Bursting Bubbles
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them. (Pauline Kael)
Many people were depressed by the outcome of the election. Some were also astonished by it. The interesting question, in that context and many others, is how people react to discovering that their view of the world was wrong. To having their bubble burst.
One response is to deny the evidence — as many Trump supporters did when he lost the 2020 election. It could not be that a majority of the voters rejected him, hence the election must have been stolen. Once one is committed to that belief, it is always possible to find supporting evidence good enough for you to believe.
It works for Democrats too:
The so called "election results" are suspicious. So fast and it's game over before all the votes are counted? It's a stealth terrorist attack and the Republicans are behind it. They've been planning it for 4 years. IMO. (FB comment)
I was disappointed by LBJ’s 1964 landslide but not surprised. Some of Goldwater’s other supporters were. They believed in the invisible majority, the millions of voters who would vote for a true conservative if only there was one to vote for. Their argument for nominating Goldwater was not only that he was right but that he could win. I do not remember if any claimed that he had won, that the election was stolen, a harder thing to believe in that election given the size of the margin, but some probably managed to believe it.
A more common response is to accept the inconvenient fact but find some way of explaining it away. The day after the election, listening to a progressive channel on satellite radio while driving, I heard the host explain that the reason the Democrats lost was that they were massively outspent by the Republicans. I don’t know what his response would have been to learning that Kamala Harris outraised and outspent Donald Trump by more than two to one and that outside groups supporting Democrats or opposing Republicans similarly outspent their opposition.
How it is explained away is not random. Progressives explain the Democratic loss as due to their not being progressive enough in the campaign, moderates as the opposite. Trump supporters in 2020 who were willing to admit that their side lost blamed it on liberal control of media, NeverTrumper Republicans blamed it on Trump.
The bubbles that all of us live in are maintained in large part by information filtering. The sources you trust tell you things that fit what you already believe. There are other information sources that contradict what you believe but you probably don’t see them and, if you do, don’t believe them.
That is harder to do if sources you trust tell you that sources you trust, possibly even the same sources, have been lying to you. A modern example is the problem faced by a loyal Democrat after the Biden-Trump debate. The Democratic leadership, the people he trusted, had been telling him that Biden was in fine shape, sharp as ever, that the claim of age-related mental problems was Republican propaganda. A Democrat who didn’t watch the debate or a sufficiently loyal one who did might have persuaded himself that Biden was still fine, just tired or having a bad day. That became harder to do after the Democratic leadership, the same people who had told him that Biden was fine, started very obviously trying to get Biden to withdraw. At that point it became nearly impossible to not realize that the Democratic leadership, the people he trusted, had been lying to him. Or were lying to him — a possible interpretation of the evidence, for a sufficiently loyal Biden supporter, was that what he was observing was a coup within the party.
Loyal communists faced a similar problem in 1939 when Hitler and Stalin agreed on a mutual non-aggression pact and both invaded Poland. They had been told, and believed, that Hitler was evil, evil enough to justify allying with the capitalist powers against him. Now the Soviet Union was allying with Hitler against the capitalist powers. Many communists and sympathizers concluded that Stalin should not be trusted. Some became Trotskyites, adherents of a communist faction opposed to Stalin, others abandoned communism entirely, becoming socialists, liberals or even conservatives. But a considerable number remained loyal, revising their views on command.
A similar problem existed for members of the communist parties of western Europe in 1956, when the Soviet Union violently suppressed the Hungarian revolution. Many of them had taken seriously the Soviet claim that the communist states of eastern Europe were voluntary allies, not puppet governments kept in power by Soviet troops. The leadership of the communist parties of France, Italy and Great Britain supported the Soviet actions but many members, including some prominent ones, opposed them, many of them resigning their party membership.
A common response to a bubble bursting is to revise the beliefs defining your bubble to fit the new information while preserving as much as possible of your old beliefs. The Trotskyite who maintains his belief in communism but not Stalin is one example. The loyal Democrat can abandon his belief in Biden’s continued competence, lower his belief in the competence and honesty of the Democratic leadership, but remain a loyal Democrat. The believer in an end of the world religious cult can, after observing the failure of the world to end on schedule, revise the predicted date.
For all but, perhaps, the last there is the alternative of preserving the bubble unchanged while resolutely ignoring the inconsistency of his beliefs with the observed facts. The beliefs function not as a picture of reality but a statement of tribal membership.1
The bubble can be defended against any possible evidence by rejecting the concept of objective truth:
“From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” (George Orwell, Books v. Cigarettes)
It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so. (Orwell)
Modern versions exist.
Rorty rejected the long-held idea that correct internal representations of objects in the outside world are a necessary prerequisite for knowledge. Rorty argued instead that knowledge is an internal and linguistic affair; knowledge relates only to our own language. Rorty argues that language is made up of vocabularies that are temporary and historical, and concludes that "since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths." (Wikipedia article on Richard Rorty)
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I discuss Dan Kahan’s research on beliefs held not because they are true but because they are useful in an earlier post.
A few years ago a libertarian colleague (Ray Perceval) wrote a fascinating work of philosophy called the myth of the closed mind. His conjecture was (as the title suggests) that no one can continue to hold a belief that has been falsified by an apparently correct refutation (assuming of course that they have understood the argument et cetera, et cetera).
And I had the privilege of knowing at least two anarcho-libertarians who had been communists, but who abandoned communism almost overnight when they were exposed to the economic calculation argument.
I’d be really interested to know what you think. On the one hand we seem to live in a world in which countless people believe things that have been refuted. But on the other hand, it does seem strange that someone could hold a belief which has been shown to them to be false.
These days, pretty much, if the government says something, anything, I assume it's a lie until and unless proven otherwise. If the media says something, anything, I assume it's a lie until and unless proven otherwise.
If David Friedman says something, I'm often willing to give him the benefit of a doubt. ;-)