Asking why people become ‘independent of reality’

August 7, 2006

About two weeks ago, Harris released a poll that still has the political world confused. The pollster found that half the country believes that Saddam Hussein’s government had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003 — a marked increase over the last year.

I still have to believe that the results are some kind of cruel mistake, intended to drive the reality-based community batty, but as long as the poll continues to puzzle nearly everyone, the AP had an interesting analysis of what led to such an odd polling outcome.

[E]xperts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull. […]

“I’m flabbergasted,” said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration’s shaky WMD claims in 2002-03. “This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence,” Massing said.

Indeed, it does. But what’s just as startling is the number of conservatives who believe the poll results are encouraging because of all the WMDs Iraq had in 2003.

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania’s Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan’s Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

“I think the Harris Poll was measuring people’s surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country,” said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware. […]

Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra’s announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the press “didn’t give the story the play it deserved.” But in some quarters it was headlined.

“Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today …” was how Fox News led its report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. “Americans are waking up from a distorted reality,” read one posting.

It’s the one thing about politics in the 21st century that I just can’t get over — the right has its own opinions and its own facts. It doesn’t matter what David Kay, Charles Duelfer, Scott Ritter or any of the other credible inspectors, many of whom were hand-picked by the Bush White House, say about WMD. Reality interferes with politics, so the answer is to retreat further into fantasy.

And when a poll shows that conservative confusion has spread among the electorate, this isn’t indicative of a problem; it’s proof that conservatives were right all along.

It’s as if we’re stuck in a Twilight Zone episode.

I don’t have any conservative types to bait anymore (new job where I want to keep a low profile), so I’ve always wondered what they’re reaction would be to this question:

So we found 500 chemical shells in Iraq. Even if Iraq had a delivery system that could threaten the United States with those shells, does that make it worth it?

We’ve lost 5+ soldiers for each shell. Is it worth it?

We’ve killed 30+ Iraqi civilians for each shell. Is it worth it?

We’ve spent $40+billion for each shell. Is it worth it?

  • Kind of riffing off of Chuck’s framework for analysis, if we were really serious about stopping the spread of weapons, we would sign on to all the international treaties for limiting weapons proliferation. And we would stop allowing so many domestic firms to sell weapons to so many foreign states, who we can’t control as to who they in turn give weapons to.

  • Stopping the presence of weapons abroad that could be used against American citizens isn’t a wholly achievable goal, and different means are going to be more effective for achieving it than other means. A multi-trillion dollar war to recover a few specious shells isn’t a worthwhile effort. In fact, huge Iraqi stockpiles of weapons were lost by the U.S. occupation right after we invaded, as was widely reported in the news media. So, on balanace there may be a lot more loose weapons in the hands of terrorists than there were before we invaded- before, it was all just sitting in big piles in Saddam’s warehouses, maybe.

    Stopping people who would use the weapons is our real strategy- and the question as to whether the means we’ve been using toward that end have been or will prove to be effective, as regards our action in Iraq specifically, is just still completely open and arguable at this point- and it’s completely open and arguable as to whether going after Iraq as a means was worthwhile at all.

  • I often lament that the spirit of Goebbels has been awakened in the crew at the WH and their proxies in FOXNEWSland. They keep at the big lie in hopes that it can sustain the fake reality they have offered up to the American public in the early 21st century.

    I believe that in our new high tech gizmo ladened society many of us have become narrative challenged. As such many latch on to the narrative being offered at any one moment in time upon any one issue at hand. Conceptual continuities have been fragmented, so that when wankers from the WH, or any other institutional setting, come up with a good narrative – even one that belies reality – they know they can sell it to the public at large with some good ol’fashion 24/7 info saturation via like-minded mouthpieces. Polling may become a lost art if Americans continue to careen from one fragmented, or incomplete, narrative to another.

    I imagine Jefferson will soon be wondering where his “collective wisdom” went among early 21st century Americans. -Kevo

  • I’d like to hear the answer to the follow up question to those who believe there were WMD: where were the WMD found, what happended to the WMD and how much was found? Let’s explore their reality.

  • If you want to predict what people are going to say, though, that’s easy enough- the hawks are going to keep saying that Iraq was worthwhile/cost-effective/noble, whatever, no matter what, because the cost we sustained is too heavy. It would be too psychologically compromising and humiliating to say that they fucked up on this one then to keep pretending we didn’t. So even if we are in fact cutting off our nose to spite our face over there, the hawks are going to keep having us bang our face against a wall with it, because psychology is going to get in the way of necessity. It’s not typical to do otherwise. Most people don’t think like that.

    That may explain some of the poll response.

    I guess it may explain somewhat the way events have turned out, too. It’s a shame, but there it is.

  • Without WMD, they would have to admit to staggering failures of the Bush regime. They would have to face the horror they unleashed on the Iraqi people for no reason whatsoever. That would be a terrible day of reckoning. It’s no wonder they are struggling to maintain a fantasy, that while still ugly, can’t begin to approach the wrongs their delusions have wrought. The guilty always cling to denial until the bitter end.

  • About the same or greater percentage of people believe that evolution is a fantasy. No matter how much proof you can line up on the side of evolution, the doubters will find some kind of easy cop out to maintain their own beliefs or sway those of others.

    There is a bigger division of world views working here that I don’t think we fully grasped. It has not been clearly defined or delineated. But I believe that people are lining up on two sides for a really big struggle over the future of the earth. I have always thought that the big divide will be between those with strong attachments to the earth and those who opt for a more alien vision of man’s ascent separate from the earth, or between those with roots and those without, or as Kevo wisely perceived above, between those with and those without conceptual continuity.

    There are those who choose to live within mind prisons and those who recognize the mind prisons and wish to escape. Ironically, those most prone to persuasion to fight for freedom may in fact be the least free or measure their freedom in ways that the mass manipulators wish them to express their freedoms by their choice of product.

  • I like my original thought about the right questions to ask:

    Did you believe in 2002 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

    Do you believe that 1990 era ineffective saran and mustard gas artillery shells were the weapons of mass destruction the Administration described in 2002?

    Do you believe today that in 2002 Iraq had the weapons of mass destruction the Administration claimed they did despite the fact that no evidence of their existence has been found?

    Do you believe the claims based on Syrian exiles statements that the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were moved into Syria with Russian assistance?

    Would you like to buy a bridge in Brooklyn?

  • Givens:
    America can only do good
    We went to war to rid Saddam of WMDs
    Conclusion
    Therefore we found WMDs

    It’s a simple proof really.

  • Its just possible the poll was a fluke. The “level of significance” of any poll results always guarantee the (extremely low) probability of error. But unlike George Bush and the Pope, polls aren’t infallible.

    Just as possible: large numbers of Americans are beginning to experience “cognitive dissonance“. We couldn’t possibly have lost so much money and so many lives without a reason, could we? Okay, since we can’t deny loss or finesse the deaths, there must have been WMDs.

    There, that’s better … conflict resolved. Now back to TeeVee. Yawn. Mmm….

  • CB writes: “And when a poll shows that conservative confusion has spread among the electorate, this isn’t indicative of a problem; it’s proof that conservatives were right all along.”

    It’s proof that the Rovian strategy of deliberately lie and lie and lie until the lie becomes the truth has been right all along…and still works.

  • This is truly the worst Twilight Zone episode ever.

    If over half the people can be so completely bamboozled about such a SIMPLE question as this one, then they will never be able to discern the truth when it comes to more complicated ideas, such as the need for clean elections, verifiable voting systems and (dare I dream it) Instant Runoff Voting.

    Unfortunately Rush keeps feeding them exactly what they want to hear, so they keep listening.

    http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_062206/content/truth_detector.guest.html

  • The right and their supporters are having the same feeling that gamblers have the stakes get higher and higher and their bill fold is getting smaller and smaller.

    Most folks don’t cut their losses and will ride out a bad hand because they hope that their luck will change. If a lot of people didn’t have cognitive dissonance then most casinos would go out of business and lotteries would be few and far between.

    Problem is that you can’t run a foreign policy like a poker table because the stakes aren’t just money.

  • If you tell a lie often enough from a position of power, it becomes accepted truth. Once again, the Reich Chancellory (1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500; telephone
    202-456-1414) rises from the ashes of 1945 Berlin….

  • the right has its own opinions and its own facts.

    Germany had the same problem between 1933-45:

    The Jews and the Liberals and the Socialists stabbed the German Army in the back in 1918. (Fact: the great German Army got its ass whipped in 1918)

    Poland attacked Germany – we have to go to war. (drugged German concentration camp inmates in Polish uniforms were shot by guards outside German radio station)

    We are fighting for freedom on the Eastern Front against Bolshevism. (no mention of Einsatzgruppen, “untermenschen”, Babi Yar, etc.)

    And our own little goose-stepper wannabees are not that different.

  • Recently I read about what biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls ‘morphic resonance’ which is defined as “a supposed paranormal influence by which a pattern of events or behaviour makes subsequent occurrences of similar patterns more likely” which goes a long way toward a possible explanation of all this.

    Basically, the idea is that when enough people start thinking the same way about something, a kind of critical mass is reached where more and more people think that way almost by a kind of osmosis.

    Maybe that’s why the right wing has spent so many years and so many millions of dollars taking over every source of media they can. They know that whoever controls information controls the minds of the people, as this kind of data supports.

    The problem for them is that even the most deluded will start to catch on when things get too outrageous. At least I very much hope they will.

  • If memory serves, the first emphasis about WMDs was that there was a concerted effort by Iraq to develop NUCLEAR weapons. The chemical/biological WMDs were a secondary adjunct to the lie, a lie expanded when the complex technolgy was obviously not to be found (remember Condi’s aluminum tube tap-dance?). What is disturbing is not that today’s conservatives are essentially psychotic liars, it is that the public remains so delusional and so easily manipulated by these con artists. It suggests that current hopes for an election that will change the country’s course will be fruitless.

  • Oh, come on everybody. We all know that WMD was just an excuse. The reasons we went to war with Iraq are:

    1) Saddam tried to kill Poppi in Kuwait,
    2) After Poppi lost in 1992, Saddam bragged about winning the war because he was still in power.

    Boy George II couldn’t tolerate either of those provocations. But somehow, he couldn’t get America behind him by stating those reasons (watch Fahernheit 9/11 and you’ll see him admit the first though), so he had to start jinning up excuses. The first excuse for going to war was that Saddam was defying the United Nations (ironic, no?) and not letting inspectors in. Once he let them in, the excuse became all the super secretly hidden WMDs.

    Sad that Americans don’t remember all that.

  • It’s almost as if the Republicans think this:

    1) Bush is President
    2) We’re in Iraq
    3) There hasn’t been a successful terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11

    = Therefore, these three things must somehow all be connected.

    But just because two things are true at the same time doesn’t mean that they’re connected or that either of them caused the other. It’s a common mistake that people make when thinking about things and I think it explains why some people still support the war.

    Now, for all I know, maybe the PATRIOT Act was what made the difference in stopping terrorist attacks on American soil. Hell, for all I know, maybe every Democrat who opposed the PATRIOT Act was just plain wrong, and it was exactly what we needed to fight terrorism, and just about enough all by itself. If other words, maybe the kinds of measures the Democrats probably would have kept us closer to limited to had they been in power during the past few years were all we needed to successfully fight terror. But it just doesn’t seem that the Iraq war was that closely related to that, nor does it seem that it could have been motivated by those kinds of motivations. It seems a lot more like people who just wanted to fight a war, and who maybe thought they had some financial interest in getting to be the ones who would rearrange the markets in the area, kind of led us all in there (basically misleading us) and everyone who supported it just went along because they’re just a bunch of followers.

    Think about it. Just because those three statements are true doesn’t mean they cause each other. You have to add a lot more to be able to say any of those causes either of the others. But look at the cost if you were wrong when you assumed that statement 2) leads to and justifies 3).

  • I’ve been thinking about this being like a casino today, actually. It’s like “Lost $200- but wouldn’t it all be worth it if you just played one more hand and won it all back?” It would be worth it, so you keep playing. One hour later: “Lost $300- but wouldn’t it all be worth it if you just played one more hand and won it all back?” And so on…

    In a sane world, if a person has people that care about them, after a while somebody takes you by the arm and says, “Cut this out…” and takes you out of there and says, “Never do this shit again.” But with this Iraq stuff, for the people who want to play this game, they don’t want to look bad, and it’s never going to happen that someone with sense that they’re willing to listen to is going to tell them that it’s time to stop.

  • I haven’t seen the simplest explanation for the poll results offered anywhere: people confuse Iraq and Iran. So the recent news about Iran’s weapons program gets translated into Iraq having WMDs back in 2002.

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