The New Neo

Here’s the description [emphasis mine]:

[From] JFM > “These are educated people who always take the news at face value. I can’t understand this. It drives me crazy.”

When they only see the news from one side, in which so much that we know about is omitted, distorted, or flat out invented, their opinions become understandable.

Not correct, but understandable.

Sadly, rectifying their erroneous impressions is time-consuming and requires background that they just don’t have.
I access probably ten times as much political and social news as most of my Democrat-voting family and friends, since I’m a Poli-Sci addict, and there is no way I can get a long enough hearing from them to convey all that information.

Change stories are interesting: so many are like Neo’s, where the sudden, unexpected, discovery that their news sources have lied about something important motivates an investigation that reveals many, many more lies.

It’s hard to know what that tipping point might be, for any individual.

The other problem is that they really don’t even want to know — literally; a recent group email from my family made that clear, in a rather off-hand fashion.

I won’t disturb their delusions, because there isn’t time in the day.

And even though they are all very nice, moral, generous, kind, productive, hard-working, intelligent, and educated (when that word had meaning), they are totally dependent on the Regime Media for their information.

And they believe the propaganda.

I would say that’s a correct depiction of 95% – perhaps even 100% – of my Democrat family and friends. In addition, some of it is a description of 20th century me – except for the part about not really wanting to know.

Perhaps the “want to know” versus “don’t want to know” dimension is the one that ultimately decides whether a person is open to political change or not. I will add that I believe that, for most of the people I’m talking about here, the “don’t want to know” crowd is usually intellectually curious about other things and open to taking in information. It’s just that politics taps into a much more emotional area of the psyche, in many instances the same one occupied (or not occupied, depending on the person) by religion. And then there’s the added dimension of the high social cost of leaving the fold. It’s huge, and when I went through my change it’s something of which I was naively unaware, which made the change easier for me.

When the media is lying – and lying in unison – and the vast majority of the people a person knows read the same sources and get the same information, an edifice of belief is built up. Much of it is based on distortions, omissions, and lies. But most of the time the person doesn’t know that or even suspect it. Sources on the right have been so demonized – for example, “Faux News” – that it usually precludes watching them. And if someone comes along to challenge the person’s point of view, unless the listener is highly motivated to sit and listen for hours, the challenge can easily dismissed by the listener as error or ignorance on the part of the challenger. That’s because part of the narrative the listener has taken in is that the other side is listening to lies all the time and basing their opinions on lies.

As I’ve described in my change story, there were some special circumstances for me that meant I was able to keep an open mind. I was so naive at the time the process began, post 9/11, that when I started reading many media sources online instead of the few print sources as I’d read before (consisting mostly of the Times, the Boston Globe, and The New Yorker), I was unaware of the political orientation of the authors of my new online sources. I was instead evaluating their logic and veracity in three main ways. The first was whether the authors were making logical points, the second was whether their predictions about future events were mostly accurate, and the third was whether they quoted public figures correctly when I checked against the transcript of a speech or interview. I found that some sources were consistently much better than others at doing those things. And after a year or two of this sort of close reading, I discovered to my surprise – I might even say to my shock – that those more reliable sources were all on the right.

One of the reasons I was able to do this was because I had recently separated from my husband and was very lonely, and therefore had a great deal of time on my hands. I had moved to a new place where I only had a friend or two. My son was now grown up and living several hours away. I was getting my news online for the first time in my life because I didn’t want the hassle of disposing of stacks of old newspapers. And so, without even realizing it, I was also reading conservative sources for the first time in my life, as well as the usual liberal sources I had always read without even thinking they were biased. I discovered that they were.

It’s not that sources on the right were free of bias. It’s just that they fulfilled those three criteria far better than media on the left did. That was really a huge turning point for me.

And then I discovered Thomas Sowell’s books, and that was another watershed. He brought it all together in a framework and provided structure for what I was already noticing and thinking in a far more disorganized way. After that, there was no turning back.

And so here I am.