: Sometimes they are just lying
Many people take pride in being skeptical but their skepticism is actually just a skepticism toward ideas they already disagree with. The skepticism is only skin deep. If you tell them what they want to hear, they won’t ask the hard questions.
I see this at work, where the important decision making business types are often asked to sit through a marketing pitch. The pitch could be for a product, or a consulting service, or whatever. What determines a successful pitch is not the quality of the product, but rather whether it speaks to the decision maker’s need.
After hearing such a pitch, the decision maker will often put on a show of skepticism: “I’m not convinced this is going to solve our problem.” Or, in the successful case: “This sounds like exactly the tool we need.” What I never hear is a discussion of whether the product actually works.
It works because they said it works. They showed us a graph of the number going up. They showed us screenshots. You can’t fake that. And even if you could, it would be False Advertising, and who would be so foolish as to do that? Some sort of mental block refuses to acknowledge the possibility that the marketing representative was just lying.
I see this in politics, too. The obvious case is when people share memes with fake or out-of-context quotes from the other side—a clear case of disinformation. Less brazen, but still concerning cases arise when people nod along to an argument that supports their opinion on a particular issue without considering the ramifications of the argument for other issues—you know, ethical inconsistency.
People love to link to that one philosophy article arguing, for the sake of argument, that abortion could be ethically permissible even if we grant a fetus is a person—never mind that the article itself disclaims that it is just a thought experiment, and acknowledges that the argument does not cover many of the forms of abortion (e.g. late term) that supporters of abortion rights want to protect. For most progressives, basing your support for abortion on this article is a tactical and ethical error. All the more so given the availability of so many better arguments for choice.
(Those who misinterpret the paragraph above as an argument against abortion rights will be banished to the local elementary school to learn how to read again.)
Sometimes I wonder if I am crazy for caring so much about principles. It bugs me a lot when we don’t agree on the “why” behind a particular rule or decision. If I were more of a pragmatist, then I would recognize the utility of forming a coalition with those whose interests align with mine even as we differ on fundamentals. But I am neither a politician nor a corporate shark (yet!). I’m just a dude on the toilet trying to figure it all out, you know?