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Key points
- False beliefs about a global pandemic, climate change, and the integrity of free elections threaten democracy.
- Rampant false belief is perpetuated by mistrust, misinformation, and the deliberate exploitation of normal cognitive biases.
- To avoid civil war, Americans must want to stay united and end the insistence that we're right, and others are wrong.
About a decade ago, I attended a lecture where the speaker—a computer scientist from Cal Tech—claimed that the greatest threat to humanity was personal dogma.
Since I’m a psychiatrist, I found this claim intriguing, but the speaker seemed a bit out of his lane, so I don’t think I quite bought it at the time.
But here we are in 2022. In the U.S., just like other countries around the world, more than 50 percent of the population believes in at least one conspiracy theory. Many would agree that we’re now living in a post-truth world where people believe they’re entitled not only to their opinions but also to their “alternative facts” and false narratives about consequential matters like a global pandemic, climate change, and the integrity of free elections.
And so, I’ve come to accept that the Cal Tech professor was right.
Due to the seemingly rampant proliferation of false beliefs, it’s been claimed that we’re living in a "Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories" or that America is suffering from mass delusion, mass psychosis, or mass formation psychosis. As a psychiatrist, I can tell you that none of that is true.
You might have heard the saying, “insanity is a sane response to an insane society." While I think that’s a bad take on actual insanity—that is, the kind of mental illness that I treat—it is a reasonable account of the post-truth world. Truth decay hasn’t occurred because of individual psychopathology or mental illness, but rather because we live in a sick society and an ailing democracy.
Just what is it that we’re sick from? My diagnosis is that we suffer from the twin maladies of mistrust and misinformation. Over the course of most of our lifetimes, mistrust in traditional institutions of informational authority—of the media, government leaders, our ideological opponents, and even our neighbors and family members—has never been so low.
We're therefore mired in profound epistemic mistrust—that is, mistrust of information and a shared sense of what’s true—to the point that living in America has become a tale of two alternative realities where the states have become more divided than united. When we no longer trust informational sources and objective news, we become vulnerable to misinformation that’s ubiquitous today, with facts and opinions and actual news and fake news sitting alongside each other so that many of us can’t tell the difference. Fake news travels farther and faster than the truth within the flea market of opinion and the disinformation food chain.
Mistrust and misinformation feed off one another. Mistrust leads to belief in misinformation, and misinformation breeds mistrust.
Now, why is there so much misinformation out there? Misinformation and disinformation—the deliberate spread of falsehoods—is a for-profit industry where the pay-offs are financial and political.
Those sitting atop of the disinformation food chain are masters of exploiting the normal cognitive machinery that we use to process information, taking full advantage of our propensity for confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and motivated reasoning that all act in the service of preserving a stable sense of self where ideology and identity are fused.
We’re losing the war on misinformation partly because we focus too much on regulating misinformation and not enough on building trust. As populist movements continue to sweep the world, we no longer have faith in institutions of authority, scientists, and other kinds of expertise. We, therefore, too easily fall victim to notorious bad actors like Russia’s disinformation machine that’s intent on churning out falsehoods to foment dissatisfaction with democracy and fan the sparks of civil war. And that agenda isn’t only coming from Russia—it’s coming from within, where many of us are playing right into Putin’s hand.
As a psychiatrist, I often think of the United States as a marriage. When I put on the hat of a marriage counselor, I can see a path to becoming united again. But I can also see a clear pathway to divorce. As in a marriage, people have to want to stay together. They must find a way to solve problems and develop alternative communication patterns besides endless bickering.
If we are to avoid civil war, we have to win over hearts and minds by steering people away from the stubborn insistence that we’re right and everyone else is wrong and instead promote the "Holy Trinity of Truth Detection" that includes cognitive flexibility, intellectual humility, and analytical thinking. We must also help institutions of authority regain the public's trust through honesty, transparency, and public engagement while coming together as a society and finding leaders who promote communal values like truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.
This blog post was created from an invited speech delivered at the St. Francis Yacht Club Lighthouse Talks on September 24, 2022.
