by John Allen Paulos
As atrocious, appalling, and abhorrent as Trump’s countless spirit-sapping outrages are, I’d like to move a little beyond adumbrating them and instead suggest a few ideas that make them even more pernicious than they first seem. Underlying the outrages are his cruelty, narcissism and ignorance, made worse by the fact that he listens to no one other than his worst enablers. On rare occasions, these are the commentators on Fox News who are generally indistinguishable from the sycophants in his cabinet, A Parliament of Whores,” to use the title of P.J. O’Rourke’s hilarious book. (No offense intended toward sex workers.) Stalin is reputed to have said that a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Paraphrasing it, I note that a single mistake, insult, or consciously false statement by a politician is, of course, a serious offense, but 25,000 of them is a statistic. Continuing with a variant of another comment often attributed to Stalin, I can imagine Trump asking, “How many divisions do CNN and the NY Times have.”
I note that his brutish actions and policies are supplemented almost hourly by his scrofulous postings on his Truth Social platform. They, in effect, constitute a kind of denial of service attack on news coverage by reputable platforms and sites. A so-called “denial of service” attack is employed by hackers to overwhelm a website with so many requests and bits of information that the site can’t respond and shuts down. It may be a bit of a stretch, but we’re a bit like the websites that shut down when overwhelmed. Our attitude too often is that the relentless stream of nonsensical rants spewing out of Truth Social is “just” Trump talking, rather than that it’s methodically Trump undermining American democracy. The belief that “He’s all talk, don’t worry” is Intended to be reassuring, but it may be the most dangerous counsel of all.
All the more reason to find anodyne advice dangerous is provided by Brandolini’s Law of Refutation. It’s a profound idea whose formulation is due to the Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. Sometimes described as the bullshit asymmetry principle, it states, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” (Brandolini wrote that the principle was inspired by the late Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow.) It might also be thought of as implying that insanity, inconsistency, and untruths are the likely destinations of political discourse if we don’t expend the considerable energy needed to insure sanity, consistency, and truth.
In fact, the principle seems to point to a sort of political thermodynamics. Very loosely understood, the metaphor suggests that increases in entropy (roughly speaking, disorder) are measured in terms of decay (say, of institutions and the law) and of confusion about (say, policy decisions and social norms). Institutions and the law are islands of order, i.e., low entropy, that need to be preserved in a chaotic world. Without hard political and social work, the general disorder of the world can only engulf these islands of social order. That reversing decay and confusion is harder than creating them was, as noted, Brandolini’s idea, but it also was well understood by Mark Twain who quipped, “It is much easier to con people than it is to convince them that they’ve been conned.”
A formulation by the Russian physicist Sergey Lopatnikov makes a related point about written work. “If the text of each individual phrase requires a paragraph (to disprove), and each paragraph requires a section, and each section requires a chapter, and each chapter requires a book, the whole text becomes effectively irrefutable in real time.” More specifically, if the text involves a legal issue, say a wrong-headed executive order, then its consequences and its consequences’ consequences soon become part of the fabric of a whole area of law whose unraveling becomes increasingly difficult.
More generally, any rapid fire sequence of lies, half-truths, misleading statements, ad hominem attacks, bad analogies, and irrelevant anecdotes will in the short run win out over a slow and painstaking fact check. Lying is so much easier than debunking as Trump illustrates every day. A fast-talking salesman is a staple of countless stories about hucksters. A slow-talking salesman is never mentioned.
Trump, of course, has no shortage of others who zealously take advantage of Brandolini’s law. Enablers are ensconced in an extensive subculture populated by the disaffected, the resentful, and the misinformed as well as the greedy, the ideologues, and the self-serving special interests. Where else but in this subculture would so many people seemingly give more weight to the statements of TV personalities than to doctors and biological researchers on vaccines? Why do industry lobbyists have more clout than climate scientists? And why are economic policies such as deficit-exploding tax cuts for the 1% and the inflation-generating draconian tariffs preferred by the Trump administration favored over those policies put forth by dozens of Nobel-prize winning economists? Such a supportive environment has proved a fertile ground for Trump’s bloviating and malevolent incompetence and won’t automatically disappear after Trump does.
Perhaps most distressing of all is the unwavering unity of pusillanimous Republicans in Congress in the face of all Trump’s outrages. They should know better and are much more deserving of scorn and condemnation than the millions who gullibly believed Trump and his enablers. I give Edmund Burke the penultimate word. “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” But Alberto Brandolini and Mark Twain get the last word, warning us that once we allow evil to triumph it will be very, very difficult to loosen its hold.
***
John Allen Paulos is an emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Temple University and the author of Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. These and his other books are described and available here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.