This is not so much a workshop as a comment, comparing different forms of false statements.
There are a few ethically acceptable reasons for telling someone something we know is false. Sometimes the truth can hurt someone more than a lie. We call those “little white lies”. We need to be very careful in using this because it means we are making a decision for another person without being sure it is what they want or that it is what is best for them. Another is when we are under duress. For example, it is fine to lie about your phone number to get someone who is a potential threat to leave you alone.
Otherwise, we should generally tell the truth. It does harm to others and probably ourselves in the long run, if we do not.
There are many reasons why people do not. We need to recognise them, both to detect them in others and to avoid them in ourselves.
Straight-out lies are those where the person uttering them knows perfectly well that their statement is false and intends the other party to believe them. They try not to be found out, so attempt to be consistent in repeating them, at least to their intended audience; there may be another audience to whom they tell the truth.
Bullshit has become more common recently, famously exemplified by Donald Trump and discussed at length in the book On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt where he explains the distinction between lies and bullshit more clearly and expands in a more detailed fashion. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as
To talk nonsense to (someone) in an attempt to deceive them
The bullshitter does not even consider the truth or falsity of their utterances. They may even contradict themselves within the same sentence. They are usually very easy to fact check, because the bullshitter does not care and expects that their audience does not care either. For example, Donald Trump:
We got 306 [electoral college votes] because people came out and voted like they’ve never seen before so that’s the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan
In fact, he got 304 votes and George H. W. Bush won with 426 electoral votes in 1988. His only purpose was to get more cheers from his willing audience. In this case, there was no further direct consequence to the bullshit, but continued disregard from the norm of telling the truth soon makes all discourse impossible and overwhelms any possibility of checking facts when every clause in every sentence is suspect.
Doublethink is a concept created by George Orwell, in his book 1984:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.
We never see anyone admit to this, so we cannot be sure whether people like Donald Trump who was able to contradict himself within the same speech are actually conscious of this and are deliberately misleading us, or whether their stream of consciousness doesn’t connect with anything like internal fact-checking. However, we frequently do this to ourselves, subconsciously.
We are taught many simple things beginning as soon as we start to acquire language. Some “facts” are absorbed along with learning our language: we absorb values along with them.
For example, in many countries, we are taught that patriotism is a virtue, that our country in somehow the best in the world. Not only did our parents learn that, but in some countries, schools are required to induce patriotism with ceremonies such as pledges of allegiance and saluting flags.
Yet when we realise that other people in other countries have learnt the same thing and even that various rankings of attributes such as how democratic various countries are, or how much inequality they have, or the quality of their health care, do not all rank our country as number one, we may well realise that our country cannot possibly be the best in the world. If we think about all this, we may even realise that the very concept is meaningless because what is best for one person will not be for others. A white, middle-class, male home-owner will find that things are fairly good for him, where a Black working-class woman in a small apartment and struggling to pay rent and put food on the table will have a very different perspective.
Yet even though it is so patently false, people will get very angry when people criticise their country or even “disrespect” a trivial symbol such as a flag or kneel when its special song is sung. They have internalised the propaganda so much that they cannot bear to have it questioned. This is an example that is clearly and frequently demonstrated in public, but it shows how ideas with no grounds in evidence can be well-rooted in our minds, even when they contradict other, well-grounded, ideas that we hold. It takes a lot of hard work to eradicate them. Doublethink is very real.
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