Truth and Fact

Lewis Black has this one bit about peas.


He starts out by saying that the reason people can’t trust government is because there’s multiple sets of facts; the Democrats have one set, and the Republicans have another. This makes discussion impossible, as before either side can begin to debate what to do about a problem, they start calling each other liars because their facts don’t match.

He goes on to say that the last bastion of truth is an elementary school cafeteria, where- if you find the menu to say that there will be meatloaf and peas- then you’d better believe you’re going to get meatloaf and fucking peas.

I agree with his sentiment, I think he just got a word wrong. It isn’t that political parties (and increasingly, the people that make up their base) have different facts, its that they have different truths. Small change, big difference. But as we learned from Indiana Jones, archaeology is the search for fact, not truth; and if its truth you’re interested in, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.

If a child has a nightmare and tells me he’s scared because there’s a monster in his closest, he is telling me the truth. But he is (probably) not telling me the facts. The truth is his perception. The fact is the reality of things.

Thus it is with Congress.

When Mitch McConnell tells America that it is a spending problem that is dragging the country down, I have no doubt he is telling me his truth. Sure, he’s influenced by his particular harem of lobbyists and donors, but if he didn’t believe what he says on some level, I think he’d have found a different set of people to fund him- people who hash more naturally with his core ideals. Similarly, when Harry Reid says it’s a revenue problem that we have, he is again telling us his truth. But are they telling us the facts?
Shit no! Facts get people booted out of office. Politicians don’t get elected on facts.

“What about Ron Paul? He speaks facts! You forgot Ron Paul!”

No I didn’t. Ron Paul is consistent in his message, and I would trust him more than most politicians, but I don’t think he has any firmer grasp of the facts than anyone else. Dude wants to abolish how many Departments of the federal government, and has the gall to say nothing bad will come of it? Like nothing bad could come from eliminating national standards set by the Department of Education? No. He speaks his truth, but he does not speak fact.

So why is this the case?

In a hyper-polarized climate such as the one America currently finds itself in, to get noticed, you have to overcome your background noise. This means that people who’re even more absurd than the current stable of frothing-at-the-mouth political zealots will get elevated to a podium from which they can be heard; this is aided by the current process of redistricting, which allows a party to cut a district into an absurd shape (called “Gerrymandering”) which only includes people most likely to vote one way or another. This process eliminates any need to move toward the middle, since each district is overwhelmingly red or blue, and breeds partisanship.

And in that climate, fact is sobering.
If current politics (and all of its “truth”) is a raging kegger, facts are the cops that show up to break up the fun. Why force your electorate, which is engaged and energized and throwing money at you, to stop calling President Obama an anticolonialist Kenyan Muslim antichrist? Why ask your party base to stop demonizing Big Oil/Agra/Pharma as shadowy 99%er hating plutocrats who secretly want to turn America into a brand-name coporatocracy? Putting the brakes on that kind of talk reduces voter enthusiasm, kills donations, and makes the OTHER SIDE more likely to win. And we can’t have that, now can we?

So why am I soap-boxing about this distinction? For a take-away whose brevity is matched only by the preceding paragraphs’ long-windedness: If you want to really be of service to your country in its political endeavors, you have to embrace the typically dry and boring world of facts to establish a common basis from which you can negotiate and compromise with people whose truths are radically different than yours.

(Also because I’m trying to get in the habit of writing more on principle. But whichever explanation makes me seem cooler is the one you can tell your friends about).