On The Maintenance of Meaning

From Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog:

...

As an objective matter, unemployment is lower today than when the president took office, and we've seen a net increase in job creation. Portman -- a sitting U.S. senator and former budget director -- surely knows this, but chose to say the exact opposite. Why? Because he thinks he can get away with it. Post-truth politics is liberating that way.

You see, Portman doesn't like our reality, so he has no qualms about making up his own version of facts, and asking Americans to believe him -- even though he's blatantly, shamelessly lying.

Putting aside all other considerations, it's just not healthy for a political system when one side of the political divide decides to substitute one version of reality for another. Words, facts, arithmetic, and objective truths must maintain some sort of meaning or our basic ability to have a political conversation will deteriorate into chaos.

Of course, in the natural world two and two will continue to go right on blithely equaling four no matter the wishes of our little species, but within the human world, "words, facts, arithmetic, and objective truths" do not maintain themselves.   Especially in the realms of politics and faith, our human desire to bend two and two around to equal three or seven or five trillion or eternal salvation means that those who traffic in the prestidigitation of "truthiness" will always do a land office business.   

Which means that the integrity of "words, facts, arithmetic, and objective truths" need to be protected and defended.

There used to be a professional dedicated to that cause: a profession that was so critical to our survival as a free people that it got its very own shout-out in the very first amendment to the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

But over the last 30 years, that profession has been gelded, hollowed out and corporatize to the point where the protectors and defenders of "words, facts, arithmetic, and objective truths" shout from the margins, and performers like David Gregory

command top dollar and center stage.

People like Mr. Gregory are the problem and until they are routinely called out (and not in a passive, "'the media' has failed us" voice, but by name) from someplace other than the margins they will continue to run the integrity of "words, facts, arithmetic, and objective truths" through the "Both Sides Do It" meat-grinder until, at last, our perception of reality is drowned forever in a gray, poisonous. corporate slurry of bullshit.

After which comes this (from "1984"):

In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science.' The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.

...

Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.