Early in her political career, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a particularly notable comment. During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, she was questioned about a claim she made about Pentagon spending, which was reviewed by the US newspaper ‘Four Pinocchio’. fact checkers at the Washington Post. While she acknowledges her mistake, she also has this to say:
If people really want to inflate one figure here or one word there, I’d say they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think many people are more concerned about being precise, factual, and semantically correct than they are about being morally right.
Unwillingly, you could interpret this to mean that she is actually saying, “It doesn’t matter if what you say is true, what matters is that if you say you are a good person.” But a more charitable interpretation is that she meant “morally right” here, in the sense of something similar to when someone says, “morally certain.” Moral certainty falls short of fully established certainty, but is close enough to justify acting on that basis. So perhaps being “morally right” in this context just means that the statement accurately points to some kind of grand truth, even if the details don’t hold up under scrutiny.
Recently published research suggests that partisans are often aware when leaders in their movement make factually incorrect claims. Like the authors to summarizeThey find that “voters often recognize when their parties’ claims are not based on objective evidence. Yet they still respond positively if they believe that these inaccurate statements evoke a deeper, more important ‘truth’.” For example, they found that many Trump supporters who support the former president’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him are fully aware that this claim is factually false. Nevertheless, they still rely on these allegations because they “view these allegations as important to ‘American priorities’ because they believe the political system is illegitimate and against their interests.” In their eyes, it doesn’t matter that Trump’s claim that the election was stolen isn’t “factually correct” because they consider it “morally correct” — it speaks to a “deeper truth” about the corrupt political system. of elites trying to thwart the will of the people, and so on.
Of course, people tend to apply this leeway over factual correctness quite unevenly. The authors point out that “voters from both parties placed more importance on ‘moral truth’ when evaluating a politician they liked. In contrast, when assessing a politician they did not like, voters relied more on strict factuality.” If you’re progressive, you’ll tend not to care about Ocasio-Cortez’s numerous factual errors because you think her statements still point to important truths — just as Trump supporters often do his factual mistakes for the same reason overlook inaccuracies.
I think there is another factor in why people seem to accept and repeat political claims that they know are factually incorrect. Making these kinds of statements acts as a kind of loyalty signal. Within a tribe, loyalty is signaled by making overly strong statements that are expected to be taken “seriously but not literally.” For this reason, fact checking can often be ineffective because the people making or repeating such claims do not view them as factual statements in the first place.
Just as many Trump supporters make claims about a stolen election that they know are untrue to signal their commitment to other ideas, I suspect that many people who have repeated so-called “woke” mantras simply do so as a way because of their progressive bot fides, and not because they actually believe the statements themselves to be in any way true. This clashes with another idea that I have called “political non-cognitivism” – the idea that people’s political claims are often intended to express attitudes and are not intended to be statements of fact.
If these types of statements are intended to signal political loyalty and gain status within an in-group, it creates an unfortunate dynamic. Status is a zero-sum game: a person can only increase his status by rising above others in status. To gain status with these types of loyalty signaling games, there is competitive pressure to become increasingly detached from reality, in order to distinguish yourself. In a way, this also sends a stronger loyalty signal.
You do not indicate that you are loyal to a group by making statements that everyone from any group agrees with. With “The sky is blue” you will not win any points in any in-group. But consider one of Ibram Kendi’s claims in his book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in Americawhere he claims: “If you really believe that racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial differences must are the result of racial discrimination.” Kendi argues that any differences in overall outcomes between different populations may be only can be explained by racial discrimination, and if you think this is possible each If you have another explanation for even a fraction of the variance, then you are some kind of racist supremacist. The willingness to endorse this sentiment sends a very strong loyalty signal, precisely because of its weak connection with reality. Likewise, the clearer Trump’s absurd claims about a stolen election are, the stronger the loyalty signal becomes when someone is willing to confirm and repeat these claims.
But there is an external problem here. Sending these kinds of signals increases someone’s status, but pollutes the public debate. When ninety-nine people repeat these mantras, not personally believing them to be true, the one person in a hundred who makes such statements sincerely gains confidence in the veracity of their incoherent ideas, and loses any chance of resolving the clash between truth and truth. to experience. wrong, as John Stuart Mill put it. People who repeat these mantras insincerely provide intellectual cover for true believers in these ideas to seize power within institutions and put these ideas into practice.
A dramatic example of this dynamic can be seen, I believe, in the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In 2016, conspiracy theorists spread the idea that a large-scale child trafficking operation was taking place among elites, and that as part of this operation, children were being held in the basement of Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in Washington DC – despite the fact that the establishment had not even a cellar. Finally, a true believer went there with a gun in hand, intending to free the children. Fortunately, he was apprehended by the police and no one was injured. But what strikes me about this case is that even though thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of people online claimed to believe this child trafficking existed, and even though many made harassing phone calls or left mean comments online, An person actually tried to do something to stop it. This suggests to me that many – perhaps most – of the people who subscribed to this conspiracy theory online did not Real believe it to be factually true. They claimed to endorse it and promoted it as a form of loyalty signaling, and doing so would send an extremely strong loyalty signal to the in-group precisely because the whole idea was patently absurd. But if enough people are willing to do this, it opens the door for a single person who really believes in it to do something terrible.
Recently I saw the following claim on Twitter: “A good sign that wokeism is going out of fashion is that even leftists, who once gleefully allowed woke people to hijack their movement, are starting to act as if they’ve always seen through wokeism, as if they always have done. war with East Asia.” I have a slightly different opinion here. I suspect that most leftists, privately, did in fact, it ‘sees through wokeism all the time’, but nevertheless vocally affirms it for reasons of status and loyalty signaling. As the halo surrounding Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo begins to fade, many leftists are now more willing to openly say that they never actually believed all that stuff. Yet some people actually believed it. And many of those true believers, with the cover given to them by such loyalty signals, have moved into positions of significant institutional power. Much of Kendi and DiAngelo’s corpus has become official policy within governments, major corporations, and medical institutions—even though most of the people who have publicly affirmed these ideas have never actually believed them to be true.