Too many of us are headed for the Truth Fallacy, and we must do better

For the first time in human existence, we can instantly find information about almost anything we can imagine.

This should be a blessing, but, so far in the digital age, the fruits of that ability are as often bitter and divisive as positively useful. This is in part inevitable because individuals — their backgrounds, preferences and intellectual capacities — are diffuse. But it’s also because some people and businesses deliberately manipulate and distort the information environment for their own ends, whether to fulfill the often-ambiguous ambitions of the ruling digiterati at Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., or simply to satisfy old-fashioned political and financial greed.

From the earliest iterations of democracy as an organizing ideal, shared information has been essential for a society built around the common goals of peace, prosperity, individual liberty and a secure future. It’s required if a society is going to answer democracy’s basic question: what shall we do?

At times, traditional news media has been a useful contributor to that process in the United States; initially it was through newspapers, joined, in the early 20th Century, by broadcast. Established journalistic institutions provided news and other information using organized and public processes and standards and being subject to direct legal, financial and reputational accountability.

Most Americans read newspapers and were exposed to a common, if limited, array of news broadcasts. At midday on Nov. 28, 1963, for example, 95 percent of Americans were watching three television broadcasts — NBC, ABC, CBS — of assassinated president John Kennedy’s funeral and, for hours, hearing from only six commentators.

Only a few years later, first cable television then the digital explosion turned the orderly marketplace of shared experience into a babel. An endless amount of information was suddenly available and any individual with an internet modem became not just a passive user but also a potential provider of valid information or whatever drivel or propaganda or scam he or she chose to offer.

So instead of more shared, actionable information, the digital explosion gave us, to borrow phrases from philosopher Neil Postman, “ … a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity; a world of fragments and discontinuities.… ”

The result, quite simply, is we no longer can effectively decide what to do as a self-governing society because we cannot organize and implement the endless flood of information, sorting truth from untruth and wisdom from foolishness.

This requires more than honest purveyors of news, though reform is certainly needed there; it also requires better, more intellectually honest citizen consumers of it.

But too many Americans are in the process of becoming victims of what can be called The Truth Fallacy. Modeled upon polymath Daniel Yankelovich’s “McNamara Fallacy,” it goes like this:

Stage One: Accept and factor into your mental and philosophical framework whatever is reported anywhere. This is fine, insofar as it goes; but it doesn’t navigate very far in today’s digital wilderness where “alternative facts” are always being asserted by someone somewhere and cognitive dissonance is epidemic.

Stage Two: Decide to seek information only from sources that fit your ideological comfort zone. This is artificial, misleading and self-limiting.

Stage Three: Presume that what cannot easily be adapted to your framework is “fake news” and thus doesn’t matter. This is willful blindness.

Stage Four: Decide that what doesn’t fit into your framework doesn’t exist. This is civic suicide.

Who will chart the muddled tracklessness of the digital jungle? Can communities be formed consisting of citizens able to act in democratic concert?

I asked those two questions in a hopeful vein in a 1996 book about public life. They are even more pressing today, 22 years later, because so far the answer to them is an emphatic, alarming negative.

It’s something we need to talk about.

This story was originally published January 30, 2018 at 9:36 AM with the headline "Too many of us are headed for the Truth Fallacy, and we must do better."