but a kinder interpretation is that she means something similar to what she means here when she says “morally right.”Morally convincedMoral certainty falls short of fully established certainty, but it is close enough to justify acting on that basis. So “morally right” in this context may just mean that a claim accurately hints at some kind of global truth, even if the details don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Recently Published the study When party leaders make factional claims that are not true, their supporters are often aware of it. To summarizethey found that “voters often find that their party’s claims are not based on objective evidence. Yet, they still respond positively to these inaccurate statements if they believe they 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 are fully aware that this claim is factually false. Nevertheless, they still bring up these claims because “they consider these claims important to ‘American priorities’ because they believe that the political system is illegitimate and against their interests.” In their view, it doesn’t matter that Trump’s claim that the election was stolen is “factually incorrect” because they see it as “morally right.” It speaks to a “deeper truth” about the political system being corrupt, about elites trying to thwart the will of the people, and so on.
Of course, people tend to apply this leeway regarding factual accuracy quite unevenly. The authors note that “voters from both parties placed more importance on ‘moral truth’ when evaluating politicians they liked, whereas voters relied more on strict factuality when evaluating politicians they disliked.” If you’re a progressive, you tend not to mind Ocasio-Cortez’s many factual errors because you think what she says still points to important truths, just as Trump supporters often overlook his factual errors for the same reasons.
Another factor seems to play a role in why people accept and repeat political claims that they know to be factually false: these statements signal a kind of loyalty. Within a group, loyalty is signaled by making overly strong claims that they expect to be taken “seriously, but not literally.” Because of this, fact-checking is often ineffective, because the people who make and repeat these claims don’t think of them as factual statements in the first place.
Just as many Trump supporters knowingly make the untrue claim that the election was stolen in order to demonstrate their allegiance to another ideology, I suspect that many who repeat the so-called “woke” mantra do so simply to demonstrate their progressive beliefs, and not because they actually believe the statement itself to be true.Political NoncognitivismThe idea that people’s political statements are often intended to express attitudes, not statements of fact.
When these statements are made to demonstrate political loyalty and to gain status within a group, this creates an unfortunate dynamic. Status is a zero-sum game. The only way to gain status is to be higher in status than others. To gain status in this loyalty game, there is competitive pressure to make statements that are increasingly unrealistic in order to set yourself apart. In a way, this also signals greater loyalty.
Saying something that everyone in a group agrees with doesn’t demonstrate loyalty to the group. “The sky is blue” doesn’t get support from any group. But consider this assertion made by Ibram Kendi in his book: Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideology in AmericaHe argues that “if we truly believe in the equality of racial groups, we must also believe in racial disparities.” Must “It’s possible that differences in overall outcomes between different groups are the result of racial discrimination,” Kendi argues. only Explained by race discriminationand if you believe it is possible Any If you can’t find any other explanation for even a fraction of the difference, then you’re some kind of racial supremacist. Your willingness to espouse this sentiment is a very strong signal of loyalty, precisely because it is so tenuously connected to reality. Similarly, the more obviously absurd Trump’s claims of election fraud are, the stronger a signal of loyalty your willingness to affirm and repeat them is.
But there is a problem of externalities here: sending such signals enhances one’s own status, at the cost of polluting the public debate. If 99 people repeat these mantras without personally believing them to be true, then if even one in 100 people make such statements sincerely, they will gain confidence in the veracity of their scattered thoughts and at the same time miss the opportunity to experience the collision of truth and error. John Stuart Mill That’s how it is. People who repeat these mantras are dishonestly providing intellectual cover for those who truly believe in these ideas to gain power within their organizations and put these ideas into practice.
One dramatic example of such dynamics is the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theoryIn 2016, conspiracy theorists promoted the idea that there was widespread child trafficking among the elite, and that children were being held as part of this operation in the basement of Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in Washington DC, even though the establishment didn’t even have a basement. Eventually, a true believer went there with a rifle and tried to free the children. Luckily, he was arrested by the police, and no one was hurt. But what particularly struck me about this case was that despite the fact that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people online claimed to believe in the existence of this child trafficking ring, and many of them made harassing phone calls or left mean comments online, One No one actually tried to stop it. This is because many, perhaps most, of the people who supported this conspiracy theory online Really They believe it as a fact. They claim to support it, and they promote it as a way to show loyalty. And it sends a very strong signal of loyalty in the group, precisely because the whole idea is so obviously absurd. But sometimes, if enough people are willing, someone who really believes it might do something awful.
Recently I saw something like Claim “A good sign that wokeism is on the decline is that even leftists who once happily allowed wokeism to hijack their movements are starting to pretend they saw through it all along, as if they were at war with Eastasia all along,” he tweeted. I see this a bit differently. Most leftists, privately, did In reality they “saw wokeness all along,” but still loudly affirmed it as a sign of status and loyalty. As the halo around Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo began to fade, many on the left began to say openly that they had never actually seen through wokeness. Believed None of this was believable. But some people did believe it. And many of these true believers, under the cover of loyalty, went on to hold important organizational positions of power. Many of Kendi and DiAngelo’s writings became official policy in governments, big corporations, and medical institutions, even though most of the people who publicly endorsed those ideas didn’t actually believe them to be true.
