Mundus vult decipit was the motto of Manuel of Poictesme in James Branch Cabell’s Figures of Earth. It reflects that Cabell’s heroes are frequently liars and con artists, and Cabell’s general cynicism about everything. But it’s also got an element of truth to it.
In its ugliest form, we have people embracing patriarchy and racism. As I’ve written before, patriarchy makes people stupid. It’s a lie that tells men they’re entitled to have a woman provide them with sex and clean up after them. The same appealing (to some people) lie ripples through society in other ways. Shitbag misogynists such as preacher John Piper insist women’s submission is justified because her man will protect her; even if she can protect herself, he should do it. And if the moment he need to protect her never comes? Well, he was willing to do it, so her life of submission and housekeeping, day in and day out, is completely justified. And if the husband, instead of protecting her, is abusive, Piper is very concerned … that she not defy her husband by calling the cops unless the church gives her permission.
Then there’s Joel Webbon, hatemongering misogynist racist preacher who claimed once that MLK and the major anti-slavery abolitionists are burning in hell. He offers no evidence for this — there is none — but for people who want to believe in white supremacy, that might be comforting. More generally we have the idea there is a divinely ordained hierarchy and God has assigned us our place in it . Regardless of whether you earn a place on merit, “He made them high and lowly” tells you you still deserve it. That’s very comforting to people with privilege or unearned advantages: questioning them is questioning God!
Then there’s the ongoing anti-vax movement. I’ve seen occasional interviews where the parent of an autistic kid says they support the Toddler and RKF Jr. because the medical establishment refused to accept the kid’s mental state was caused by vaccines. Well, that’s because it wasn’t. There’s no link, no connection. But the parent wants to believe there’s a simple explanation and so they swallow the first one offered. And as I noted a week ago, so has the Toddler.
Or consider the endless claims that forcing women into tradwife homes isn’t sexist: It’s what women secretly crave. Which is the tip of a whole iceberg of lies: “We’re supposed to buy that the woman who makes chewing gum from scratch while her husband cosplays as James Dean wasn’t trying to capitalize on the tradwife trend? That Miller throwing hot water on his wife was just “horseplay”? That a desperate mother who called ER after ER and saw doctor after doctor was planning on killing her children? Really?
For decades, American mothers have been expected to eat lies with a smile—swallowing any anger and disappointment, and surviving on platitudes about our job being the most important in the world. (So important that we don’t need pesky paid parental leave, affordable child care, or the equitable division of domestic labor.) Still, for a minute there, it seemed like conservatives might just get the cultural shift they wanted: between the backlash to “girlboss feminism,” the rise of MAHA moms, and the Covid-era exodus of women from the workforce—the tradwife movement was being carefully positioned as something American moms might just want.”
Then you have Katie Souza, ex-con and former meth distributor, who’s reinvented herself as a preacher exposing the covert alien conspiracy to harvest women’s eggs and make alien hybrids. Plus “she said that she had to break a family curse connected to Adolf Hitler’s attempt to harness the power of a Satanic altar.” As Fred Clark says at the link there’s not an atom of evidence for any of this but plenty of people are apparently willing to believe her — after all, it’s such a cool story. The same, I think is true of fake Satanist Mike Warnke. It’s not just that much of his life story was obvious bullshit (the Freedom Riders were a Kennedy administration thing so he couldn’t have been one when at college in the late 1960s) but if, as he claimed, he’d participated in Satanic human sacrifices, he’s an accessory to murder. I’m pretty sure if his conservative Christian audiences believed him they’d have called the cops — but they told themselves they did.
Which shows why this stuff isn’t merely laughable: during the 1980s Satanic panic, prosecutors cited Warnke’s stories as proof that Satanic cults could indeed be sacrificing children. They weren’t. A number of people went to jail based on the lie, though. The Qanon nonsense follows the same path. Only it’s not just about the cool story, it’s about the fantasy that if Democrats are pedophiles, Republicans are heroes for fighting them.
There are multiple reasons people fall for nonsense. There are multiple reasons people spread them: fame, political advantage, money (and in the current political environment add one more: to keep President Crybaby happy). Underpinning much of this is one fundamental defense against reality: “We just have different facts” or the like. We do not, however, have different facts. While there are many cases where we might debate over the facts or how to interpret them, the examples I’m listing here are not among them. There is no vast network of Satanic ritual abuse, there are no aliens creating hybrids, vaccines work, and nothing justifies a hierarchy that ranks members of one race or gender or ethnicity above others.
In the words of George Orwell, “”The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” And for some people, not even that will work.
