If myths do more for social progress than facts — then why worry?
Well aside from “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” or blanket amnesty that is and is not lawful for a president to grant, there is a special category of progressive mythology. Or rather a particular cast of “truth tellers,” victims, supposed whistle blowers, and popular liberal icons who spin tales for a supposedly higher good, on the premise that untruth for a cause makes it sort of true.
From the details of Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir, to Tawana Brawley’s supposed rape, to the O. J. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” myth, to the open-and-shut case of the hate-crime crucifixion of Matthew Shepard by savage homophobes, to Dan Rather’s fake but accurate National Guard memo, to the Duke lacrosse team’s supposed racist raping, to Barack Obama’s autobiographic interludes with his girlfriend, to Scott Beauchamp’s “true” stories of American military atrocities in Iraq, to Lena Dunham’s purported right-wing sexual assaulter at Oberlin College (home of the 2013 epidemic of pseudo-racist graffiti), to the pack of University of Virginia fraternity rapists on the loose, to “Hands up, don’t shoot,” we have come to appreciate that facts and truth are not that important, if myths can better serve social progress or the careers of those on the correct side of history.
The new generation of progressive mythmaking has taken up where prior generations left off. In the old progressive mythology, Alger Hiss never passed on U.S. secrets. Instead, he was a tortured idealist, intent on preventing the descent of America into dangerous know-nothing McCarthyism. The Rosenbergs really did not spy for the Soviet Union — or if they did, it was to help a wartime ally with a similar anti-fascist agenda. JFK and RFK were gunned down by right-wing conspirators, fueled by a larger culture of reactionary hatred. Rigoberta Menchú wrote her own factual autobiography — or at least wanted to.
Why is there this overarching need to fabricate iconic race, class, gender, and political victims when Western capitalist society supposedly should offer enough pathologies without having to invent any? Many reasons come to mind.
PSYCHODRAMA
One, 21st-century America is not quite the racial cauldron of the 1960s. It is not the 1930s Depression-era world of Steinbeck. And it is not the 1950s straitjacket of housewives all but jailed in tiny suburban boxes. In 2014, the enemy is too much food, not too little, as obesity, not malnutrition and a dearth of calories, is the far more deadly killer of the underclass. More women now graduate from college than do men. Looting an Apple Store or stealing Air Jordans is more common during rioting than carrying off sacks of rice and beans from Costco.
Having an Hispanic last name or being half-African-American is valuable enough in terms of college admission for a middle-class suburbanite to outweigh the dangers of institutionalized racism. Mayor de Blasio’s son, as an African-American male youth, is, in statistical terms, 30 times more likely to die at the hands of an African-American male youth than at the hands of a trigger-happy racist law-enforcement officer. In terms of homicide rates, whites usually murder other whites, as blacks murder other blacks. But in the latter case, 13 percent of the population accounts for over 50 percent of both U.S. murder victims and murder offenders.
A so-called Obamaphone has more computing and entertainment power than the billionaire’s laptop of 20 years ago. In such a diverse, wealthy, and leisured society, it is harder now to find Oliver Twists, Joads, and Nat Turners. With material and social advancement, however, comes not greater appreciation of positive progress, but even more anger at its perceived slow pace, in the march from the desire for equality of opportunity to the demand for government-sanctioned equality of outcome. To paraphrase Tocqueville, most would prefer to be equal and unfree than to be free and unequal. In such a landscape, the perception of relative inequality is a far greater catalyst for anger than the former reality of abject poverty. In other words, the victim status of the past is harder to obtain and thus requires far more creative and fictive methods. What does not exist with enough frequency can at least be invented.
PAINLESS MENDACITY
Two, in the most reductionist sense, there is no downside to lying, if the lie is considered useful for a noble liberal cause. It was the Duke lacrosse players whose lives were ruined, not the professors who wrote public letters condemning them as likely racist rapists. We should expect that if there is something like a Duke baseball scandal at some future date, the same professors would write the same false indictments for the same reasons as they did in the lacrosse case — because there is no liability in weaving a particular sort of tale.
Al Sharpton did not have his business burned down in Ferguson, so why should he worry that he simply turns myths into catalysts for violence? I doubt whether the president of the University of Virginia will be censured for all but equating campus fraternities with endemic rape. It is not as if she said something of the sort that cost Larry Summers his job.
Lena Dunham will probably not be sued, or at least sued in any manner that would deter her from future feminist mythographies. Indeed, she could easily write a sequel at 40 with the same sort of made-up stereotyped conservative villains. Who is going to indict Dorian Johnson for offering false testimony about the death of Michael Brown, or dare tell the Black Caucus that their “Hands up, don’t shoot” theatrics were based on lies? Massaging helpful facts pays; demanding proof for fantasies does not. We live in an age where plagiarism — ask Fareed Zakaria or Doris Kearns Goodwin — is of two sorts: the traditional deliberate theft of someone else’s work for one’s own aggrandizement, and the “problematic” sort, when progressives overwhelmed with data as they strive to give voice to the liberal cause make an inadvertent slip.
WHOSE “TRUTH”?
Three, postmodernism, the bastard child of modernism, attacks the entire idea of objective truth. We supposedly live in a relativist world cloaked by the lie of objective truth. Facts are merely the authoritative narratives of the powerful, who craft them to protect their own privilege. An establishment rigs up “rules of evidence,” and in that way declares its own stories “true” because they serve the larger power purposes of the elite. We should not necessarily be bound by forensic evidence or videos, nor should we check sources or ask the accused their version of the story or check footnotes — or much of anything else other than ascertaining the degree of privilege associated with any particular narrative.
What does it matter if there were not really identifiable University of Virginia fraternity rapists, as Rolling Stone swore? Does anyone doubt that fraternities have treated women poorly in the past? That is the real “truth,” which merely needs a particular “vehicle” to give it currency. Reactionaries call such narratives “fake,” but they are in fact “accurate” in suggesting scenarios of oppression that can in fact happen.
So “truth” is what is deemed socially useful. After the Rolling Stone essay, perhaps frat boys might not be so cavalier about their sexism in the future. The fact that Dan Rather fell for a fake memo is immaterial. If his purpose was to get a regressive like George W. Bush out of the White House, then the means necessary to do that are irrelevant. Maybe Michael Brown did not have his hands up in a gesture of surrender, or then again maybe he did. But who is to rule out that he could have had them up and that the cause of young black males can benefit from assuming that he did? Grand juries worry about irrelevancies like whether bullets hit Brown from the front or the back or whether a particular store owner caught him on tape supposedly stealing; the people, in contrast, deal with the greater “truth” that there are millions of Michael Browns who are victimized by a racist white police architecture.
USEFUL DISTRACTIONS
Four, liberal lies are cheap. They by intent turn attention to easy icons rather than the more difficult and complex paradoxes of the human condition that defy easy sloganeering or cookie-cutter big-government solutions. By iconizing Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin, the black political elite avoids the intractable problem of the violent death of over 6,000 black youths per year, the vast majority killed by other blacks. Blaming stereotyped white racist cops for less than 200 deaths per year serves as an exculpatory salve for not having a clue how to stop the near-genocidal shooting of inner-city young black males. Rich white kids march and scream at police barricades about law enforcement’s supposed racism, but they do not march into the inner city to protest the mass killings of young blacks, or for that matter go into the inner city much at all. What could they do or say, within their own political world views, to help prevent the epidemic of violent death unleashed on young black males?
Al Sharpton can get rich shaking down the establishment with the always implied message that the alternative to his own de facto protection racket is burning stores in Ferguson. Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan have no clue how to restore the black family, create an urban entrepreneurial class, or reduce black illegitimacy and crime rates to the levels of other minority groups. In exasperation, it is simply far easier — and more lucrative — to scream about an impending race war or suggest the grand jury is little more than a Jim Crow–era lynch mob.
The same goes for members of the Obama administration. Eric Holder apparently surmises that if he goes after a local police department, he does not have to investigate the conditions under which Michael Brown thinks he has a right to strongarm a store, slug a policeman, or walk down the center of a highway under the influence. If Holder went to St. Louis to investigate a spate of hate crimes against Bosnian immigrants, or to learn why youths of color are far more likely to commit than to suffer from interracial crime, he would face existential challenges. Not so if he flies in, cites police racism, and flies out. That gesture becomes penance for an impotence in dealing with the foundational causes of the black underclass — from inordinately high rates of unemployment and incarceration to dismally low rates of graduation and legitimacy.
For these reasons and more, either liberal mythography is not seen as lying, or it is at least more advantageous and more lucrative than the truth. And so we will see more of it.
Thank you Professor Hanson,
If I was born with a Natural Law that no one can aggress upon my spirit, soul, mind, body, property or finances… then Progressives have upended this idea, since if I or you or we are in the wrong place at the wrong time and Progressive Thought Controllers find our circumstance useful, despite our innocence and adherence to Natural Law (i.e. we fought back against hooligans and didn’t die), then we shall be branded, we shall be charged in criminal court for political purposes, and our finances and futures shall be ruined.
Why? Because lies are expensive to project into a false-reality-field. And BIGGER lies are needed to reinforce greater lies into a LARGER false-reality-field. The bigger and longer the lies goes on, the worse it gets.
This is a clear and obvious false-right of the Progressive Thought Controllers, to choose what lies to promulgate. How can we strip them of this evil right they have taken? Perhaps tar? Perhaps feathers?
Progressives are doing great violence against the truth. But truth knows how to fight back. Truth is a winner, and it is economic. It can also be fast, though normally it is known over lengths of time.
But truth is a winner. That is what the Progressives are so scared about, that truth will be known. And that Progressives shall be known as sad Troglodytes, who commit heinous crimes against themselves and humanity… because they hate truth and love lies.
Want truth? Take a post sunset stroll through an urban neighborhood personally pigmented in a shade not your own. Without a camera crew.
One of the first lessons to keep in mind that conservative mythology also has issues, but we won’t go into those. Nor the mythologies spawned by other ideologies such as the communist or fascist or various religious ideologies.
For a passing grade in this course, distinguish between mythology, theory, ideology, world view, creed, hypothesis, principle, and lie.
For extra credit, choose one “mythology,” describe how it distorts modern life, and state what you think needs to be done to combat it.
Saying “It’s hopeless” is a waste of everybody’s time.
I don’t think I could pass your course Ace. I see no difference in real life whether someone bases his crusade of choice on the Bible, a manifesto, a philosopher, or his favorite rock star. I only know he
oops, I only know he wants me to change to accommodate him.
A traditionally devote acquaintance said in a very zealous manner that he was convinced of the guilt of UVA frats because “where there is smoke, there is fire.”
I said nothing because I knew I was speaking to a slave. The Progressive masters contradict fact and logic and tell people what they say is the truth. So, it is logical for the slave, in order to show his subservience, to publicly proclaim that same kind of logic.
Progressive have brained washed and enslaved the general public, without the use of torture or mind altering drugs, through a convincing and utterly authentic display of religious zeal in almost their every public utterance.
They ignore the fact that the author sought out universities without smoke nor fire and tried to make it so.
No myths about it. Progressivism= Energy Serfdom, Universal Poverty and National Discontent.
Free Enterprise= Liberty, Freedom and Prosperity.
And where does this all lead? The answer is given by Theodore Dalrymple’s “Life at the Bottom.” The British lowest class have food, shelter, and entertainment, guaranteed. Because of the breakdown of law and order, and schools finding it politically incorrect actually to teach (this occasioned by bien-pensant liberals further up the food chain), the poorest live with a high level of violence, and little chance of escape. Dalrymple is clear that this is a new situation; his father came from a slum, and got out because the schools still functioned; and Orwell’s account of life at the bottom is not so bleak as Dalrymple’s.
Mr. D’Agostino, one of the first lessons is that a lie in one city does not cancel out a lie in another city. Try to stick to the point, rather than drag it off into the ditch for a proper beating. You’ll get more out of it and it will be less irritating to other posters.
The masses are being distracted by the things of the mind—- illusions are pleasurable. Revealing the truth of a dying world order must be postponed at all costs– there are billions and trillions more to siphon off the organism. From the first financial upheaval in 2008, World debt has climbed from 70 to 100 trillion— the spinning top of globalized free trade is wobbling, unbalanced. Find a lifeboat before the other 99 percent realize they need one as well, the problems facing the globe are unsolvable. The future is mitigating the damage and triage. And if history is a guide— War. { hands up brain-dead sheep }.
I heard a brief interview on NPR with Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely. She was jaw-droppingly unapologetic about the fact that she made no attempt to get the fraternity’s side of the story. And standards of sound journalistic practice be damned.
One largely unspoken reason for the disfunction of a disproportionately high percentage of black Americans is the degree to which they hit their kids. A tiny bit of research will show you that people who get hit as kids are way more likely to be disfunctional adults and the vast majority of black parents hit their kids. This, coupled with the extremely high percentage of single-parent households, explains a huge percentage of black problems.
re: black people hitting their kids. I can’t speak to the frequency of black people hitting their kids, but the times I’ve seen it seemed absent love (yes, it is possible to dispense corporal punishment lovingly). The most recent was when I halted my car on a residential street to allow passage to a very obese black lady on foot accompanied by her (presumably) her two small daughters and toddler son to cross the street carrying small bags of household trash to the dumpster on the other side of the street. On the way across the street, otherwise bare of auto traffic, the toddler boy stumbled, fell, and dropped his sack, spilling trash onto the pavement. The woman instantly reached down and roughly jerked the boy upright while cursing him, and spanked him hard several times. She then mostly dragged him across the street by his arm with him barely keeping on his feet all the way to the dumpster then back across the street, cursing him all the way.
Where to start with the many degrees of awfulness I witnessed? At a very young age, possibly well before he can remember when he gets older, he’s already learned the risks of trying to be helpful, the instant white hot anger and profanity of a black woman, the lack of justice and understanding for an ordinary mistake mostly not his own fault, public humiliation and scorn, and lack of gratitude for trying to be a help, and how levels of retribution are wildly out of proportion to errors and failings. How many more such experiences, in addition to those he may already have experienced, will he have as he grows up? And what will their cumulative effect be upon his psyche? I still despair when I think of what I saw that day.
And the trash stayed spilled on the street.
thanks for this essay. lies are so corrosive to human society that it is very difficult to overdo calling them—and liars—out. i’m encouraged that you do.
The truth of what happened in the Michael Brown incident is out but no one cares about the truth. People make up stories of why the truth is not the truth. We are living in 1984 times now. One cannot say what we believe now or why we may disrespect some aspects of our accepted cultural elements. Acceptance of gay sexuality, going green to save the earth when most of the world decimates it regularly in their normal course of living (Asia), paying people who do not work but are capable of working. When the truth does not matter, we are in a sad place. It must be what most Americans want or we would not have the leaders that we have. We are becoming a third world country where politicians lie, the people know they lie, but are or feel helpless to change anything. We are swiftly losing our ability to take action against what is right and what is wrong. There is no such thing anymore. It is the end of western civilization.
Glad I will be gone to see it all. The young will get what they deserve as they have bought in to all of the glitz.
But during their lifetime, there will be less and less of it available to them. Those in power will have it and they will have become enslaved with high taxes, and a grey existence, just like the story details in the book, 1984.
Dr. Hanson, excellent writing. This article was the voice in my head. I wish I could express it as clearly as you.
When I saw the photo of Michael Brown in graduation garb, I wondered why no one had thought to instead post his baby pictures or photoshop it to appear that he was holding rescue kittens. Perhaps it just didn’t occur to them or it might have been (for now) a step too far in using post modern means for currently and all too dynamically defined social justice ends.
For moral-relativist Progressives, the ends always justify the means. They have end-goals that they believe (subjectively) to be moral and/or fair, and any method (even those that are immoral/unethical) for achieving those ends is acceptable.