Countries, Too, Can Have A Split Personality

Some people suffer from a condition where two different personalities apparently inhabit one body, contending for control. This was famously illustrated in Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Recent developments suggest that whole countries can also develop split personalities. Senator Mitch McConnell recently warned that we are "drifting apart into two separate tribes with a separate set of facts and separate realities with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share."

If everybody was just getting the same news but splitting into very different personal interpretations of it, their differences would probably not line up along party lines. But a poll before the second impeachment trial found that more than 90% of Democrats said they believed that Donald Trump bore major responsibility for inciting the attack on the Capitol, while only 30-some percent of Republicans agreed.

Today's proliferation of digital media allows people to select only news sources that reinforce what they already think. Many apparently try to avoid reports or interpretations that disagree with their current opinions, limiting their ability to reconsider them. .

After Fox News recognized Joe Biden's election, many Trump supporters switched to TV outlets whose reports they considered more congenial. If there's a market for anything, someone will always supply it, and that includes nonsense.

As a part-time Kremlinologist, I used to assume that rigorous censorship---controlling all information available to its people---was essential if a totalitarian regime was to retain power. The Soviet government ran short wave jamming transmitters to prevent people from hearing dissonant information from the BBC or the Voice of America. Glavlit, a government organization employing 80,000 censors, issued permits which were required even for messages on a book of matches. Its 300 page manual listed things that could not be mentioned, including existence of an agency called Glavlit!

But recent American developments suggest censorship is not essential to prevent large numbers of people from getting reliable information. Although the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and press in the U.S., we are free not to listen to information and perspectives which conflict with our current opinions. Recently so many people have chosen to do so that we now have public opinion about facts divided into two substantial parts---- a collective split personality.

Thoughtful citizens, however, still have the power to stay, or get back, in touch with reality. We can deliberately get news from more than one source, thereby becoming aware of conflicting ways of interpreting what is going on. Important facts ignored by one news source may be reported by other sources. We can evaluate the compatibility of conflicting factual claims and interpretations with evidence and common sense.

In a word, more Americans could learn how to be critical thinkers who are unwilling to have our view of the world handed to us in a package deal by some demagogue or by spin-doctors.

The Internet is, in general, a wonderful thing. In the past, when we had limited sources of information, editors protected us from utter nonsense, but they also "protected" us from worthwhile perspectives they considered too far off the beaten path.

Life is tough, and all political discourse is a mixture of sense and nonsense. Since we can no longer depend on editors to sort out the sense from the nonsense for us, we all need to figure it out for ourselves, individually, as best we can.

In the internet age a broad liberal education ("liberal" in the classical sense, not in the political sense!) and the ability to think critically are more important than ever if we want to be responsible citizens.