Lies and Group Polarization

In the November 2 NEW YORKER, Elizabeth Kolbert discusses group polarization, the tendency to become more extreme after discussing something with like minded people. After many experiments, the tendency is well documented. Doves grouped with doves become more dovish. Birthers grouped with birthers become more adamant that Obama was not born in the United States. They begin to exaggerate.
They lie to themselves and to each other. No one in the like-minded group challenges them.

Some see the internet as a breeding ground for extremism. If you live in the Haight and have trouble finding a fellow birther to reinforce your conspiracy theory, you can easily reach a support system on the 'net. But, as I see it, there have long been networks of conspiracy theorists using pamphlets, books, clubs, phone trees, movements, etc. Computers and the internet have made some of the contact work easier, but the birthers I've watched on television don't always strike me as computer literate.

The problem with fantasies, whether about Obama or Bush, is that a society cannot flourish if it is infected with mistaken beliefs. To prosper we need truths. When we walk into a drugstore we need to know which sunblocks are safe and which are dangerous. Our ability to handle life's hazards depends on our ability to recognize them.

"Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality," Harry Frankfurt wrote. "They are intended . . . to make us crazy." And the liar, Adrienne Rich wrote, "lives an existence of unutterable loneliness."

The liar has to pretend to believe what he doesn't believe. As a consequence no one really knows him. He's alone. He can't tell anyone the truth about himself. He's falsity personified. He's Richard Nixon. Or--a sympathetic version--he's the unutterably lonely progressive telling me it doesn't matter whether Bush or Gore wins the Presidential election. He's manipulating me, of course. On some level I grasp that he's lying, but I can't admit it because it calls my own judgment of people into question. I believed in this progressive. If I admit he lied, I admit I am too easily fooled.

If you are interested, read ON TRUTH by Harry G. Frankfurt, a retired philosophy professor from Princeton.