Truth-Seekers versus Lie-Seekers

Eric Zuesse

Whereas truth-seekers apply the epistemology that’s known as science in order to understand how the world really works, lie-seekers apply the epistemology that’s known as faith in order to ‘find’ that it works in the way that the particular lie-seeker already believes that it works.

To understand is not merely to find, but to learn the larger system in which any given finding functions: it’s to know about more than just a gear, but instead about the machine of which it’s a part, and (at the highest level of science) why that machine was designed the way it is. No one can know why it works who doesn’t know how it works.

Lie-seekers have the advantage that they are members of a club: whichever individuals are committed to the same beliefs that they themselves are. (For examples: Democrats are committed to the belief that Joe Biden and Barack Obama are decent people, and Republicans are committed to the belief that Donald Trump and George W. Bush are decent people. By contrast, a scientist — if at all authentic as being such — isn’t committed to any belief, but only to the empirical evidence; but they can disagree strongly on how to interpret the empirical evidence, and so scientists disagree vigorously with one-another about the deepest questions at the theoretical frontiers within their field. They have no clubs in the sense of beliefs.)

On 17 March 2014, I headlined “Why Do Conservatives Soak Up Lies?” and wrote:

The evidence that conservatives crave lies is abundant.

Conservatives loved George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s lies about “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction” — loved them so much, that the researchers who wrote “‘There Must Be a Reason’: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification” surveyed 49 conservative Republicans, during October 2004, who admitted that they still believed Saddam Hussein had caused the 9/11 (2001) attacks, and these researchers found that 48 of those 49 extreme conservatives were entirely impervious to the overwhelming factual evidence that was provided to them by the presenters contradicting this false belief they held. Then, a separate study showed that when Republicans were offered the official 2004 Duelfer report that had concluded Iraq hadn’t possessed any weapons of mass destruction for years before the United States invaded it in 2003, the percentage of Republicans who believed that Iraq did have WMD immediately prior to the invasion shot up, instead of going down (as, of course, would have happened if these people had been rational). Even all of the exposés that had already been published about Bush’s faked WMD “proofs” didn’t persuade Republican voters that they’d simply been deceived by the people they trusted and supported. They didn’t resent it at all; they just asked for more, from those same discredited liars.

Conservatives also loved Sarah Palin’s and Chuck Grassley’s lies about “Obama’s death panels” — loved these lies so much, that “politically knowledgeable Palin supporters” actually increased their belief in the death panels, after being provided proof that it was a lie.

These believers in death panels were sometimes called “deathers.” But there was also a “birther” lie, from Rupert Murdoch and others, which was popular among conservatives. On 15 February 2011, Public Policy Polling released their survey of likely Republican U.S. Presidential Primary voters for 2012. Headlining, “Huckabee Tops GOP Field; 51% Are Birthers,” this report about lie-lovers said that, “A 51% majority of national GOP primary voters think President Obama was not born in the U.S. 28% know that he was.” Murdoch’s Fox “News” and talk-radio had nourished fantasy, and this was one result of that feeding-of-lies. But Murdoch’s own The Australian, on the opposite side of the planet (which was safely distant from Murdoch’s propaganda-factory inside the U.S.), headlined about this poll, “Republicans Refuse to Accept Barack Obama Was Born in US,” and stated forthrightly something that Murdoch’s minions in the U.S. never would or could: “Crazy is a word being used increasingly to describe a large and growing proportion of American conservatives who refuse to believe that President Obama was born in the United States.” Those “crazy” people were Murdoch’s own U.S. audience — an audience of lie-lovers. …

However, liberals are just as much dedicated to their club’s lies. For example, take the war in Ukraine, which was created by Barack Obama, whom America’s liberals think to be a decent man, if not even one of America’s finest recent Presidents:

Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled goverment an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said; but Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022 in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear strike.

However, even after at least $360 billion in support to Ukraine’s war against Russia after Russia’s invasion, from the U.S. and its colonies and their IMF, Ukraine’s prospects of winning against Russia have been declining not increasing throughout the course of the war and are now close to nil.

Furthermore, whether a given person is a conservative or instead a liberal is largely a reflection of that person’s view about economic inequality. Liberals think it’s a problem that ought to be fixed, whereas conservatives think it’s an essential part of the solution to the problem and therefore needs to be unchanged or even made more extreme than it already is. A 2021 study, “Education and Attitudes toward Redistribution in the United States”, found that the higher a person’s education is, the more conservative that person becomes — the more opposed to wealth-redistribution he or she is. The data sugest that because the more-educated people tend to be wealthier, and because most people are psychopaths (their main actual motivation is their own self-interest, not bringing about a better world — not producing a more just world), richer people tend to be Republicans, whereas poorer persons tend to be Democrats.

So: a person’s circumstances tend to determine which club that person belongs to. The Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee both are clubs, and they both pretend to represent their voters, but actually they do not and never have. They represent the mega-donors who fund it. The billionaires who fund the Republican Party put up candidates who pretend to represent the self-interest of their voters, whereas the billionaires who fund the Democratic Party put up candidates who pretend to represent the nation’s interest.

By contrast, a scientist has no club to belong to, because loyalty to any club is alien to science, which is instead ONLY loyalty to truth itself. People whose only loyalty is to truth itself, tend to become whistleblowers, and the people in power haven’t designed their system to reward, but instead to punish, them. This is a scientific, empirically based, finding, but lie-lovers refuse to know it. And that makes it easy for the super-rich to control the public.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.