The Sept. 5, 2008 edition of [the Onion] reported that a damp stain on a concrete wall in Tennessee bore a striking resemblance to the features of Charles Darwin. Devoted evolutionary biologists from all over the world were queueing up for as long as 16 hours to burn votive candles, lay wreaths, and to read aloud passages from the Darwin canon. Enterprising merchants were doing a brisk business selling Darwin relics, such as bits of wood from the hull of the Beagle. Was it all an elaborate lie? The question isn’t worth debating. None of the Onion’s readers were deceived, and it wouldn’t have been funny if it were true.1
The [Weekly World News] presents a more ambiguous case. It was a tabloid newspaper that could be found at supermarket checkout lines for several decades until 2007 (and apparently survives today in electronic format). It trumpeted delightfully sensational stories that varied in plausibility from the preposterous “Bat Boy” (Eats his own weight in insects every day!), to routine Elvis sightings, and greatly exaggerated anecdotes with a tiny kernel of truth (Man explodes on operating table!). [Some ether had briefly ignited.]
The quality of my life—at least that proportion of my life spent in supermarket lines—has gone down since the WWN stopped publishing its print copy, but what about the culture as a whole? Circulation often topped a million per week—a number which obviously excludes countless skim-and-return-to-the-rack freeloaders like me—and some proportion of those readers evidently believed what they were reading. According to the obituary in the [Economist (Feb. 21, 2004)] of WWN’s founding editor, Eddie Clontz:
“Letters poured in, especially from the conservative and rural parts of the country where [Clontz’s] columns struck a chord. If a sensible man like [him] kept company with aliens and 20-pound cucumbers, perhaps those stories too were true. When the News reported the discovery of a hive of baby ghosts, more than a thousand readers wrote in to adopt one. But the saddest tale was of the soldier who wrote, in all seriousness, offering marriage to the two-headed woman.”
The Weekly World News introduces a new variable for our consideration: It claimed to be telling the truth (“The World’s Most Reliable News”). That was just hard-headed business: The more that people believed, the more faithfully they would buy the paper. Since the government was obviously suppressing such news elsewhere, there were few alternatives. But didn’t WWN profit at the expense of the culture as a whole? Aren’t we all worse off when thousands of our fellow citizens are persuaded to believe nonsense?
Perhaps not. Does it really matter if a few thousand people believe that Elvis is alive and working at a Burger King in Des Moines, or that the last surviving Bigfoot lives in a trailer park outside Seattle and collects stamps? Many people believe far more incredible things—for example, that we are all descended from single-celled creatures, or that the earth is a giant ball circling the sun. Shouldn’t we mind our own business and let people believe whatever silly things they want to believe?
Today—in September 2024—worries about Elvis, Bigfoot, and alien garden gnomes seem laughably innocent. An important effect of the technological changes of the past two or three decades has been the elimination of gatekeepers. Formerly, to reach a wide audience, one had to submit to the judgment of editors of newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, academic journals, radio stations, or TV studios. This inhibited the craziest baloney, or channeled it into those fringe outlets that welcomed such stuff, like the Weekly World News. But now everyone has equal access to the megaphone. That has had many wonderful effects. It has released unimagined wells of creativity, and news now travels with the speed of light, but it has also uncorked geysers of lies and propaganda, and at least on the internet, there are hardly any filters.
I am speaking as a citizen of the United States, where the ill effects have been particularly acute, but I have no reason to doubt that other countries face analogous problems to varying extents. In this country, the freedom to lie for profit is enshrined in the Bill of Rights in blunt and uncompromising language: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Period. Few phrases are more reverently repeated by Americans, often with a shiver of self-righteous pride, as if they themselves had been present at the drafting of the document. Nobody seems to notice that it isn’t true.
In practice and in law, things are not so black and white. There are a few exceptions apparently derived from common law, which long preceded the Constitution: Thou shalt not slander, nor libel, nor stir violence, and thou shalt not lie under oath. Within the past few years, prominent defamation cases have led to damage awards of hundreds of millions of dollars, so such laws have teeth, but they apply only to identifiable victims who have suffered demonstrable harm. There appear to be no limits on lying for profit or other forms of self-interest if the effects of doing so are diffuse.
To take a salient case in point: About one in three Americans believes that the 2020 election was stolen from the rightful winner. The debate is about a matter of fact, not wishes. Whichever way the truth lies—for our purposes it doesn’t matter—either one-third or two-thirds of Americans have been deceived about something of international and lasting importance. The culture has failed to protect its own citizens from a delusion that can affect the health of that very culture. Was the First Amendment ultimately a lethal cultural mutation?
If we accept that behavior is lawful, there must be good reasons why people believe lies, and those reasons are not obscure: A newborn infant does not know, so to speak, whether it is year 2024, 1024, 3024, or 50,024 B.C., and it matters a lot. Infants must quickly adapt to the contingencies of their social and physical environments, and they typically do so for two reasons: First, cultures endure only if they make it their business to teach their children what they need to know under prevailing circumstances. Second, children soon learn that the fastest way to a successful repertoire in a particular environment is to take guidance from those who already have acquired one. Believing what you are told tends to pay off handsomely. So in successful cultures, the norm is to tell the truth and to believe what you are told, a pattern that is nominally codified in formal education. Trust in our verbal communities is supported incidentally every day by the near perfect correlation between public signs and circumstances: “Left lane closed ahead,” “Store hours: 7 AM-9 PM,” “The county fair will be held on Sept. 27-29,” “Expect heavy rain and strong wind all day tomorrow,” “Northampton – 9 miles.” Store names, blazoned in large letters, correspond to the establishments inside the doors; street signs are almost always correct.
One consequence of these facts is that people usually believe what they are told, and they believe what the people around them believe, whether true or false. Furthermore, most of us believe things only because other people believe them. Belief is transitive: Why do we believe that the earth is a giant ball hurtling around the sun in an elliptical orbit? A handful of scientists know the evidence upon which such a claim is made, but the rest of us just believe it because everyone else does, just as we know that pi goes on forever without repeating. (See! It’s right there in my sixth-grade math book!) Most of our ‘scientific knowledge’ is simply intraverbal behavior or textual behavior acquired from our communities. In successful cultures, scientists are accorded prestige and are consulted on important matters of fact, especially when textbooks are being written. The technology that springs from science is avidly embraced, and the prestige of scientists is shown to be justified.
Against this idyllic background, a liar can quickly get ahead, at least in the short run. Boys cry “Wolf;” used car dealers roll back odometers; deadbeats promise they will pay you back next month, politicians promise a chicken in every pot, televangelists threaten hellfire unless you donate generously. Consequently, individuals learn the hard way to look for ulterior motives and discount accordingly. Usually, agencies and institutions can be trusted, because they represent groups of people who are reluctant to have their reputations tarnished, while individuals with profit motives are open to suspicion. Since written matter is typically edited, is expensive to produce, implies an educated author, and shares the medium with culturally accepted learned texts, it is often born with a halo of truthfulness. Furthermore, cultures place sanctions on patent abuses of trust, as in gross falsehoods in advertising. So long as sanctions against lying are sufficiently punitive, and editorial gatekeepers sufficiently alert, the incidence of lying can be kept in equilibrium at a level that does not seriously threaten the culture as a whole. We can think of it as a liar’s tax that the culture must pay in order to maintain trust in its laws, policies, and institutions with a minimum of coercion. The equilibrium seems to have held for many years, perhaps centuries: If a culture is to endure, in the sense of maintaining a coherent set of practices over time, possibly in the face of strong competition, it will attempt to teach its children honestly, and children will learn to trust what they are told, while keeping on the lookout for liars.
To return to my earlier point, we are no longer at this acceptable equilibrium. In the vast publishing house that is the internet, the gatekeepers have been relegated to a broom closet. A mischievous person, an unscrupulous politician, or an agent of a cultural adversary can post corrosive lies to the world all day long and do it anonymously, so long as they stop short of actual criminal behavior. Worse, labor-saving “bots” can be programmed to generate them in any number. In short, today lies are dressed up like truths.
The sheer volume of material on the internet offers some protection, because every lie must vie for eyeballs with myriad alternatives, but unfortunately, self-selection tends to funnel polemical postings to eager readers; that is, readers tend to search for posts, true or false, that confirm their biases.
A second source of disequilibrium arises from the fact that those selection contingencies that protect us from liars inevitably shape up ever more skillful liars who evade detection. In this respect they are analogous to camouflage in nature. The owl moth is a liar who pretends to be a predatory bird, not a delectable insect, and it plausibly does so as the result of evolutionary shaping. Skillful liars presumably emerge through behavioral shaping. Here are a few features of the skillful liar culled from observation of contemporary political figures: 1) Repeat the lie as often as possible. (The more we hear something the more natural it sounds.) 2) Tell the lie in its most extreme form. (Listeners will tend to treat it as an exaggeration and split the difference, rather than reject it.) 3) Recruit allies who are willing to support the lies. (If everybody is saying it, it must be true.) 4) Accuse your opponents of the offense you have committed. (Their denials will sound just like yours.) In America in recent years, these patterns of behavior are on display every day. Politicians seem to lie ever more often and more flagrantly in service of gaining power and hanging on to it. The cultural norm that formerly discouraged rampant lying by public figures seems to have lapsed. Although the effects of such lying are serious, they are diffuse and hence protected by the First Amendment.
I am sure that I am not the only one who worries about the future of the United States. Can nothing be done? The Constitution seems to be indifferent to our plight. But perhaps we can turn once more to our old friend, common law: There is a remaining provision whose implications we have not yet exploited: It is illegal to lie under oath. Even the most prolific liars seem to balk at doing so, for then they are unambiguously on the wrong side of the law. Unfortunately, at present there is no way to force someone merely suspected of lying to go under oath, but public servants must obey their masters, and it would be in the public interest to require public officials, by law, as a condition of employment, to go under oath periodically to answer questions from a neutral panel every so many months. How such a scheme might work, I leave to others. Is it feasible? Surely not in the foreseeable future, at least in the United States, but it seems to me to offer a theoretical solution to a problem arising from the uncompromising language of the First Amendment.
In closing, I invite the reader to dwell on an idyllic passage from Walden Two2:
“Why don’t you indoctrinate, though?” I said. “Wouldn’t that be the safest way of assuring the success of the community?”
“It would be the safest way of assuring failure,” said Frazier with some warmth. “It would be a fatal mistake. Nothing but the truth, that’s our rule.”
Can you imagine living in a culture with such a rule? Neither could James Madison.
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Dave Palmer
dcpalmer@smith.edu