I’ve had two calls in the last 24 hours asking me to fact-check claims by Tony Abbott. I accepted one, and found that his claims were nonsense (links soon, I hope). The other didn’t sound much better, but I thought I’d let someone else deal with it.
The emergence of systematic fact-checking is a huge vulnerability for Abbott, coming at just the wrong time for him. Until recently, the perception that the government was untrustworthy and deceitful[1] allowed Abbott to get away with just about anything he said, and he took full advantage of this. Now his record is littered with obvious lies and he’s finding it hard to break the habit. Worse still, the post-truth state of the political right, in Australia and the US, makes it hard for anyone on that side of politics to discern the truth even if they want to. Once you assume (correctly) that anything said by Bolt, the IPA, the Oz, Fox and so on is probably false, where can a conservative go for information. Essentially, it’s necessary to do the work from scratch, and I don’t get the impression that Abbott or his team enjoy hitting the books[2]. So, switching from his previous line of fact-free negativity and putting forward a positive alternative to Rudd is going to be very difficult for Abbott, I think
fn1. As previously, I don’t want to debate the accuracy of this perception. I don’t suppose anyone will dispute its existence
fn2. To be fair, he obviously trains much harder than I do, as our relative performance in endurance events illustrates. But I haven’t found a lot of transference of training between ironman length triathlon and policy analysis.
John Quiggin 
Eagerly await next installment. You do great work.
‘Once you assume (correctly) that anything said by Bolt, the IPA, the Oz, Fox and so on is probably false, where can a conservative go for information. ‘ Love it. It is an interesting phenomenon. The bourgeoisie during the rise of capitalism and its solidification saw science as a necessary part of the system’s development. Now, while business may still feel that to be true, and necessary to maintain competitiveness, it appears the right has abandoned any semblance of truth, and science with it, for irrationality. This might be, irony of ironies, a logical response for them in a time of the decline of Western capitalism. The truth is too horrible to contemplate.
Training/physical exercise eats up lots of time and is at the expense of thinking/learning/analysing i.e. has an opportunity cost. Tony’s comfort zone is obviously the former, and if the election campaign changes his time allocation towards the latter, he might become unsettled and less effective.
If he ever becomes PM, I expect a reversion to what feels good, and a more presidential style: hovering above the fray, and making keynote speeches a la Reagan. I thought Rhodes scholars were clever intellectuals but clearly he’s not (at least Kris Kristofferson was a multi-talented artist) and is susceptible to the dark forces which hover around the Coalition.
Pr Q said:
I have been mentally urging Rudd to go long on the campaign, mainly because he is a good campaigner (he connects!). But also because the longer he is in the ring with Abbott the more likely he will land a knock out punch (or at least win on points).
Also Abbott-L/NP dont have many positive policies, in contrast to Howard-L/NP which had lots to do (levy GST, control guns, fight wars, protect borders, defend the sovereign). Essentially Abbott-L/NP will be committed to repealing popular taxes (mineral & carbon) and cutting popular services (health & education). Plus the ever present threat of Son of Work Choices stalking the land.
Really Rudd should have no trouble in running a scare-campaign against Abbott, something along the lines of Mr Negativity, Captain Slash & Burn, Mad Monk etc
Pr Q said:
Of course the intellectual Left is in a “post-truth state” alright, at least with regard to the touchy subject of human nature. But dont hold your breath waiting for the liberal media-academia is not going to hold itself to account when there are politically incorrect witches to hunt.
@jack strocchi
It is impossible to evaluate the merits of your criticism when you identify none of its targets.
@jack strocchi
Ha! “human nature”, what a slippery idea you’ve brought up there. Care to elaborate?
Tony Abbott has a big problem with dropping the carbon tax; his promise to maintain compensation must result in an added cost. Libs keep preaching fiscal restraint, the carbon tax is one anomaly and they should be held to account.
‘Once you assume (correctly) that anything said by Bolt, the IPA, the Oz, Fox and so on is probably false, where can a conservative go for information.’
Surely the flaw in this argument is that conservatives don’t share your assumption? On the contrary, they assume that everything believed by lefties/liberals/whomever is probably false, and they will therefore continue to accept News Ltd and the IPA as reliable sources of information/opinion (it is increasingly difficult to separate the two in most media these days).
Kevin1 @#3 I strongly disagree that ‘physical exercise … is at the expense of thinking/learning/analysing’. All my adult life I have found that exercise is conducive to thinking; indeed when I have a knotty problem to resolve my usual practice is to go for a long walk where I know I will have no distractions while I think it through.
@rog
Cut government waste rog, cut government waste. Pink batts, school laptops, NBN, cash for clunkers etc … BILLIONS that can be saved with a bit of fiscal discipline … it’s an opposition formula that’s stood the test of time and will no doubt serve again. I suspect government budgets are way beyond the interest of most voters, who assume (with some justification) they fiddle the books to get whatever result they like. Also a party that promised repeatedly to deliver a surplus by now is hardly in a position to criticise Abbott’s fiscal capabilities.
Recently on this site I posited that the ALP could win the 2013 election if the LNP “did a Steven Bradbury”.
It will be sad for Australia if this is the best we can do. Literally allowing a disgraced failure of an ALP to slide through (and claim a ‘mandate’) simply because Abbott and his LNP crew are “worse”.
In my fantasy universe there would be an equal holding to account (‘fact checking’ of Kevin Rudd) along with wide distribution of the results to as many Australian citizens as possible.
Of course we would need a degree of honestly run TV, radio and newspaper journalists.
That’s the problem. We have a failure of journalism and of the structures historically placed to support it.
The following site seems to do a pretty comprehensive job of fact checking. Although reading through their verdicts it does become clear that there is a bit of art in simply translating between complex realities and catchy political slogans.
http://www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/
Journalists ought to be doing this stuff as a matter of course. Although some of them seem to be rather selective in what they bother to check. And social media memes are littered with blatant lies that can sometimes be shown false in under 60 seconds but proliferate regardless.
@Ken_L
The problem is that people outside the conservative movement, but not committed to the other side, are gradually becoming aware of their factual unreliability. This process has gone further in the US than it has here, but I think it’s happenening
@Terje Politifact was the second of the sites that called me. The first, which I responded to, was or The Conversation (hopefully up today)
@rog Toss in border protection (loss of control), debt (running on empty) and unions ( corruption) and you have FUD. Step in tough muscular LNP to fix things up, the FUD busters.
Who needs facts?
Casting my eye across the site I’m not seeing this as revealing a huge vulnerability for Tony Abbott. I do think the leadership change in Labor does perversely put more scrutiny on Abbott however I’m not seeing his track record with the raw facts as being worse than that of his opponents. In fact I would rate him as more sincere and honest than his opponent, but of course I have a different set of political biases than you.
Are you sure it isn’t just a case of you caring more about certain facts and being somewhat indifferent to other facts. For instance if Kevin Rudd made a false claim about the number of abortions in Australia I think a revelation about the deceit would have a different impact on certain audiences compared to if he made a false claim about the amount of illegal fishing. Both might be topical but they matter differently to different people.
I know a lot of people get cranky when discussions about CO2 emissions are accompanied by pictures of steam or smoke. Others might get more annoyed about pictures of terrorist events coupled with discussions of boat people. An awful lot depends on the filters through which people observe the liar. For some Gillard’s words about no carbon tax under a government she leads was a mere technicality. For others it was one of the worst pieces of deceit in recent political history.
My point is that facts may be cold and hard but which facts we care about is intensely subjective.
“I know a lot of people get cranky when discussions about CO2 emissions are accompanied by pictures of steam or smoke”
Say what? Is the claim that, because CO2 itself is not visible, there’s a problem with pictures of combustion? This is just more of the absurd delusionism rampant on your side of politics and regularly defended (admittedly, in a half-hearted way) by you
It’s noteworthy that, as in Terje’s comment, nobody bothers to deny that rightwing political talk is full of lies. The only claim ever made in defence of the lies of Bolt, IPA etc is a tu quoque, or, in plainer terms “everyone does it, so get used to it”.
The current trope that “most asylum seekers are economic migrants” was started by Bob Carr but has been taken up enthusiastically by Abbott and Morrison. The difficulty for them, which they seem not to have realised, is reconciling the claim that people are flooding Australia’s borders in search of economic opportunities with the claim that the economy has gone south under the current government.
Carr’s presumption that he knows more than the tribunal about the cases they assess has a precedent. In 1994, when the NSW Chief Statistician reported that rates of serious crime weren’t increasing, Carr as NSW Opposition Leader criticised the Chief Statistician on the grounds that the statistics “didn’t reflect community perceptions”.
@kevin1
The reality is that human nature does indeed exist. This can be established philosophically (ontologically) and scientifically (empirically). However, human nature is a highly complex, variable, ambivalent, multi-facted and self-contradictary phenomenon in its reactions and expressions. Resort to “human nature” as a rhetorical device by the right usually presages a simplistic argument where human nature is plain, obvious and consistent; a caricature employed to support an ideological position.
However, it is easy enough to demonstrate that we do have a “nature”. “Nature” in this sense means the essential, consistent and categorical properties of something. This is true (the existence of a nature) even if a consistent “higher emergent” property is to demonstrate repeating patterns of inconsistency in “lower emergent” properties.
At a physical level, we clearly do have a nature. To list a few properties in no particular order; we are material objects, we are homeostatic systems, we require inputs of materials and energy (food and water) to grow, repair and maintain our bodies (to counter entropic processes).
At the levels of complex emergent phenomena, we also clearly have a nature. It is becoming clearer and clearer from genetic and neurological studies that genotype and phenotype right up to neurological and chemical phenomena in the brain are far more determinative of human development and behaviour than previously thought. In other words, nature in a very real sense has primacy over nurture. (Lest anyone thinks this lends itself to racist interpretations, it must be pointed out that genotype differences between “the races” are miniscule and their phenotypic expression trivial except perhaps for some adaptations to climate zones and prehistoric hunting and gathering styles.)
Nature (genotype determined nature) tends to set the upper bounds of the potential performance of the organism (human in this case) as it is challenged by environment and milue. Nurture, along with environmental and social opportunity, tends to determine how much of innate human potential will be fulfilled. To simplify, good nurture can “merely” enable development towards full potential. Bad nurture, deprivation etc. on the other hand can totally wreck development and potential.
This illustrates that the greatest good of the greatest number can be enabled within an equitable society. If nuture is good or even good enough the great majority will likely reach some reasonable proportion of their innate potential. If nurture is bad and deprivation occurs, the damage to the individuals thus affected is enormous. It’s another argument for equitable distribution of resources and the avoidance of pockets of deprivation and extreme poverty.
John that’s a silly response to my comment. I cite some examples of how view points differ amoung different audiences and I seek to understand how fact checking initiatives will have some particular political consequence for Tony Abbott. In response you want to talk about how the right tells loads of lies, how I won’t admit it and how you personally feel about pictures of combustion.
How will fact checking have a political impact on Abbott that is new or disproportionate to it’s effect on other politicians?
@John Quiggin
Regarding “the lies of Bolt”. From some biographical pieces I have read about Bolt, he is a “knowing liar”. But then many in politics, public life and indeed business life are “knowing liars”. They knowingly and repeatedly lie for gain.
On the matter of climate change it is pretty clear that Bolt does not really care if climate change is a real phenomenon or not. He is probably agnostic on the issue. However, he has calculated that appearing to subscribe to the sceptical-denialist position and writing populist drivel to that affect (and appealing to many other red-neck prejudices) was the way to get a lucrative journalist post with a right-wing capitalist enterprise. Bolt really doesn’t care whether what he writes is true or not or whether it has a beneficial or deleterious effect on our society and environment. All he cares about is that this approach was and is the best way he has found to enhance his personal wealth and influence.
It’s an approach common to many in our society and sanctioned by crude “Adam Smithism”.
I wonder if the good folk who waved ‘Juliar’ placards on the lawns of Parliament House will be quick to respond to veracity lapses by Abbott. Examples; repeal of the carbon tax, stopping the boats in the first year. No doubt the obliging Murdoch press will explain it as pragmatism. However just a few might ponder on the inconsistency. Presumably attack chihuahua the ABC will go in as hard as they did on Gillard.
Terje, “My point is that facts may be cold and hard but which facts we care about is intensely subjective.”.
But this is a problem that ‘we’ could do something about.
It is possible to learn how to be more ‘objective’. Certainly, pure objectivity is not something that humans can do, but, based on the latest understanding and knowledge about human nature, it is obvious that some people are, with the appropriate intellectual exercises, able to have some insight into how their brains fool them.
One needs to understand ‘motivated cognition’ and how it works.
Motivated cognition is the way of thinking that we use to maintain our self-esteem in the face of events in the world that could lead us to make a negative assessment of our ‘self’. The more you value your ‘self’ as an individual who is better than others – works harder, more intelligent etc – the more your brain is motivated to defend that ‘self’ against these negative assessments.
Motivated cognition is what we use to justify our beliefs, attitudes and behaviour and it is the basis of subjectivity.
Know your ‘self’, investigate your biases and how they were formed by your upbringing and your environment and then you will be capable of more objectivity.
Spinoza is the best of the western philosophers IMO because of his absolute integrity. He lived his philosophy unlike most of the other western philosophers who were sad and unhappy hypocritical human beings, and he said it this way, to see the truth about something, you need to have no opinion at all.
The Climate Insitute opinion on Lowy data re voters priorities; #1 is the economy with #2 being perceptions of lies and broken promises
http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2013/07/03/Do-voters-want-to-repeal-carbon-pricing.aspx
@rog That should be “Lowy Institute opinion on data….”
is it possible parliament will be recalled before the election?
show the line up?
tear the (news)paper off the cracks in the wall of gall?
@Ikonoclast
All well and good but what I queried was Jack Strocchi’s elliptical comment at #5 saying “Of course the intellectual Left is in a “post-truth state” alright, at least with regard to the touchy subject of human nature.”
It’s kinda funny that references to “human nature” generally consider this underlying human nature to be sacting with simple personal self interest, something like chimpanzees. In fact, it is in the nature of humans to generate culture that normalises and habituates a mass of complex behaviours. It is this part of human nature that has allowed humans to accumulate knowledge and cooperate to a biologically unprecedented level and so more or less take over the planet, while chimpanzees are still squabbling in a few forest areas.
Our stress biochemistry is very similar to that of a chimpanzee – or indeed a mollusc – but our behavioural response to stress is wildly different to molluscs or chimps and is wildly different in different cultural environments. The idea of an a-cultural or pre-cultural human is a fantasy, culture is embedded human nature.
I’m sceptical of the potential of a descriptor such as ‘human nature’ to tell us anything useful about human behaviour or social organisation.
Clearly, it is true by definition that if one wants to distinguish humans from every other kind of a thing in the world, one will need to be able to point to some unique attributes — those peculair to humans alone, and one could describe that as ‘our nature’ — literally — what we were born with or was at least immanent at the time.
Unsurprsingly, as a left|st, I lean heavily towards the view that what humans are is the result of work — collaborative work with others, along with various kinds of adaptive behaviour driven by our desire to avoid various kinds of pain and loss — socio-cultural and physical and also to obtain various kinds of pleasure — everything from a full stomach through social and sexual intimacy and a sense of purpose.
Yet all of that cognitive acquisition and accomplishment and adaptive behaviour is bounded by ‘the social’. Nobody, I would contend, can become human or remain human apart from other humans, or at least the possibility of engaging with them.
Humans have devised many a cruel punishment but amongst them all the mere threat of solitary confinement is generally considered to be in the top rung of cruel and unusual punishments. In this condition, people commonly lose their humanity, their will to live and the capacity for autonomy and even those that survive it are seriously blighted. That says much about what being human entails, IMO.
@Ikonoclast
It’s easy to claim that you know what “human nature” is when you get to define the meaning of the term. The hard part comes when you try to get someone (anyone!) else to agree with your definition.
@TerjeP
Terje, the point was that your smoke-CO2/terrorist-refugee comparison made no sense. A picture of something burning really *is* a picture of a CO2 emitting process. A picture of some refugees is, with incredibly high probability, *not* a picture of terrorists. People who get angry about the first are simply ignorant of the facts, whereas people who get angry about the second are very cognisant of them. I gather that you were simply stating that this is how some people think, rather than defending the viewpoint yourself but the the truth is that someone would have to be stuck well inside a right-wing echo chamber to think these things were remotely comparable.
Julie – yes we can do something about our perceptions. Maybe we even ought to. But the suggestion John made was that an exercise in fact checking would somehow change Tony Abbotts electoral prospects. I’m trying to elicit the mechanism by which he expects that to happen.
I could write an article about Muslim asylum seekers with a picture of a Muslim man beheading a muslim women. And I could use the defence that it really is a picture of some Muslims. But obviously it entails some misrepresentation. If your claim is they smoke and steam has never been used in a similar way to misrepresent the CO2 emissions issue then I disagree. But I could put up alternate examples so this specific example isn’t terrible material to my point. Although the reaction to it is somewhat telling.
@Megan
Wouldn’t that be Labor doing a Bradbury, not the LNP as they would have been the ones falling over to let Labor win?
@TerjeP
No, you cannot apply the same defence at all. For your next point to make any sense you would need to find a picture of Muslim *asylum seekers* beheading someone. To recapitulate: a burning object is, with (almost?) certainty, emitting carbon dioxide. The probability that a) a picture of an asylum seeker is a picture of someone who also likes beheading people, or b) that a picture of someone beheading is also a picture of an asylum seeker is much closer to zero. That’s the difference. It’s not that there’s no validity whatsoever to your general point, but your unwillingness to acknowledge the obvious illogic of your particular choice of example is telling indeed.
@TerjeP I think your point about favoring some facts over others is a good one .Listening to Allan Jones and reading Bolt Im not sure there is much they say that is just false – what I hear is an enthusiastic coverage of one side of the argument and a total silence with respect to the other side (maybe with a good dose of exaggeration thrown in ) .I do think tho that that sort of behaviour is not so prevalent on the Left .Lefties are not so afraid of doubt .
@Fran Barlow I like the existence before essence approach too . Also there may be nothing substantial we do that cannot be found somewhere else in the animal kingdom (that could be used to separate us in an essential way). It needs to be something not done at all to support radical difference ,not just something we do a lot more than any other animal.
@Jim Birch I also am wary of claims human nature is primarily selfish and competitive. Lots of animal nature isnt like that either .
Terje @ 18:53
That was incredibly lame.
Combustion is the most significant process of ACO2 emissions.
Your ‘beheading’ comment is troll-worthy.
@TerjeP A
And the man with the sword is an ‘economic migrant”? If not the argument is nonsense.
@jack strocchi
Human nature? Proponents of the efficient market are unfortunately in a rather glassy house on that score. Homo economicus makes a cute assumption but turns out to be far different from how people actually are. Aside from people’s tendencies to some measure of co-operation, altruism, and stubborn/vengefulness, there is also the problem that people are not perfect maximizers (not smart enough, not enough information to make the perfect choices theory calls for) and also do not treat losses and gains as equal (people have a small-c conservative bias; they tend to worry about losses more than they want gains and so take fewer risks than efficient market theories need them to).
For that matter, the right subscribes to inherent contradictions; in that, it’s worse even than Communists (a caricature of whom I’m assuming strocchi wished to strawman the entire left with). Communists arguably believed in a perfect or perfectably social human nature which would allow for “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. But the right believes in neoliberal/neoclassical economics (which cannot work without Homo Economicus the perfect maximizer), and simultaneously swears up and down that unemployment and low wages are caused by masses of lazy idle layabouts with no ambition blah blah, who are clearly nothing resembling Homo Economicus. The two notions cannot coexist, so the right wing is completely incoherent on human nature. And for that matter manages to be dead wrong both times.
On the discussion in general . . . Well, it seems fairly clear to me that while one can cherry pick examples from any side you could imagine, there is a strong general trend: In terms of right wing partisans vs left wing partisans,
The left certainly chooses the facts and issues it is interested in, arranges them and presents them in ways they deem rhetorically effective etc., as does anyone presenting an argument, but as a general rule if you fact check the factual statements they will turn out to be true, drawn from solid sources and not misrepresented. So if someone on the left says “The top 1% of US income earners held X% of the country’s wealth in 2011, up from N% in 1981” this will turn out to have been drawn pretty verbatim from OECD statistics or some such. The two years will be taken from the same data series in an apples-to-apples comparison. The question of which statistics are important maybe depends on what side you’re on, what ideology you hold; you can say “so what?” But the factual statements are not false. Exceptions are few, although inevitably they exist.
The mushy middle (often called “the left” by right wingers) just doesn’t say much that’s real in the first place so it’s hard for them to lie about it. You have to make an actual statement before you can be caught in a lie.
The right frequently lies flat out. They present statistics that were drawn from other right wing claims which were drawn from other right wing claims which were drawn from . . . nothing at all. Or sometimes, they compare statistic A using methodology A measuring phenomenon 1 with statistic B using methodology B measuring phenomenon 2, and talk as if they were the same. Stuff like that. This is so frequent in right wing discourse as to be commonplace; it is actually becoming difficult to find mainstream right wing factual claims which are not false or seriously distorted in some way.
There have been many explanations proposed for this, but for whatever reason I think there’s little doubt it’s the case.
These things are not the same. All sides are biased, all sides arrange what they say to make their side sound right. No doubt all sides decorate their discourse with pictures intended to elicit visceral emotional responses. But bias and lying are two different things. The right speaks many falsehoods, the left relatively few. Therefore, prevalent fact checking is worse for the right.
Incidentally, objectivity is a myth. You can’t be genuinely neutral; no matter where you stand if you actually look at your feet you will note that you are in fact standing somewhere. You can, however, tell the truth. There is a difference between truth and lying. I would also want to claim that Aristotle was onto something when he defined a distinction between true rhetoric and false rhetoric. False rhetoric involved basically conning people, appealing to their emotions against their reason, using argument forms that seem like they make sense but don’t and so on. You can choose to use true rhetoric instead, stuff which amplifies and makes clear and attractive the real merits of your case.
The thing about “human nature” is that by-and-large the people who are saying that this-and-that is “human nature” are basing that on the direct experience of exactly one human, themselves.
@Tim Macknay
If one uses a term, one must define it. I am arguing for a definition of the compound term “human nature” so we can use it as an investigative and explanatory concept. I am not arguing I can immediately define human nature.
I am arguing for a “modest” approach which does not go beyond attempts to determine the objective and quantifiable aspects of “human nature”. People assume that as soon as one talks about “human nature”, one must be talking about higher, “true” or “inner” nature.
Really, we should start at the relatively simple, objective and quantifiable end of matters. If this leaves us without ill-defined and/or imaginary categories (like “homo economicus”, “animal spirits”, “exhuberance”, “confidence”, “selfishness”, “altruism” and “souls” to bolster our political economy rhetoric then we have already significantly clarified our thinking. If we cannot yet make any true, testable statements in the more complex areas it still helps to stop making vague, untrue, wild and untestable statements.
Further Notes.
The term “human” is clear enough. Following biological classification and now genetic classification we can clearly define what a “human” is (a member of the species homo sapiens) in terms of certain orderly, scientific and useful categorisation systems. This definition is objective and limited. It does not claim to encapsulate all that a human being is but simply enough for an objective and useful category determination.
We use these objective categorisation systems everyday (via shortcuts involving common knowledge and basic heuristics). To be objective is not to be “heartless”. In a car accident a man and a dog might each be injured. We categorise these two living, injured entities via a quick visual appraisal and send the man to a hospital for humans and the dog to a vetinary surgeon.
People need to pay more attention to their definition of the term “nature” when they use a compound term like “human nature”. What do they mean when they say something has a “nature”? Are they saying that it has a categorical set of objective properties and that without a full or sufficient complement of these properties it ceases to be a thing of that category? I certainly hope they are saying that or they are just waffling.
But whilst holding to the general point that something of a category must have a set of categorical properties and very possibly a further set of likely properties, this does not mean I claim to know what all these properties are for all things. I know to a very high degree of certainty that the element gold has a set of objective, categorical properties. I think I could even name some, especially if I could crib a look at the periodic table. This high degree of certainty does not mean I claim to know all the properties of gold.
Terje, It is so easy to take the Ayn Rand philosophy that values the individual over the collective. However did you ever think that it might be the case that to be a part of a decent society, to construct a decent society that could govern itself – you know, self-organise – the individual has to take some responsibility for the society. And since there is no society, the only thing to do is to take care of the individuals, the ones who apparently deliberately choose to be stupid and lazy.
It might also be the case that some of the traditional values that have underpinned western civilization over the centuries need to be dusted off and examined. Aristotle, I think, said that we get better at being human with practice. What decent traditional philosophy values selfishness and getting ahead as good ways to behave?
The Enlightenment enlightened us about the idea of ‘rationality’ and libertarians are supposed to value rational thinking highly. It is clear now that rational thinking is not as easy to do as it seemed to Ayn Rand, who had an enormous ability to fool herself about what was rational and what was not. Think motivated cognition here.
But rationality is objectivity; they are the same thing and it seems clear to me that you do have an obligation to examine yourself and try to be more rational, if you want a better world of course. If you just want self-gratification then go ahead and do whatever it takes and hope that not everyone else chooses to do that.
Julie – I’m not sure I really disagree with anything you wrote. However based on past encounters I suspect we draw different conclusions from it. For instance I champion small government because I think it would be good for society. If I simply wanted to look after myself I would expend my energies on other activities.
@Purple Library Guy
That argument makes a lot of sense and seems to accord with what we are observing in modern political life.
It leads one to ask why one side, the left, now tend to use factual statements and the other side now tend to use lies and fabrications? What follows are my initial suppositions about what is happening.
In arguing cases (in the legal as well as the moral sense), it is in the interests of the innocent or wronged party to tell the truth. It assists their case. It is in the interests of the guilty or wronging party to lie.
Thus, if we could objectively survey many factual claims of the “left” and the “right” (as broad political categories) and establish a general, statistically valid pattern of truth or accuracy by the former and of lies and fabrications by the latter, we could as a first step establish the “right” as an “unreliable witness”.
Further, after examining the lies, if we established certain patterns we could infer systematic lying rather than simple ignorance or stupidity. Systematic lying implies lying to cover guilt, lying for advantage or both. If we look at various phenomena like “astroturfing” and deliberate spreading of disinformation and uncertainty about issues from tobacco’s cancer links right out to global warming we can very quickly establish the case for systematic lying; that is to say knowing, programmatic lying.
Thus the “right” know they are guilty (if they have a sense of guilt which seems unlikely) or they know that their position of advantage (extreme advantage in the case of the plutocrats) would be under threat if all or even a substantial slice of the truths of the entire matter (political economy and its social and environmental effects) were widely known.
This dishonest dynamic now functions to make our political economy maladaptive and unsustainable at all levels. There are both internal and external contradictions which are ultimately insurmountable and which will crash the system. (Insert standard Ikonoclast rants involving Marxist analysis and Limits to Growth here.)
Hmmm . . . but ideologies of small government (in market economies) depend on the notion that everyone is motivated by selfishness and that that is OK, even ideal. By selflessly advocating for it, you are devoting your ideals to pushing an ideology you cannot genuinely subscribe to, that you exist in contradiction of. It’s an odd position.
Oops. That last one was to TerjeP’s #43.
“but ideologies of small government (in market economies) depend on the notion that everyone is motivated by selfishness and that that is OK, even ideal
I am not a big believer in small government but I disagree with this statement.
Someone might like small government because they think people are typically nice and come to fair compromise without the need for a large government apparatus. From this perspective a belief in a large government (without being too nebulous 😛 ) to increase equality/fairness depands on the notion that a sufficiently large number of people are motivated by selfishness.
Anyway, not my view. Just a thought.
Terje Of course you think that you are motivated by the good of society and not by your own preference for not paying any tax.
Your argument is that if everyone looks after themselves, we will all – ie society – be better off, no?
But this is not true. There is no evidence from history or from philosophy or from the latest research in the social sciences about human ‘nature’, that this works. And yet, you continue to maintain the faith.
@kevin1
Don’t feed the troll derailer!