The Credibility Conundrum
I hate pretty much every single term used broadly to describe the collective mental illness that has currently afflicted huge swaths of the American population. The problem is not the terms themselves, but the expertise with which the meanings of normal words have been co-opted, and the misuse of them by those who simply don’t know any better and refuse to learn. The end result is that terms like “brainwashed” and “gaslighting” take on a kind of pop-social meaning that reflects the groups that typically level these words as insults rather than meaning what they mean. It can make talking honestly about a thing difficult, which of course is the whole point. Like the terms “narcissist” and “bigot,” these words have been scrubbed of their meaning and reassigned as epithets for anyone who disagrees with the collective. They are interchangeable to a very large extent. Their use isn’t dependent upon an offense committed by their target, but on the audience who will hear the insult slung and on which word will get the correct reaction from them. If a member of the collective decides that calling someone a racist is likely to get a more positive response from others within the collective, racist it is! If narcissist or bigot would be better, then those will do nicely. The point isn’t to convey meaning, but to energize others in the collective echo chamber. To show that “I am You, and We together hate this person.” Very often, it is the permission slip required from the collective for its members to tear down someone’s life and “cancel” them – shunned and banished from society as punishment for non-conformity.
For those reasons, I’m going to attempt to write this entry without using those buzzy jargony terms that have come to mean anything and everything except what they actually mean. I’m going to do this because I’m not ranting about some mysterious effect I’ve witnessed or some social media behavior that isn’t really important in the real world. From 1999 through most of 2007, I was a Psychological Operations Specialist in the U.S. Army. At that time, Psychological Operations was largely centered around influencing America’s adversaries during times of war. Influence operations ran a broad and diverse gamut of activities from simply informing a target audience of impending movements or actions and communicating directions to shaping the perceptions of a target audience to compel them to behave in ways that were beneficial to our interests. The key difference between Psychological Operations and Propaganda was simple and critical. Credibility. Truth. To be effective, a Psychological Operations Specialist needed to create his influence campaigns based on credible information and truth and then use the tools of influence to help the target audience align their attitudes, opinions, and beliefs with the facts. Credibility was the single most important asset any campaign or communicator could have. Once compromised, credibility is nearly impossible to rebuild, especially among a hostile audience. Once violated, trust won’t be easily restored. Key in the planning of any and all good Psychological Operations was to preserve credibility jealously. Your audience may not like anything you have to say, but if you are consistently the source of real and honest truth through a communicator they know they can trust, they’ll learn they can depend on you. The nice thing about a well-conceived psychological operation is that it tends to eventually verify itself. Truth comes to light whether by circumstance or design, and the target audience can see that you weren’t lying to them. This is a fundamental difference between psychological operations and propaganda. With propaganda, the state’s message is designed to create attitudes, opinions, beliefs and behaviors regardless of the facts and even in opposition to them. While both seek to manipulate perception, psychological operations tend to be grounded in what is real, using truth to influence behaviors, while propaganda tends to be centered on the State’s agenda and the facts be damned. Now, it would be a mistake to say that psychological operations are not centered on the State’s agenda – of course they are. The goal is to make people do what you want them to do, such as surrender en masse instead of putting up a fight. But the mechanism for that influence is to inform the target audience of their situational truth and craft a message that spares everyone a mass slaughter at the hands of a superior force. A propaganda campaign is different in that it puts the message first and foremost above (or in contradiction to) the facts, purely for the benefit of the State.
Consider Dr. Fauci as a useful example. At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, Dr. Fauci regularly appeared on TV to tell us that masks were pointless and that wearing them was useless. In February of 2020, he wrote that masks would not be very effective in preventing COVID-19 and advised travelers not to wear them. He came out later and admitted that message had absolutely nothing to do with his actual scientific opinion of the data available to him – it was a message crafted purely to keep the public from buying up masks he wanted reserved for hospital staffs around the country. By June of 2021, he was recommending we all wear two masks because it was “common sense.” The change in position wasn’t due to “science learning more,” or the evolution of an opinion based on data. No, in June of 2020, he admitted that the reason for his earlier message was plainly and simply to preserve the supply for healthcare workers. Now, that should have produced some fatal cracks in his credibility right then and there. What he inarguably showed the entire world was that he was absolutely willing and ready to lie to the entire world about what measures they should take to prevent getting sick, just to make sure that the supplies went where he thought they should go. In his words, the people were “intentionally misled” in an effort to make sure that healthcare workers could buy those masks instead of all the peasants out there getting sick. Now, regardless of what data has come to light about the ineffectiveness of masks in the spread of COVID-19, the behavior demonstrated in that decision is crucial. The behavior witnessed in the following months is equally interesting. He went from telling us all that masks were not effective to telling us we should wear two masks to protect ourselves. As he did so, Fauci mocked those who took his advice. Then-White House Spokesperson Brian Morganstern recalled Fauci’s private displays when the cameras weren’t rolling:
“I vividly recall my blood boiling during an infuriating meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, when Fauci laughed about his own goggles comment, making it clear how cynical he was and that he could get people to believe anything,” Morgenstern wrote in his book, adding “he went on to laugh about how ‘ass-backwards’ it was that people entered a restaurant wearing a mask, then sat down and conversed with people without a mask. Of course, he wasn’t saying things to that effect publicly, just laughing privately at the American rubes he was fooling.”
It's reminiscent of the not-so-public discussions surrounding the Affordable Care Act. Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act actually slipped up and said on camera what was up until then only said behind closed doors in Democrat policy circles. "Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage, and basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass," Jonathan Gruber said at the Annual Health Economics Conference in 2014. "They proposed it and that passed because the American voters are too stupid to understand the difference." Perhaps he felt as though it didn’t matter – the Act had already passed, so who cares if we tell the truth now? That should have been an unequivocal sign that the people entrusted to protect and preserve the best interests of the American people could not and should not be trusted. It should have blown apart all credibility and trust any of us had, regardless of party affiliation, and it should have resulted in a reckoning of a truly mass scale across our elected government.
It didn’t.
Many sat around as astonished about why it didn’t as people do today when they watch “the science” evolve to a very nearly exact copy of what they’ve been saying and getting banned from social media for sharing since the beginning. Many ranted and raved like absolutely exasperated lunatics as they watched something this painfully obvious unfold in front of them even as the committed partisan collective rallied to defend “their guy” and demonize the people who were, well, right all along. Everywhere we saw credibility shatter, everywhere the hypocrisy and double-talk had been laid bare, every time we looked on and saw the official line veer wildly off from the path of truth or reason and its defenders tell us all we were crazy for seeing it like that, we wrestled with the same conundrum. How can people crater their own credibility like this and still stare us all in the face and call us stupid for refusing to believe them? How can anyone possibly criticize our unwillingness to trust anybody who has proven themselves to be such bald-faced liars and self-serving hypocrites? How can anyone fault us for showing caution or reluctance to accept the word of anybody so unimaginably two-faced as to admit lying to us and then calling us stupid and laughing at our gullibility? More importantly, why in the clear blue Hell were they so willing to believe those same liars?
It’s because those in the in-group falsely believed they weren’t being included in the statement about how stupid and gullible everybody was. Those within the collective were being spoken for by their avatar in Jonathan Gruber of Anthony Fauci. Those insults weren’t meant for members of the collective, but for “they” who aren’t “us.” And it’s ok to insult them. They don’t think like us. The collectivists shared in the exhilaration of duping the stupid and the gullible. They weren’t members of the stupid and gullible American public - they were Fauci. They were Gruber. You don’t see it that way because you are an individual. You are not defined by the groups with which you associate. If you did, all of this would be instinctively understood. Since you don’t, and since you aren’t, it’s confusing.
What I’m about to tell you won’t help. It won’t fix anything, and it won’t solve the problem. All it will do is give you the words you didn’t have before to describe the phenomenon you’re seeing. It may help you name the thing that’s frustrating you and put things in a more helpful perspective, but that’s about all I can promise.
The Psychological Operations Field Manual (FM 33-1) warns that social factors within a target audience may be even more important than individual perceptions, and that they may be more difficult to overcome than an individual’s resistance to a message. One reason for this is the human need for safety and security and belonging. The threat of social consequences for departing from an in-group message is so great within some collectives that to depart from it and risk exclusion is a fate worse than death. The idea of being excluded from the collective that gives them status, safety, identity, and approval leaves them lost in a way few if any self-sufficient free-thinking people can even fathom. It really is existentially threatening to them to part ways with the relative comfort of the collective and be the one in their virulently exclusionary in-group who points and says “The Emperor has no clothes.” On balance, the pressure of social consequences outweighs any perception of gain that objectivity might bring. So they choose to toe the line, no matter how absurd or demonstrably wrong it may be. Many don’t recognize they’re doing it. Or at least, they don’t recognize they have any kind of real alternative. They see what happens when someone contradicts the in-group message. The content of the message doesn’t matter, only the consequences. So they see exclusion, they see berating and insulting to the cheers of the in-group, they see cancel culture swoop in and try to humiliate, shame, and destroy. The words they use quite literally do not mean to them what they mean to you. Individualism isn’t the free pursuit of individual interest over collective interest. To them, individualism is strictly the existence of an individual within the collective or being an individual within the in-group. Freedom does not mean the exemption from compulsion or necessity in choices and actions. It means the recognition of necessity within the collective. What a person hears when they value the approval of a collective over the freedom of individual thought may be made up of the same words you use, but their meanings are not the same. This is the danger of co-opting language and changing meanings as a means of control. It achieves a kind of malevolent control of the social authority to which one has to submit, but it also prevents dialogue, communication of real content and ideas, and comprehension of the differences between two viewpoints. You’re frustrated because you’re crafting sentences in your mind to express ideas and then firing them out of your mouth at another person who shares the same language, but your words are going through some kind of strange encoding process by which your meanings are transmogrified into the meanings assigned by the social group to which your audience belongs. Just as your own biases and beliefs create noise at the point where you are crafting your message, the receiver’s social group and biases create noise at the point when your message is received. If the collective can change enough meanings, co-opt enough language, and rewire enough definitions, then the noise completely overwhelms the signal and all anybody can hear is what the in-group chooses.
That’s an intensely frustrating thing. I would like to think it may ultimately be a useful thing to know beyond the value inherent in self-improvement, better comprehension, and broader understanding. I’d like to think that, but all evidence to date has been to the contrary. More often than not, it feels like you’re the guy who took the old adage to heart and learned from your history so as not to be doomed to repeat it. Except now, you’re just standing around doomed to watch everyone else repeat it and suffer alongside them anyway. I’ve chosen to believe it is still better to open your eyes and be able to call a thing what it is than to willfully suffer from your own curable ignorance. I choose to keep on examining these sorts of things, even as I reserve my discussions about them for people who don’t need my insights in the least. That, and to try to root the things I’m thinking about, talking about, and acting upon in some form of credible, objective truth whenever I am able to identify it. Credibility may not matter to some folks as much as it once did, but it’s still the only bedrock upon which I can see any value in building.