There’s an old gag I used to try on some of my more gullible friends in times past. Should gullibility ever come up, mention “did you know that the word gullible is not in the dictionary?” The goal, obviously, is to get them to look it up (and its effectiveness as a gag isn’t nearly what it used be in the age of iPhones and Google), and realize they fell for a gag. I do not know how many people actually fell for this bit of silliness, but I do know that it’s more than zero.
The secrets to the gag are timing and an awareness of the target’s gullibility. Catch someone in the right mind set, and he or she might just believe you enough to fall for the trap.
The sturm-und-drang surrounding the House’s passage of the American Health Care Act of 2017 reminded me of this old bit. By many measures (and especially to libertarian and small-government eyes), the bill falls woefully short of the promised repeal of ObamaCare. Some reports indicate that it changes only about 10% of the Affordable Care Act’s provisions, and leaves much of its core structure intact. That reality, however, is washed away in over-the-top hysteria being shared by the press and by liberals on social media.
Instead of a discussion of what the bill does and doesn’t do, there’s been a bombardment of outlandish claims:
Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted, “#AHCA will devastate Americans’ healthcare. Families will go bankrupt. People will die.”
Daily Kos tweeted, “House Republicans vote to sentence millions of Americans to death.”
Slate tweeted, “The GOP’s passage of Trumpcare is one of the cruelest things the party has ever done.”
Senator Chris Murphy tweeted, “House GOP, I hope you slept well last night … you will have the death of thousands on your conscience forever.”
DNC Chairman Tom Perez issued a statement that included, “Trump and Republicans will own every preventable death, every untreated illness, and every bankruptcy that American families will be forced to bear if this bill becomes law and millions lose access to affordable health care. The 24 million who would lose access to health care is not just a number — it represents fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and even newborn babies with heart diseases or cancers that are too costly to treat without affordable insurance.”
And, my Facebook feed is awash in people screaming that Trump just made rape a pre-existing condition.
This is all hysterical nonsense, of course. Reason debunks the rape assertion quite thoroughly, to believe the proclamations of impending mass death would require presuming that ObamaCare had, in its incredibly brief existence, rescued millions from death, and the 24 million figure is just hand-waving by people with an overt agenda.
Just as one does not blame the scorpion for stinging the frog, I do not blame the usual suspects (i.e. liberal news organizations and politicians) for spouting tendentious nonsense. They’re selling a product, and they’re responding to their consumers. The consumers, who swallow this blather whole and unchewed, don’t get the same deference.
Consider what it takes to believe that the Republicans would pass a bill that will kill millions of Americans, make rape a preexisting condition, and institutionalize countless other atrocities as alleged by the muckrakers and pot-stirrers. Consider what someone has to believe about the Right in general, and about Trump in particular, to hear, accept as true, and regurgitate such talking points without a moment’s skepticism. Consider the degree of gullibility, and the roots that create that gullibility, required to believe without fact-checking such hyperbole.
Make no mistake – this isn’t being gullible enough to actually open the dictionary to see if the word “gullible” is indeed in there. It’s being gullible enough not to even bother checking.
Trump has been painted as such a pillar of evil that people are believing anything and everything that someone can concoct about him. A couple months ago, a “dossier” that alleged deep and nefarious ties between Trump and the Russian government was “leaked” and went viral. The original publisher didn’t bother verifying any of it, but went ahead and shared it anyway. Countless people deemed it an AHA! moment, and then, when it was deemed a hoax, continued to repeat and complain about what it alleged. In a demonstration of irony and lack of self-awareness that would be stunning were it not so common nowadays, many of these selfsame people are the first to denounce Trump for lying, exaggerating, peddling “alternative facts,” and screaming “fake news.”
The Trump era has has built upon the Obama era the way the Obama era built upon the GWBush era. Thanks to the explosion of information sources and the eternal realities of human nature (tribalism, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, et al), society and politics have become increasingly polarized, binary and Manichean. The other side is not only always wrong, it’s evil, and because it’s evil, nothing that’s alleged about it raises any red flags. People are quick to believe and repeat the worst possible allegations. Some do because they think it’s how to win political fights, some because they use them to scold others, some simply because they want to.
There’s an old proverb in poker:
If after ten minutes at the poker table you do not know who the patsy is—you are the patsy.
If someone suggests to you that the word “gullible” is not in the dictionary, and enough doubt is planted in your mind to prompt you to look it up (or, worse, you consider the possibility without checking)… guess what? You’re gullible.
If someone suggests that some law does some truly heinous things, and you repeat them without raising an eyebrow or doing some fact-checking (with sources that aren’t all confirmation-bias)… guess what? You are a polezniye duraki, a useful idiot.
Guess what else? No one who’s not already just like you is going to be swayed by your Facebook screeds and Twitter rants.
We live in a time of unprecedented access to and flow of information. Unfortunately, the ease of information flow has enabled unprecedented ease of misinformation and disinformation flow, and, sadly, the latter have blended with human failings to kill off the twin filters of skepticism and common sense that should stand as bulwarks against the outrageous. With so much informational power literally at our fingertips, there’s no excuse for such gullibility as was exhibited in the breathless post-AHCA-vote days, but it happened. And, lest anyone think that we’ve reached peak-OFFS on this topic, just wait until the Senate takes its turn at health care reform.
Just as there is no peak-OFFS, there is no peak-gullibility in the Trump age.
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You are right. The reaction to the Health Care Bill passage is “hysterical nonsense.” But, there is a reason for it. IT WORKS. When the Obamacare legislation was first proposed there was a similar reaction: There would be death panels, the economy would crash, Obama was a Nazi communist to propose this government-takeover of healthcare. The Tea Party was formed partly to oppose it. Republicans spent years demonizing and running against it. And, they got elected.