X+Y: MENTAL HYGIENE, INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER AND THE BULLSHIT ARTIST
by Shawn K. Inlow
When Kellyanne Conway in 2017 uttered the phrase, "Alternative Facts," it set off a firestorm.
Conway had been Donald Trump's campaign advisor, and when he won the White House, she was elevated to Senior Counselor to the President. Conway coined the utterly new term to defend misleading information presented by White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, who said that the crowd gathered at the 2017 inauguration was, "The largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe."
The alternative fact was easily disproved by photos showing Trump's inauguration crowd was - in fact - substantially smaller than Barak Obama's. Still, the question remained why someone would lie about something so inconsequential and it remains a topic adjacent to our subject today.
I watched Kellyanne and I suddenly found myself in the Ministry of Love, in Room 101, and O'Brien was holding up four fingers in front of my face.
"Couldn't it be three?" God, I was chilled to the bone.
I went over to Amazon the next day to buy a copy of 1984 and found that Amazon had completely sold out of Orwell that day. Think that through for a second. Amazon... Had run out of one of the most famous pieces of literature of all time... overnight. At least I wasn't the only one.
We've come such a long way from Kellyanne. Today it's gotten quite insane. "They're eating the cats!" you know? And how about the topsy-turvy thinking that Ukraine started a war with Russia?
We've gone so far down the rabbit hole of disinformation, that today I'm trying to get a handle on why so many people believe crazy shit.
I got started on this topic with an article, by Quassim Cassam, called "Bad Thinkers." It's your homework if you really want to start ruminating on WHY so many people buy into bullshit. In short, Cassam posits that people have bad mental character. The upshot is that some people are just gullible. They are maybe not curious, or prejudiced, closed-minded, or dogmatic.
Good mental hygiene would include opposite traits, like open-mindedness, curiosity and rigor.
Which brings me to an example in my life where a pastor was trying to convince me to get baptized. This has bothered me all my life. I was trying to compare a Taoist principle to the Christ teaching and my friend told me, quite simply, "That is false." My pastor, a well-meaning, good person, was dogmatic, close-minded, and indoctrinated to the point he could not access information outside his own belief structure.
In my thinking, I am often keen to the fact that I could be wrong. If you are trying to respond from a place of mental rigor, then you are interested in possibilities and permutations; answers perhaps beyond the easiest ones. For example, what if, as in the conversations with my pastor, there are MANY paths to the divine?
That's not possible, he said.
So I'd like to compare Kellyanne to my pastor. That's a shocker, I know. Because it seems to me that both religious and political thinking share elements that Cassam suggests feature poor intellectual character.
It used to be impolite to talk about politics or religion.
My hunch is that if we took out politics and religion, we'd run out of crazy in a day or two.
Listen: Kellyanne is lying, in the face of good evidence to the contrary, because she's being told to do so by her boss. What that makes her, is a tool: definition #6 over at dictionary.com, "A person manipulated by another for the latter's own ends."
Kellyanne is lying and she knows she's lying. But there she is with a straight face, lying, because it's her job. She lacks the intellectual character to walk away from the money. Never mind the intellectual character of her boss.
Cassam says the problem with "bad thinkers" is they have a lack of evidence to support their conspiracy theory while they reject good evidence to the contrary.
Kellyanne is different from my pastor. He has been indoctrinated and quite literally believes The Apostle's Creed, which is the oath you take to join the church. This is his, and many of my friends' truth. The ancient problem with the God question, though, is that your proof has to be anecdotal, not empiric.
"Prove there is a God," you might say. "Well, why don't you prove there isn't," might be the riposte.
"Well, have you seen, like, an angel come out of the sky?" you might say. "No. But I just know it is the truth," is the brick wall you come up against. Closed-minded people don't know they're closed-minded. Meanwhile, if I claim to be open-minded, and I have the temerity to question that thought, then we are, my friend and I, of two different intellectual characters.
My Christian pastor is unable to accept the proposition he might be wrong. He is no different than a jihadi Mullah in Iran, unable to see beyond his carefully constructed walls. That's poor mental hygiene. Kellyanne is just a bullshit artist. They're two very different people. But I think Kellyanne and people like her and my pastor both cause bad thinking.
So it comes down to whose particular flavor of bullshit you might be ingesting. It might be Shawn Inlow at X+Y Blog or it might be Sean Hannity at Fox Liar Report. But, I think, and I'll get to this at the bottom, there is a difference between us. Wait for it.
Let's move on to a recent election where I was doing a table to support the fair drawing of electoral districts so that political parties could not gerrymander the outcome. I met many republicans, democrats and independents and everyone could agree that elections need to be fair. What stunned me was the crazy amount of conspiracy theories I heard that day and I made my guesses about who was voting for who.
One fellow, a retired doctor, so not a dumb guy, was telling me about chem-trails. His view was that airlines were seeding clouds and that the vapor trails left by jet planes in the sky from the burning of jet fuel were a nefarious plot to control the weather and that dangerous chemicals were falling to earth and poisoning the people.
I asked him who was doing this and why? He could not say.
I said something to the effect that, clearly, the FAA or the Federal Government, or the airlines, (all of them everywhere in the world) or a chemical company that was producing the material that was being added to jet fuel, or the hospitals dealing with all the sickness, had to conspire in a way that should be impossible to hide. You should be able to find evidence, right? Right?
But this is me asking; a person trained as a journalist and a police detective whose inclination is to try to see every issue from every possible side. My questions were curious. Interrogative.
The source he provided me was a nutty website that probably was tracking me when I actually looked it up. My questions and his sources had different quality.
Another person told me they were obsessed with 5G cell towers. Told me exactly how many of them were between Clearfield, Pa. and his vacation at Atlantic City. He could not tell me exactly why he was worried. Tracking. Radiation.
I asked if 4G towers were bad too. I asked if he had a cell phone. He did, in his back pocket, which I found ironic.
I had an interview with someone who believed the election was stolen. When I asked her if she was aware the Trump Administration filed 63 lawsuits across America over election fraud and lost every case because they never, in any of them, revealed any evidence of fraud.
This stunned my January 6 attendee.
"Hmmmm. Why would Trump file a lawsuit and not give the evidence?" she wondered.
I waited. But, rather than walking down the path of that possibility, she suggested there must have been some other plan; one she could not identify.
This is bad thinking. This is poor mental hygiene. It can also be ignorant people. It can be people who don't read well, or don't synthesize information well. Or don't pay attention. It could be people whose brains have been shrunk by COVID, I don't know! But many of them don't make sense when there is good evidence that they will not accept. This is the problem.
Many of my friends who are well-to-do support Trump. Rich people like tax breaks. That's a motive and you can understand that thinking.
Many people I know, who also support Trump, blame poor people for being poor. I hear envy and disdain (if not hatred) coming out of their hearts. Where is the kindness and generosity or the understanding of why a person has not been successful in America.
"They're lazy scumbags."
Again. Two different kinds of people.
I've come to this: I think the information society we live in is damaging our mental well-being. We turn on powerful tools and get all the junk information in the world and I think it is a matter of whose sermon you are listening to that affects your intellectual character. What you believe, what you trust, and what is true are often different things.
This blog. This post and those that will follow in subsequent Thursdays is aimed at providing the tools and means to correct the problem. To the cleaning up around the mental house, to trimming back those overgrown hedges outside the window so you can see better.
Look. They're not eating cats in Ohio. That's nonsense. And the 5G towers ARE tracking you... That's the point so your GPS works, man! Vaccines don't have micro-chips in them. The election wasn't stolen. What we have evolved into is a world of Babel, and our primitive minds can't handle it. This space is about credibility.
I understand people who lie intentionally. I understand people who lie in order to profit, like oil and tobacco companies. What I have a problem with, and want to get at, is people swallowing lies like that. You are what you eat. And that shit will fuck up your mind. We need an intervention.
The aim of education, should be one, according to Cassam, "That equips students not only to think critically, but to challenge unacceptable views. The challenge is how to do that."
I posit that our mental character has a lot to do with whether or not we have a mean streak. I remember decades ago, way before it got so bad, my brother-in-law changed from republican to democrat. I asked him why.
"Republicans are mean," he said.
Look around you. People hating on poor people. People hating on climate refugees fleeing their shit-hole countries and doing harm instead of helping. Look at the tailgate of the truck that says, "Fuck Your Feelings," or "Fuck Biden." Or the nasty flag flying outside their homes. Or how about the guy with his carburetor set to run rich, so that when he gears down he blows black exhaust all over some guy riding a bicycle. That guy's just being a dick.
But surely our pastor isn't a "mean" person, right? Well, let's examine a bit. Don't you find sometimes that our religion has a brutal streak? The Holy Bible is full of medieval shit. It certainly will not contemplate the place of a woman in society. And sometimes our religious leaders turn out to be glimmer men. Con artists. Or worse. This Lord, and the God who orders Jihad, are equally severe. So... just spitballing here... to be an adherent, you don't have to flagellate yourself, but you might have a stern hand.
All of these people, to some degree, use hostility either plain or hidden. Unkind. And, yes, mean. And I think we may never get to them, because we may never know how they got that way. But we can give it a try.
I may not be able to touch those people. But, our lives should maybe return to ones of joy, reason and purpose instead of the incessant worry and fear and distrust driven by bad thinkers. But, if you want something like that, like my man Nick Miller says, "You gotta open up your eyes and do some work."
Class dismissed.
Next week, I'm going to be focusing on the history of Fox News and the Rupert Murdoch family. I think Murdoch is the key element in the pollution of our information stream and I hope to provide compelling facts for that next Thursday.
Until next time... Enjoy!
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