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.

Mass Psychological Conformity

Thinking about our current covid totalitarianism, columnist Roger Simon recently wrote:

What we have witnessed throughout the world [today] is millions, really billions, of people taking orders without thinking or, in the majority of cases, even seriously investigating what they have been told.

Simon states that witnessing this has helped him answer his long-held question (also held by many, including me): how could educated people in World War II Germany do what the Nazis did to Jews?

The best he could come up with:

We live in a culture of pervasive obedience….It’s everywhere—people giving up their personal agency, even their ability to reason, out of fear and willingly adhering to the mass.

A generation of conformists has been created as never before in our history.

Which certainly is true, but leaves the question “why?” unanswered. The best I can come up with is “mass psychological conformity,” or to elaborate, “mass psychologically-generated callous conformity, indifferent to harm caused to others.” The harm can range from “lockdowns” to mass extermination. In the case of the latter, “inhumanity” may be substituted for callous conformity.

Which still leaves the questions: “Why?” and “How?”

Various attempts to name this syndrome have been made: group psychology, groupthink, the madness of crowds, or true believers in a mass movement. Tulip mania, the current situation is not, though “herd conformity” is a phrase I have used before to describe it. Most recently, the terms “mass delusional psychosis” or “mass formation psychosis” have been offered.

“Delusion” is correct because in its simplest definition delusion means belief in something that is false, whether it’s “I’m probably going to die if you breathe anywhere near me” or “I’m Jesus Christ.”

And the syndrome is “mass” because so many people worldwide have gone along with their authoritarian public health and political leaders.

But these followers are not psychotic in the sense that they completely withdraw from reality, suspending conscious control over life and allowing the subconscious to take over.* Because thinking errors are the cause of neuroses, all psychological problems can be said to some extent to be delusional.

“Inhumanity,” according to Merriam-Webster means “being cruel or barbarous” and “the absence of warmth or geniality.” The past two years have certainly seemed inhumane, at least to those who have been harmed the most: children, small businesses that have closed and workers, if they still have a job, many of them single moms, who have to mask up to serve the laptop elite while the latter dine and shop. Then there are the non-virus related deaths, many by suicide.

Callous indifference, indeed! (See my post “They Just Don’t Care—Rationalization and the Need to Look Good.”

Who exactly am I talking about? The intelligentsia in particular: mainstream media, leftist teachers and professors, certain left-leaning entertainers and business leaders, politicians, and the public health cadre of unelected deep staters.

The latter two may even have a worse psychology. The past two years seem to have brought out their inner totalitarian, as in “we’re telling you who you can have in your home and when or if you can travel. Obey!”

Other people, such as the laptop elite who support the intelligentsia’s doctrines, would have to be included. The cause of all psychologies varies widely, in this case likely ranging from plain ignorance of the doctrine’s consequences to deliberate envious glee for those harmed (akin to many Germans during World War II).

Today, most people are just scared, thanks to the unrelenting propaganda campaign waged by the intelligentsia.

The root of the syndrome is psychological dependence, a psychology that does not depart completely from reality as a psychotic does, but one that shifts reality to other people as their source of beliefs and values. It is a passive acceptance of what those significant others think, feel, and do—a suspension of independent judgment to go along to get along . . . with the crowd.

We all often fail to seriously investigate, because we learn from books and other people and can’t escape the need to rely on experts.

But why the suspension of independent judgment? On the mass scale, this is where there is again a wide variety of reasons. The culture’s philosophy contributes in large part to explaining Simon’s observation of “pervasive obedience.” Germany’s duty ethics of self-sacrifice to the state (or Führer) eclipses independence. “It’s your duty to obey.”

The United States holds a nearly as strong duty ethics based on its predominant Protestantism. Just look at attitudes toward the military draft: “It’s your duty to die for your country.” (Should a big war break out, a new draft would be passed in a heartbeat by Congress and supported by the public. See The Ominous Parallels.)

For over 120 years, American culture has been assaulted and battered unendingly by the progressive left demanding that to be moral we must sacrifice ourselves to the collective, the group, the state.

And in non-Judeo-Christian cultures, asceticism and self-denial are widely held doctrines, with authoritarianism not even questioned.

Hence, worldwide, pervasive obedience.

Psychologically, independence derives from a strong sense of personal identity and self-responsibility. Courage, integrity, and self-esteem are consequences. Parental and formal education (the “how” of this issue) are both crucial in helping us develop these traits, but preaching self-sacrifice and victimhood erodes or blocks the development of independence.

“Dependent personalities,” as I have written before (p. 105), “gravitate to groups as the source of their identity, such as their religion, nation, race, class, ethnicity, or private clubs. They gravitate to the government as their caretaker.”**

Depending on the level of deficiency in self-esteem, dependent personalities will blindly accept whatever the government and its public health officials say, even if they are asking us to give up our rights.

It takes a confident mind to stand up to the irrational onslaught we have been going through over the past two years.

Perhaps the best explanation of mass gutlessness is the bureaucratic state. Bureaucracy is how governments manage their affairs and rules and laws are their tools. “Rules are rules” is the battle cry and “I don’t make ‘em, I just enforce ‘em” is what we have been up against for many years.

Those who respond by saying “Oh, okay”—without understanding or questioning what is being asked of them—encourage the totalitarians to continue with more total control.

The rules and laws—far too many of both in the United States, for about a century—all allow both citizens and bureaucrats to rationalize what they are doing as good. “I’m just following (or enforcing) the law.”

Rationalization is a strong defensive habit that allows us to make excuses for our behavior. Criminals thrive on it. So did many Germans in Nazi Germany.

Deference to authority comes first. Then, the obedience. Rationalization does not require or allow examination.

The bureaucratic state of Nazi Germany had gangs of secretaries typing orders to send Jews to the death camps. How could they do it? The explanation has to be that they thought they were doing something good! See “The Reductio of Bureaucracy” (Applying Principles, pp. 117-21) and William L. Shirer’s book.

Deference sacrifices independent judgment. Obedience makes one a follower and in extreme cases a killer.

Are we going to reclaim our rights, our personal agency, and, most importantly, our ability to reason to assert independence from the madness of crowds?

Or are we going to continue to go along to get along?


* Psychotics usually have episodes. They are not constantly “out of their minds,” living in a “waking dream,” as psychosis has sometimes been described. Even statuesque catatonics are aware of their surroundings and occasionally will respond to a nearby conversation before retreating to their trance-like states. And one psychiatrist asked a psychotic to “stop acting crazy now so I can talk to you.” The response? “Oh, okay.”

** Psychologist Edith Packer (p. 264): “Such people want to be taken care of, and in return they will gladly obey. A nation that breeds a dictator is a nation of people who are afraid of life.”