MY VIEW: Why do people believe things that are not true?

By Reverend Edmund Robinson

Published Jan 24, 2021 

If we’re lucky, this nation may get through the transition without further violence or loss of life. Let’s imagine Donald Trump flew out of town Jan. 20 and will go off to lick his wounds, finally out of the public eye. Let’s imagine that the Senate voted (retroactively)  to bar him from any future office of “honor or profit” under the U.S. government. Let’s go even further and dream that the government finds an unused island in the Caribbean and deposits him there like Napolean in Elba. Would the country then be finally rid of Donald Trump?

It is obvious that the answer is “no,” and the biggest reason is that 74 million people voted for him in November and a majority of those people sincerely still believe that he won the election. What are we going to do with those people?

I’m not talking about the ones who overran the Capitol, the members of Congress who voted against certifying the election results and the enablers who egged them on, including Trump. These people all have actions to answer for, actions that have seriously undermined the peaceful transfer of power, which was the hallmark of our democracy.

No, I’m talking about the ones who haven’t done anything except cast a ballot but who still have faith that the president they support was telling the truth when he said the election was stolen from him. If the First Amendment means anything, it is that no government can tell you what to believe.

There is something in the human brain called confirmation bias. The mind tends to interpret new evidence as confirmation of existing belief. We all have this. We seek social sets that will confirm our beliefs as true.

Someone posted a cartoon on social media recently which had two booths set up next to each other, with a sign above each one advertising what was being dispensed. One booth was labeled “comforting lies,” and the other was labeled “unpleasant truths.” The first booth had a line of people stretching outside the frame to get their “comforting lies,” but there was no one coming to the booth labeled “unpleasant truths.” As if to drive the point home, the moral of the cartoon was etched on the wall behind the booths.

"Most people don’t really want the truth. They just want assurances that what they already believe is the truth.”

As New York Times pundit Jamele Bouie recently pointed out, false Republican claims of election fraud are not new. At the state and national levels, Republican strategists have realized since 2000 that the demographics of the electorate are increasingly favoring Democrats, and they have been active in trying to disenfranchise as many of the new voters as possible. This effort was greatly facilitated when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. The cry of “election fraud” has been heard in statehouses and city halls as a justification for more onerous voting qualification, even though there is very little evidence that there is any election fraud.

But these latest wolf-warnings surpassed any prior lies of this century. Nothing illustrates this better than Georgia, where the Trump campaign calculated that almost five thousand dead people voted, and the Secretary of State’s office, after an extensive investigation, determined that the actual number of dead people who had cast ballots was two. Not 200, not 2,000, but two.

Trump himself may be on the island of Elba, or fighting legal cases, but he will not be gone from the scene entirely. There are too many people who have crawled out on the credibility limb with him in the last four years. They need Trump, or else their whole lives will no longer make sense. We need to find ways to talk the people he has lured out on that limb back to the common ground, the real earth we all share. Our future as a species depends on this.

Rev. Edmund Robinson is a Unitarian Universalist minister who lives in Brewster.