There is a type of argument, known as evolutionary debunking arguments, that have been deployed as skeptical attacks on domains such as morality, religion, and our mind’s sensitivity to the truth. These arguments purport to establish that the domain in question can be fully explained by evolutionary processes.
For example, some have argued that the reason we have moral judgments is because it was evolutionarily beneficial (it increased cooperation and therefore survival), not because there is any objective morality that we are tapping into when we say things like, “it’s wrong to kill a person for no good reason.”
Another debunking argument targets the question of whether our minds evolved to generally produce true beliefs, or whether they evolved to have merely useful beliefs. In other words, whether our cognitive processes tend to track the truth or whether they track only what has utility – what was more evolutionarily beneficial for our cognitive processes to do?
The debunking argument answers that our minds track pragmatics and so our minds are not truth-conducive.
As I suspect most do, I like to think that my mind is at least attempting to believe the facts of the matter even if it often fails. It seems though that as a society, we are providing ample evidence that truth is not an important factor when determining what to believe.
The most recent and powerful evidence source is coming from Trump and the millions who believe what he says. His address to Congress this past Tuesday demonstrated absolutely no regard for the truth – things that are easily verifiably false that many believe nonetheless. Claims that are so blatantly contradictory that one wonders how so many can miss it. The answer may very well be that we believe in accordance with what preserves our goals or mental states.
Throughout the address, Trump made numerous false, misleading, or uncorroborated claims including estimates about how much savings DOGE cuts have produced. The administration has provided no evidence that it has found “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud,” and in fact, what DOGE has published only amounts to about $18 billion. Of course, when you promise to cut $2 trillion from federal expenditures and you’re failing miserably despite violating the law and ignoring court orders, it might be tempting to greatly inflate the numbers.
Trump claimed that, “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security numbers from people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119 […] 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129. 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139. 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149 […] 1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159, and over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old. We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby. Including, to finish, 1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229; one person between the age of 240 and 249; and one person is listed at 360 years of age.”
Going by Trump’s math, that’s approximately 20.6 million dead people. Since he’s calling this fraud, he must mean that there are millions of dead people being paid by Social Security. According to the Social Security Administration, only about 89,000 people over the age of 99 receive payments. Given how easily accessible this information is, we have to rule out brute incompetence – these are just outright lies. What’s the point of lying about this? Well, it makes you outraged that our government has been so disgustingly wasteful with our taxes and it assures you that Donald Trump is fixing it.
Then there were the Trump contradictions. He spent a lot of his excruciatingly long speech criticizing DEI practices and woke ideology, ranting about how our country will now hire people on the basis of merit and fit. The claim that we should not have DEI because we should have the best person for the job points out the same underlying problem with nepotism.
The inconsistency must have been lost on Trump given that he has been hiring people based on his relationships with them and their loyalty, not on merit. Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr, several members of his family, and John Ratcliffe are all people who are not qualified for their jobs. For all of his shouting about meritocracy, he has not demonstrated that he believes in the concept.
One of the big bombshells of the night was when Trump informed us that the Biden administration had paid researchers $8 million “for making mice transgender.” He said it like it’s a bad thing. Why wouldn’t we want to turn mice transgender? If you believe hormone therapy is bad, you should want research conducted that studies the physiological effects, that way you have concrete evidence to support your position. If you believe hormone therapy is good, then you should want scientific evidence to back that up. I personally love the idea of transgender mice despite the fact that you can’t turn mice transgender because mice do not have gender identities.
If asked, most people would probably say that they believe that they want to believe the truth. I’m sure that they believe that they believe that. The behavioral evidence that we have been providing by choosing to believe known liars like Trump suggests that our belief that we want to know the truth is false.
But it’s not too late to turn this ship around – we can choose to set our personal feelings aside and believe in accordance with the truth. If we do not believe in accordance with the truth, then we are not in a position to make the best decisions for ourselves or our country.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com
