Theories or ideas about the world don't fit together and never are integrated. You use whole different language sets for different topics.
I think this is true. You have the likes of Trump destabilising reality by telling bare-faced lies about things people can see with their own eyes.
And so much information that it’s hard to make sense of it, particularly when it’s available without nuance, in the way, for example, the media reports science.
And most people, I think, are so busy with their own lives, they’re not interested in parsing ambiguity or analysing competing narratives to uncover something more complex. On social media they want to seem kind and aware and not have to engage too deeply.
There are also deeply embedded lies which have been told so often we believe them - even if they’re entirely fictitious. Having to constantly check what you think you know, against reality and falling down a rabbit hole of complexities is exhausting.
We’re trained for five second sound bites, click bait headlines and assertions of absolute certainty from authorities.
What happens then is that we start to believe our own memes and slogans and then translating them directly into policy.
Here’s an example. The slogan, “A dog is for life, not just for Christmas”, came into being as a fundraising slogan for the Dog’s Trust some 30 years ago. It was coined one night over a glass of wine.
There was no research behind its assumption that puppies adopted at Christmas would be back at the pound in February when the novelty wore off. Subsequent research in fact shows that this doesn’t happen. But shelter policy decisions, not only in the UK, but the US and Australia, prevented pet adoptions at Christmas for decades. People still trot it out because it feeds into their own dark assumptions about other people and because people with authority are saying it.
Once an idea, however false, is embedded in public consciousness and policy, attempting to change it, even with good evidence, causes outrage. There’s an awful lot of powerful government legislation based on nothing but supposition it’s something someone thought was a good idea on a Friday afternoon.
So if TWAW is repeated enough times and people start to believe it, and government policy supports the idea, that false narrative creates its own reality. We have to keep standing up for reality, even if we feel like we’re saying the same things over and over.