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.

The Clouded Lenses of a Certain Political Derangement Syndrome

Columnist Roger Simon makes this comment about today’s leftist sympathizers who excuse the burning of America.

So they blame Trump—someone who occasionally does act like a father—for their own failures. And even though those failures have been going on for months.

It’s hard to believe they do this with a straight face, but they do.

Simon is talking about a certain psychological syndrome identified to describe our current president’s opposition.

The political derangement syndrome, says Simon, “has evolved from a neurosis to a psychosis. . . . They [the deranged] disbelieve what is in front of their eyes.” Rioting thus can be described as “mostly peaceful protests” and it’s all the fault of our current president.

To most rational observers today, it is astoundingly incomprehensible why anyone would ignore or tolerate the violence we have seen in the last few months.

Perhaps psychology can help us understand.

A syndrome is a collection of symptoms. What makes it psychological is that the symptoms derive from thinking errors, not physical conditions or environmental events, though both are often asserted as causes.

For example, a depressed young man jilted by his lover may feel anxiety and a profound sense of hopelessness with the underlying thoughts: “I’ll never find another girlfriend or ever be happy again. I can’t go on with life.” The young man then may as a symptom project his plight onto the young woman, blaming her while ignoring any role he may have played in the breakup.

His thoughts, however, are false because, considering the population of the world, a new lover can be found, though the effort likely will require putting himself in a position to meet members of the opposite sex. And as the song says, it “Takes Two to Tango” when it comes to successful relationships (1, 2). The false thoughts nonetheless cause the young man’s symptoms of anxiety, hopelessness, and projection.

Psychological problems, as a result, set up a clouded lens that distorts our perceptions. In worst cases, the lens can prevent us from seeing reality at all.

The clouded lenses with the additional defensive habits of rationalization and projection are what blind many derangement sufferers.

Columnist John Miltimore offers further understanding by citing Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s linking of violence to falsehood, because violence, as Solzenitsyn points out, sooner or later “loses confidence in itself” and must lie to put on a “respectable face.” Says Solzhenitsyn, “Violence can conceal itself with nothing except lies, and the lies can be maintained only by violence.”

The reason, more precisely, that violence requires lies is that initiated coercion, which all forms of non-self-defensive violence are, cannot ever be justified; it must be covered up or rationalized.

To be sure, our postmodern culture of epistemological skepticism and moral relativism is a fundamental cause of the present lack of respect for truth and sincerity—the postmoderns, after all, have brought about the penchant for talking in “narratives” (or fictions, as I prefer to call them), rather than facts and knowledge.

The notion of lying to cover up coercion goes back at least to the “noble lie” recommended in Plato’s (totalitarian) Republic (1, 2) and probably to the first tribal chieftain who called himself master of the tribe.

The defensive habit of rationalization, which can be either subconscious or intentional, is the act of making excuses to justify one’s irrational thoughts and behaviors. This is what explains the otherwise astoundingly incomprehensible events of today.

Leftist sympathizers are the writers and politicians who fail to denounce the violence, whereas the actual rioters are criminal personalities who lie, cheat, and steal as a way of life and enjoy getting away with the forbidden. Leftist ideology justifies the rioting, because any form of socialism requires total coercion and control. (See Trevor Loudon’s columns on the Maoist role in today’s riots: 1, 2.)

Leftist ideology is what allows the sympathizers to excuse and tolerate the rioters, though some sympathizers may secretly be what Yochelson and Samenow (1, chap. 7; Applying Principles, pp. 280-83) call “nonarrestable criminals,” a criminal personality that lies, cheats, and manipulates others but does nothing overtly illegal. Some may want to be on the streets, tossing Molotov cocktails, but other internal psychological conflicts prevent them from doing so—or perhaps a modicum of health prevents them from being that deranged.

And blaming a father figure? Hmm! Without going too Freudian, projection and scapegoating derive from the need to blame someone—anyone—for one’s own insecurities, especially anxiety and anxiety’s source, low self-esteem. Projection is rampant in today’s political context and it comes mostly from one side.

Does this explain the seemingly unexplainable? It’s a start, but just how far down the rathole are we going to go?