For some time now I’ve been thinking about what the Trumpests (a new word I’m attempting to coin meaning those people who blindly suport anything Donald Trump says/does) mean when the shout “Fake News”. For the longest time I thought this meant news they saw as coming from the Main Stream (aks ‘Liberal’) media. Later I thought it might be news that the Trumpest disliked. Now I think I was mistaken.
What is really meant by “Fake News” is any news that disagrees, no mater how minor the discrepancy, with what Trump or the Trumpest is saying. This can be truly a challenge to keep up with. Just think about it, one day North Korea is the ultimate bad guy and the next it is a shining example of good government. One day the Prime Minister of Canada is Trump’s best Bud and the next he is the lying cheat. Even businesses aren’t exempt, just looked what happened to Harly Davidsonnthis last week.
What we are faced with now is finding out how to live with this phenomenon. Psychologists have a complex name for this, it is called Cognitive Dissonance, I prefer to call it Doublethink. For those of you not familiar with the origins of the term, it come from the Novel 1984. In essence it means holding two, or more, contradictory thought (ideas) in you mind at the same time and then using the correct one on call.
What is easier to do is just to overwrite your memory of the old idea with the new idea. Unfortunately human memory isn’t read/write but write once read always. (Sorry computer geek here. What I mean is that like most RAM in a computer once you overwrite something in memory it is gone for ever. Human memory is more like PROM and once the idea is written it is there until the day you die.). What doublethink lets you do is keep multiple contradictory ideas in your head without havin to choose between them. The way you know is when the Person in Charge tells you that an idea I’s Fake News or when something they say now conflicts with something said earlier.
See, simple. All you have to do is accept the idea that Truth and Falsehood are totally constant and mutable at the sametime.