Delusion or Lie? Which Is It?

Two prominent and accomplished conservative-leaning news analysts with decades of experience disagree in their assessments of today’s mainstream media. Bernard Goldberg says they are delusional, while Bill O’Reilly says they are lying.
 
Take your pick of the issues. The media, whether print “reporter” or cable news talking head, frequently say things that are not true about our current president, our previous president, the previous president before our previous president, our adventure in covid totalitarianism, and so on ad nauseam.
 
The difference between delusion and lie raises epistemological questions about the nature of these concepts and their referents, and, especially, about their place in the continuum from moral to immoral behavior.
 
Both concepts entail falsehoods or incorrect perceptions. “Lying” usually means the falsehood is intentional or deliberate. Delusion may or may not mean that. Let us take delusion first.
 
In previous posts (1, 2), I have used “delusion” broadly to include false perceptions caused by psychological problems, whether neurotic or psychotic. A young man, for example, who on the same day is fired from his job and jilted by his lover suffers neurotic depression and concludes, “I’ll never find another job or lover.” This is not true, but the young man strongly feels it.
 
Typical psychotic delusions include hearing voices, seeing false images, or concluding things like “I am Jesus.” Psychotic delusion is a belief completely cut off from reality with the subconscious taking over. Neurotic delusion is an exaggerated belief based on an exaggerated emotional reaction to something, but an overall connection to reality still exists.
 
In both neurosis and psychosis, the delusion is fixed and impervious to change. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is “a form of mental derangement,” which makes us think of a certain derangement syndrome in response to our previous and now current president. “Fixed and impervious to change” means the person is motivated by the subconscious and is not aware of the mistaken perception. Such a person is motivated by a defensive habit that says, “I am correct in what I have written or spoken and that content is right, noble, and moral.” Self-reflection—introspection—does not often occur.
 
Honest and healthy people who are simply mistaken, on the other hand, are not “fixed and impervious to change,” because they do change when they realize their mistake or when it is pointed out to them. They are not driven by the subconscious premise that their frail ego depends on always being right, noble, and moral—albeit “moral” in a superficial way, usually steeped in “looking good to others” or just rationalization. Honest and healthy people are committed to facts and truth, which means they are committed to reason and reality, with no major defensive habits or subconscious motivations controlling them.
 
Lying is an easier case to discuss, at least on the surface, as liars are deliberate and intentional. They know that what they are writing or speaking is false. They know the facts but state the opposite.
 
This, however, is the dilemma I have been writing about for some time: how do we judge other people, especially others we do not know but who, working in the public arena, namely the media and politicians, affect our lives. How do we know whether they are lying? Or are delusional?
 
In previous posts, I have drawn the line with the criminal personality who lies, cheats, and steals as a way of life and enjoys getting away with the forbidden. The criminal is clearly immoral and many are attracted to law enforcement, the military, and politics. As Yochelson and Samenow point out, there also exists what they call “non-arrestable” criminals who do not overtly violate laws, but nonetheless enjoy manipulating and cheating relatives, co-workers, and citizens of our country. Are such people delusional or lying?
 
I stand by my earlier conclusion that to judge others who are not criminal personalities, we must know the persons well. Judging people from a distance, meaning not knowing them or knowing them well, is nearly impossible because they, particularly reporters, cable TV talking heads, and politicians, can have so many different motivations.
 
Many who work in business, for example, follow the dictum, “Business is business and ethics is ethics,” which means what we do in business has nothing to do with ethics, thus endorsing such dubious practices as cutting corners and BS-ing. Others just follow the money, meaning they choose to work for the highest bidder. Sales representatives, for example, sometimes cynically say this about an unprincipled co-worker: “He’s just whoring himself for a sale.” It seems this unprincipled motivation of “whoring oneself” is present in many professions, as well as, or especially, in politics.
 
A certain presidential administration in the recent past repeatedly ignored the law—immigration, student loan repayment, covid totalitarianism, and so on ad nauseam—and the media supported the moves. Is that not explicit lying? The problem here is that we are, or should be, attempting to judge individual human beings, not a collective called “the administration” or “the media.” The problem is we do not personally know the individuals in the administration who executed the unlawful orders or the members of the press who promoted the actions.
 
This does not mean that we cannot speak up and yell about the violations of law. If someone steps on my foot while standing in line, I will yell whether the act was intentional or accidental. What about the person who ordered the violations of law? Such a person likely justifies the orders and actions as variations on Plato’s so-called noble lie: “It’s for a good cause and, besides, the law itself is immoral.” Is this not the rationalization of a criminal personality? Maybe, but we still do not know the person.
 
This last, the morality or immorality of law, is a complication in making moral judgments. If the law itself can be demonstrated as immoral, violation of it can be the moral thing to do, hiding Jews from the Nazis, for example, or helping them escape Nazi rule. Or evading the military draft. In the late 1960s, one of my roommates quit school, which at the time meant you were almost immediately drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam. He immediately moved to Canada. I wholeheartedly condoned his actions—and hoped I would not have to make the same decision. (I didn’t have to.)
 
What about an Adolf Hitler and other dictators who often isolate and label a group of people as scapegoats, by saying such things as “Jews are vermin,” then jailing or killing them? Yes, of course, this type of person, for which there is plenty of evidence in writing, speech, and action is a psychopathically criminal personality.
 
Delusional or lying? Both. The defensive habit of compulsively perceiving reality falsely and reporting it as such does not seem terribly different from what is called the bald-faced lie. The behaviors can be plotted along a continuum, from knowing something is false and saying it anyway to saying something is false but believing it to be true, unaware that it is false.* 
 
The delusional neurotic—the young man fired and jilted on the same day—still probably has some vague sense or glimmer that what he is saying is not true but does not know what to do about it and, perhaps, does not care to find out. Liars, on the other hand, clearly know what they are doing.
 
So who is right, Goldberg or O’Reilly? Both are, but lacking personal knowledge of particular players in the media market, how can we know whether any of them are delusional or lying? Presumably, some are delusional, some are lying, and the rest are somewhere in between the two extremes.
 
 
* These two personality types on a continuum are similar to the two continuums I wrote about in a paper on BS’ers and liars. The continuums range, on the one hand, from the BS-er who talks for show (facts don’t matter) to the liar who is concerned about facts to state the opposite and, on the other hand, from the deliberate motivation to BS or lie to a motivation from carelessness, ignorance, or unthought-about habit.

“Don’t Hire College Graduates”

In the early 1970s I worked in the client services department of a mid-town Manhattan firm. I was the only college graduate (in philosophy!). My boss hired a recent business school grad, with a bachelor’s degree, not an MBA.* The guy whined and complained about the “menial tasks” he had to perform and acted like he should be running the company. He quit before he could be fired.

Shortly afterwards, my boss paid me a nice compliment, asking “How can I find more people like you?” I replied, “Don’t hire college graduates.”

I still stand by that advice, though I have to qualify it. In our credentialed world, the college degree is a union card that opens doors and provides opportunities that otherwise would be more difficult, though not impossible, to find without the degree. Many students today—and their parents—already know this as they have become expert at gaming the system.

Learning? Yes, you can get lucky and find a handful of professors who actually teach and can communicate what they know. Most learning, however, after all the thousands of dollars have been spent, must be accomplished on your own, and most likely will occur after you leave the ivory towers. (Companies will spend a lot of dollars training you, regardless of your degree.)

My point about the uncredentialed is that “deplorably” ill-credentialed people can make highly competent and responsible employees. Even in technical fields, non-graduates have been known to know more about, and work harder on, the job than the “well-schooled.”

More generally, “don’t hire college graduates” is metaphor for arrogance-busting of the “well-schooled.” I include here the wealthy (and not so wealthy) bi-coastal elites who despise and denigrate the “deplorables” of middle America’s flyover country (which is not to say that middle American values are found only in the hinterlands and that arrogant elites are found only on the coasts.)

One advocate of middle American values and bias-free news reporting, who was not a Republican conservative, was the late Tim Russert, moderator for sixteen years of NBC’s Meet the Press. Russert was educated with a law degree but not one from any of the “good schools” that the elites cherish. His background was blue collar and he emphasized how valuable that experience was for him.

Not long before his death, Russert was interviewed by former CBS newsman, conservative Bernard Goldberg, who asked him about the significance of that background. Russert replied,

There's no substitute for it. . . . I've worked on garbage trucks. I drove a taxi. I tended bar. I delivered pizzas. I worked with liberals, conservatives, blacks, whites; that's how you grew up in this interesting world, and people were always simply judged in the end on their quality as a person: Did they tell the truth? Did they honor their commitments? Did they show up for work on time?

These are middle American values that apply to both the degreed and non-degreed. “Judge the quality of the person, their commitment to truth-telling, their willingness to honor commitments, and their willingness to show up for work on time.” All of which means working hard and being responsible. College degrees do not shape moral values like these. If anything, in today’s culture, they may erode them.

These values carried over in Russert’s work as a newsman and interviewer. He was a straight shooter who learned the skill from his sanitation worker father. “Always give the other guy the benefit of the doubt,” Russert said his father would say, “but hear him out. Hear him out. And don’t dismiss him and don’t brand him as anything.”

So what did Russert’s more “well-schooled” colleagues say about him (as reported by Russert)? Well, we can imagine the colleagues saying, with appropriate snootiness, Russert attended “middling schools , , , [and] admits to being a practicing Catholic.” And, Russert, with good reason, speculates they probably also say, “If he didn’t go to Harvard, if he’s not Ivy League, how can he be smart?”

Does snootiness go with hard work in a business? Not really. Business is humbling. The goal of a business, in contrast to a government bureaucracy, is to satisfy the customer’s needs and wants. Angry customers? You have to learn how to pacify them.

A memorable episode from my NYC days was a customer barging into the office early in the morning, with smoke coming out of his ears, fuming over an order he had not received when promised. I had not even taken the lid off my cup of coffee! As a bureaucrat, I would probably get away with saying something like “Take a number and wait until I’m ready to talk to you!” Since my job depended on keeping customers happy, I dropped everything to talk to the client, checked on what was going on in our back production room, and made sure that he would get his order promptly.

That is the essence of business and it doesn’t require a college degree. I don’t recall whether I said this to my students, but here is the lesson learned from such experiences: you know how to work in business after you have had to pacify an irate customer. Or rather, make that an irate New Yorker!!

The client was understanding. He was from middle America, though I hasten to add that this was not a blank check for me. I had to deliver the promised service and ensure that such failures would not happen again. A number of my coworkers were also from middle America, which created a family atmosphere, far more enjoyable than being a student (Applying Principles, pp. 52-54). My coworkers from New York also shared most of my middle American values, but they did somewhat remind me of our current president!

My hiring advice to employers? Judge the person, not the credentials.


* The NY Times help wanted ads in the early ‘70s listed column after column of jobs headlined “Col Grad,” meaning employers were looking for college graduates regardless of major. By the late ‘70s this had changed to “MBA.” My liberal-arts-major colleagues and I realized we probably should get a new credential to join the MBA guild. We did. For the reason why I use the word “guild” to refer to education, see chapter 5 of Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, especially pp. 156-58.