These surveys provide an important window into just how unmoored perception can be from reality. Some of my favorite types of survey questions ask respondents to describe how they view members of the other political party. You might ask, “How can having an inaccurate view of things like religion and politics have any real impact on society?” Let me give you an example.
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Similarly, we can expect collapse when our worldviews are too often built on a series of small, untested assumptions about the way things work.
If he got lazy and decided not to carefully inspect all the bricks that would form the base of the bridge, eventually those faulty materials would lead to a catastrophic collapse. Imagine a builder was tasked with constructing a new bridge made entirely of bricks. These myths, I’ll call them, are worth really considering, because they form the foundation of our worldviews. These nuggets are considered by pastors, denominational leaders and even people in the pews as true unless proven false. Instead, these are suppositions about the world that people just naturally assume are true because they have never seen any real evidence to the contrary. These haven’t been pushed by hucksters trying to get more views on their videos or more shares for their content. While high-profile conspiracy theories take up a lot of bandwidth on social media and cable news networks, right below those are a menagerie of less outlandish but no less insidious lies about the way American society actually works. The same men and women who taught me those lessons in Sunday school and on church camping trips now try to tell anyone who follows them on social media to ignore the evidence from the scientific community, or courts of law, and instead to believe in random videos they find on YouTube or an article that was copied and pasted on social media with zero attribution or fact-checking. The phrase “All truth is God’s truth” has been deeply embedded into my subconscious. I can’t tell you how many sermons I heard about the boogeyman of moral relativism. I grew up in a conservative evangelical Southern Baptist church that was led by pastors who emphasized to me over and over again that there are objective truths in this world. Observing the devolution of American debate over the past two decades has been especially jarring for me. If we cannot agree on the foundation, there can be no meaningful debate. If we think about the structure of political discourse, facts are the foundation. It’s not an exaggeration to say that when verifiable facts are in dispute, we are at a moment of crisis. Debates about the purpose of life, what is true and what constitutes a good life are worth having, because they focus on what we value, how our life experiences shape our worldview, and what we hope and fear for the future. I like to believe that American discourse used to be focused on high-minded ideas like freedom, morality and the role of government in the lives of its citizens. Huge swaths of the public seem to express no desire to rethink their worldview.
And he’s not alone.Ī growing segment of the population is completely unwilling to even entertain facts that may contradict the way that they think about politics, culture and society.
But no matter how much data, how many graphs, how much evidence I muster, this guy will never believe me. Trying to be data-driven, neutral and objective is my entire career, my life’s purpose, something I’d like to think that I am pretty good at. I sent that graph to him with a note that simply said, “I think that data you are relying on is faulty, and I have more confidence in these results that I’m illustrating here.” The reply I got a few minutes later was direct and demoralizing: “I don’t believe your data.” So I did what I always do in situations like this: I made a graph. They were making a point using statistical evidence that I knew to be false. I got into an argument with someone on social media.
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