Where's Comrade Brezhnev?
On the dangers of confusing what is correct with what is true
Over on my main blog, I wrote a post today about ketman and the Democratic Party. Ketman is a Persian word that describes the hypocrisy one has to live with as a survival mechanism in a society in which it is impossible to speak the truth. I want to keep my political and culture war posting over on that blog, not in this newsletter. But I’d like to talk today about the phenomenon of the social lie, and of the dangers of creating a social group, of whatever size, in which it is impossible to speak truthfully.
It’s a topic I think about all the time, though usually I’m more focused on epistemology — that is, how we know what we know. But truth-telling is necessary to truth-knowing. If we cannot trust that what we are told is true, or is at least falsifiable (i.e., can be shown to be false), then we cannot expect to know the truth.
The great ex-Marxist intellectual Leszek Kolakowski, writing about totalitarianism and truth, said that in Communist societies,
the borderline between what is ‘correct’ and what is ‘true,’ as we normally understand this, seems really to have become blurred; by repeating the same absurdities time and again, they themselves began to believe or half-believe them. The vast and profound corruption of the language eventually produced people who were incapable of perceiving their own mendacity.
Kolakowski explained that in the later years of the Soviet Union, the functionaries weren’t really cynics. They had been living in lies, and dwelling in the language of lying, for so long that they honestly believed the falsehoods they told (e.g., that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan for the cause of “liberation.”) I believe that this is happening now, with the regnant woke ideology that has conquered our institutions and the ruling class. The terrific HBO miniseries Chernobyl is about what happens when a system becomes so corrupt that everyone is afraid to speak the truth about problems within it.
I’m thinking tonight of the instances in which I have seen, or have friends who have seen, the destructiveness of this principle in power. I’ll start with a Russian man with whom I had dinner in Moscow last year. He told me that his first job out of college was to serve as an assistant cameraman at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Shortly before the opening ceremony, a KGB detachment guarding Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev arrived in the VIP box where Brezhnev and other dignitaries would be sitting.
The KGB colonel in charge ordered the state TV crew to take down some metal framing, because it was, in his judgment, a threat to Brezhnev. The director explained to the KGB colonel that that metal framing was necessary to hang the lights that would illuminate the faces of the dignitaries. “We didn’t agree to these things!” the KGB man barked. The director didn’t push it, because nobody argued with the KGB in the Soviet Union.
Click this to see what happened in the opening ceremony. The screenshot is above: Brezhnev and the Politburo broadcast around the world in the dark. The Russian technician told me that this moment in 1980 marked the first time he knew that the Soviet system was doomed because it was impossible to speak the truth about anything.
In the year 2000, I was walking the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem in the company of a Catholic priest, an American who served a Palestinian Arab parish in a Jerusalem suburb. I talked with him about what it was like ministering to that population. He told me that it could be very frustrating, because he didn’t know how to help people. Their idea of fact changed constantly, to fit the politically correct line.
Arabic culture is famously indulgent of conspiracy theory. The priest told me that a couple of weeks ago, after mass, the men in his parish were discussing the “fact” that Yassir Arafat was a secret Jew. They were absolutely certain of this, and wouldn’t admit any evidence against it. A week later, they were talking about the same set of facts that led them to conclude that Arafat was a secret Jew, but they had come to a very different conclusion — that Arafat was actually the innocent victim of the crafty Jews.
The priest said that when he questioned the men about their reasoning, they did not understand what his point was. It was as obvious to them that Arafat was a gentle lamb this week as it had been the previous week that he was a hidden Jew. The priest told me this story, he said, because the hardest thing he had to deal with as their pastor was the plan fact that Arafat and his cronies were robbing the Palestinians blind, and did so by taking advantage of their chronic weakness for taking as true anything that suited their emotional state. The priest, with his American psychological stance, had no idea how to help. The Palestinians’ culturally constructed framework for determining truth and falsity made them incredibly vulnerable to exploiters, the priest said. In that case, it wasn’t fear of telling the truth, but rather truth-telling being difficult because truth-hearing was so hard to do. People within that culture couldn’t perceive their own susceptibility; this was just the epistemic water in which they swam.
I can think of several examples I’ve encountered over the years of family systems in which the entire family was held hostage to the inability of its members to say anything that upset the matriarch or patriarch. In one case, the family business was hemorrhaging money because nobody could bring themselves to confront the patriarch about his poor judgment. He had created a dysfunctional system in which everyone, even his own family members, were incentivized to lie to him. In my own family — I wrote about this in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming — I learned to my indescribable shock that my late sister and my father had raised my sister’s children to think the worst of me because I had left town and gotten above my raising. My niece (the oldest of my sister’s three) told me this because she couldn’t stand to think that her uncle, who had just moved back home to Louisiana, was going to be in the dark about why her siblings were always going to be standoffish. When I confronted my father about it all, he halfheartedly and implausibly denied it. My father was a scrupulously honest and honorable man, but when it came to family matters, it was more important to seem than to be. We were a loving, happy, harmonious family, and he could not bear to hear anything that contradicted that belief. Because he could not accept these painful truths, he could not act on them to fix what was broken, and the thing he cherished above all others — his family — more or less dissolved. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about that, not in a vengeful or grieving way, but by now as a lesson in the terrible cost of fearing and suppressing the truth.
Another example. When I was writing about the Catholic priest abuse scandal twenty ago, I ran into that kind of thing a fair amount within diocesan government. I discovered that in some cases, bishops behaved as if they wanted to be lied to. This was easy to do when there was no accountability imposed on them at all from the laity, who really only wanted to be assured that everything was just fine in the diocese. As a younger man, I could not understand why laymen would not want to know the truth about the corruption in their dioceses, including where their money was going (e.g., to pay settlements with victims of molester priests). Eventually I understood that there was an unspoken agreement between the clergy and the laity in many cases: the truth was as worthless as Confederate money, because nobody really wanted to know it. As long as there were no consequences for avoiding the truth, the system could go on indefinitely. Funnily enough, that’s what my father was counting on: an unspoken agreement within the family that nobody mention unpleasant things, for the sake of harmony and continuity. That is how it had always been with us. We are Southern people, after all, and well practiced in pretending not to notice things for the sake of social harmony.
Here’s a story I’ve told on my blog, but I’ll repeat it here in case some of you haven’t heard it. Last year when I was in Boston on business, I had lunch with a European friend who was finishing up graduate work at Harvard. He told me how bizarre he and his international student friends in the program found it that their professors would routinely rule certain discussion topics out of bounds in class. Why? Because other students had come to the professors ahead of class and mentioned that discussing these things would be traumatizing to them, and they were not capable of handling it.
The European graduate student said that he and the other foreigners couldn’t believe that a self-respecting student would make that request of a professor, and that a professor would grant it. But it was common — at Harvard! He told me that the Harvard Crimson had recently published an article on student health center data showing that a staggering number of Harvard students were taking antidepressants. (I couldn’t find the story he was talking about, but here’s a Crimson piece from a year ago revealing that depression is far higher among Harvard students than the general public.)
My lunch guest said that the neuroticism and fragility of the American students unnerved him, because he knew perfectly well that these young people were going to be the institutional leaders of tomorrow. Weirdly, he said, none of them seemed to doubt in the slightest that they were meant to lead. But none had the capacity to do so, in his judgment, because they were psychologically crippled by the prospect of confronting data that made them anxious.
Those Harvard students are the class of people who will be staffing, and eventually leading, institutions like the Democratic Party. I don’t think Republicans are specially protected from the problems that come from a culture that discourages truth-telling, but I think there is something about the current ideological culture within liberal spaces that makes Democrats especially vulnerable. In my TAC post, I brought up the case of Progressphiles, the e-mail list of 1,000 or so Democratic data professionals — that is, men and women who work in the party crunching numbers to get candidates elected. This past summer, they drove out of their group a young genius named David Shor for having tweeted research data showing that riots hurt Democrats at the polls, but non-violent protest helps them. The ultra-woke leadership of Progressphiles excoriated Shor, who had distinguished himself serving as President Obama’s data guru, for hurting the feelings of blacks and persons of color. This, simply because he pointed to academic research that challenged the narrative they preferred.
The woke Progressphiles preferred to dwell in darkness than confront a truth claim that upset them — even though it was a truth claim that was urgently important to the success or failure of their mission: to get Democrats elected. I wonder how David Shor feels about Tuesday’s results. I wonder how the Democratic donors who gave hundreds of millions of dollars in hopes of winning Senate and Congressional races feel.
As I was finishing up today’s newsletter, I reader of my TAC blog sent over this story from Nature, the leading science journal, reporting election results. Why on earth is a scientific journal commenting on the American presidential election? The headline and subhed explain it all:
Said the reader, “These people are are incapable of seeing how much damage they are doing themselves. So much for objectivity.”
Even scientists confuse what is “correct” with what is “true.” And they will be the last ones to know it.