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Trust Before Truth: The Greedy and the Gullible [1]

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Date: 2024-06-14  

We live in a time when faith in our institutions, our justice system, and democracy itself can no longer be taken for granted. It seems we can hardly even agree on what is actually true. Unfortunately, this condition is fueled by an array of political and other commercial interests, distributed by media of all types.

A few examples include FOX “news” virtually ignoring any stories that make their favorite Orange guru look bad in any way, especially by being found guilty of 34 felony counts. Or Trump addressing his audiences with literal gibberish. Then there’s Sinclair Media, promoting unfounded stories about America in decline. Sinclair recently went further, utilizing its national network of local affiliates to promote a widely debunked story from the Wall Street Journal about Joe Biden’s mental fitness (all based on a Kevin McCarthy interview). Sinclair made sure the affiliates used almost identical wording in their reporting, falsely portraying the story as independently sourced “local” coverage of a national story. Why? Because viewers tend to trust local news more than national reports. Never mind that the story turned out to be highly misleading, at best.

So it’s not surprising that those who depend on right-wing media for their news coverage come to so many erroneous conclusions about what’s going on in America — conclusions that are most often in complete denial of what is actually happening on the ground. It should be obvious what’s true and what isn’t? But it ultimately depends on whom we trust.

Obviously, we can trust what we ourselves witness first-hand. For instance, when individuals or a group witness an automobile accident, they can be confident that it actually happened. We can trust our own eyes. The same might be said of what we hear with our own ears.

But what if we don’t experience something with our own eyes or our own ears? In order to know about it, and to know it really happened, we must always depend on an intermediary who passes the information on to us. This may be a friend, a celebrity, news media, or just a passer-by. Whenever we are not personally present to the event, someone else must be trusted in order for us to accept the information as truthful. This was true of the events of 9/11. Many people were present where it happened, but everyone else depended on the intermediaries, the news media, to accurately report to the world what happened. Because we trusted the videos that ran repeatedly on all major new and Internet media, the events themselves were never in question.

Often, we can’t see past our own confirmation bias — believing in those sources that validate our pre-existing beliefs about what is true, or certainly should be, in our humble (or not so humble) opinions. This might apply to various “conspiracy” theories about what “really” happened on 9/11. Something was inevitably the truth, but theories (including the official one) differed; and depending upon where one heard about a particular theory, differing versions of “the truth”came into being for different individuals.

Because we must depend on outside sources to determine what is true information, upon which to form our world-views and opinions about matters large and small, we are all vulnerable. We are vulnerable to the values, ethics and motives of those we entrust with telling us the truth. Anyone can tell us anything, be it individuals, groups, social or other media.

Here’s the problem: Most of us don’t go through a conscious process of evaluating the basis by which we put our trust in others. We rely to a great degree upon a combination of confirmation bias and what we deem to be “common sense.” But neither of these necessarily requires critical thinking. Because of that, we have limited capabilities for making good decisions about whom or what is trustworthy.

In a recent opinion piece entitled “The Price America Pays for Ignorant Americans,” the author attempts to explain the make-up of our modern day electorate, and in particular those who seem to be out of touch with reality. He describes a cohort that can generally be thought of as either willfully or unwittingly ignorant, sometimes lazy, and most often, generally uninformed. And they just don’t seem interested in changing that. Getting to the bottom of what’s actually true isn’t easy to begin with, and apparently it’s not worth their time or effort.

This segment of our society represents the low-hanging fruit — the easiest-pickins’ for those politicians, corporations and other special interest groups that tend to gain the most from exploiting what can generally be described as the most gullible of our society. These folks aren’t necessarily stupid (although there is certainly a subset of the gullible that is not just ignorant, but proud of it, even when that is in their own worst interests). But stupid or not, we are all gullible to differing degrees.

The greedy and the gullible.

Years ago, a colleague of mine with a long career in finance told me that in his experience, investors were motivated by only two things, fear and greed. He meant that both emotions would motivate the same people, and mostly around money. But what is also true is that those who are motivated by greed can easily take advantage of those who are motivated by fear.

Greed includes the thirst for power as well as wealth. And fear includes fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of others who do not look like us, fear of those who have more than us, and so on and so forth. Once the greedy identify the fearful in society, it’s easy to speak to their fears in a manner that promises relief. It’s ultimately an emotional pitch, to those qualities in humans that make us vulnerable, that make us gullible. It is the standard playbook that most authoritarians use to speak to the gullible in terms that resonate emotionally.

We’ve all seen it throughout our lifetimes in examples large and small. From snake-oil salesmen of olden times to modern get-rich-quick con artists. From miracle COVID cures that don’t work to miraculous opportunities to get rich alongside the wealthy (for a small fee of course). A small segment of our society is far too eager to hear what the vast majority would consider unfortunate messages, like promises to rid our country of brown-skinned “invaders,” “rapists,” and the like. There are unfulfillable promises to end supposed crime waves, which only exist on FOX news, to fix an economy that’s actually doing much better than in a very long time. When speaking to the fears of the gullible, all that’s necessary is an ability to lie while enlivening fear, reinforced by the support of others willing to join ranks and to do the same. The tools of the trade often include flawed, privately-funded “public opinion” polls, often designed to mislead and scare audiences into believing in a version of reality that is inauthentic, at best. Or total fabrications, at worst.

Back when there was only a small handful of news outlets, back when newsman Walter Cronkite was known “the most trusted man in America,” it was much more difficult to hoodwink a nation with “fake news.” That term came into bloom courtesy of the Internet, and more specifically, social media, unrestrained by the journalistic ethics and values that traditionally equated with trustworthiness. While few of us today would want to be limited to only a handful of news sources, the lack of public faith in our journalistic institutions is at an apex.

AI combined with today’s deep-fake technology is only going to make this problem worse. The greedy have no qualms about misrepresenting factual reality, and ultimately believe that “the end justifies the means.” And the last thing the gullible want to do is to admit the possibility that what they have been led to believe is, in fact, not true.

But keeping up with untruths is no small task. By the time a lie has been exposed, it has often spread virally, and few notice the updates that reveal the lies and put forth the truth. Life moves on too quickly, while the rendering of reality itself is increasingly weaponized by the greedy, ready to make quick work of the gullible. The advent of unregulated artificial intelligence is poised to launch this unfortunate dynamic into hyper-drive, one of the most dangerous risks to our society, going mostly unnoticed among mere mortals..

So what can we do? Who or what can we trust?

There is no simple answer, but perhaps we can start by recognizing what the real problem is. It’s not the gullibles who have been groomed to repeat what they hear from questionable sources, without question. Or even those who are led to hate on command. It’s the greedy — those that would split us into tribes with fear-laden promises of civil war, retribution, racism, and abandonment of the rule of law, as synonyms for “freedom.”

We can recognize that in order to sort through the massive misinformation, disinformation and fake reality being blown into our collective faces every day, our best strategy might be to take seriously the task of determining who is worthy of our trust, who is not, and on what basis to make those distinctions.

When deciding whom to trust:

Do you share their values? How are those values expressed?

Have they proven trustworthy in the past? Or have they been exposed as willing to lie, for any number of reasons?

Do their positions on issues change depending upon who the audience is?

Do they stand to gain from not telling the truth?

Do they have the best interests of the greater good in mind? Or just self-interests?

Do their words and deeds align?

In other words, do they have integrity?

As former U.S. Senator Alan Simpson once observed, “If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.”

It doesn’t even matter what political tribe we might belong to. I’d like to think (perhaps naively so) that we are all capable of recognizing integrity when we see it with our own eyes, and to spot its absence as well. When we are honest, at least with ourselves, the ability to detect integrity is probably the most reliable indicator with which we can accurately identify who and what is worthy of our trust. Once we know that, we can have more confidence in what is true. The discernment of integrity might be our not-so-secret weapon to combat the greedy, and our ultimate strategy to free the gullible among us.

To ignore the opportunity would be to either willingly or unwittingly join the ranks of the gullible, whether we know it or not, whether we want to or not. Without a search for integrity, we can easily become fish in a barrel, awaiting our fate at the hands of the greedy among us. But don’t take my word for it, see for yourself

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