On the diminishing marginal utility of true beliefs

After reading a story about our president’s changing views regarding the veracity of his Access Hollywood tape or his Bitherism, I wondered why he would bother provoking another media cycle about it.

Putting aside the psychological reasons at play (of which I am sure there are many) consider a deeper, possibly unconscious, strategy: Trump is realizing he has more to gain establishing his own fictional narrative than he has to lose by being accused of a liar.

An OpEd in the the Washington Post makes the case that Trump’s is doing this to assert his power. I think that absolutely true, but it doesn’t explain why people continue to believe him, and why this strategy has worked for so long.

Everyone would like to believe they live in a consensus-driven reality whose contours are defined by facts, truths, and the best theories we can wrangle from evidence-based science. We are brought up to believe that this is a core component of what makes modern society work — that we all can agree and act upon basic principles of reality with the help of well functioning belief systems.

But what if the only thing that matters are not holding actually true beliefs, but rather being perceived as holding true beliefs? What if most people don’t want to believe verifiably true things because they don’t have to?

In economic terms, the marginal utility in believing true things (i.e., the overall usefulness of adopting a new, actually true belief) is approaching zero.

If social media has given us filter bubbles that algorithmically prescribe only the news we find palatable, then Trump’s label of “FAKE NEWS” has similarly given us a tool to demarcate the truths we don’t want to believe.

Unfortunately, whether Trump lied about Access Hollywood just doesn’t materially matter to most people — it’s not like he’s going to suddenly appear one day and sexually harass them personally. Trump knows this: the value in “getting to the bottom” about what happened is probably too costly for most people given there’s very little inherent value in it. They much rather believe his lie.

So a large portion of America’s population have decided that permitting Trump’s transgressions holds more value than wrangling with the difficult realities that lie underneath — that they’ve elected a racist sexual harasser with only the dimmest understanding of what is required to govern a country.

Because everyone knows Trump lies. Even his supporters.

It’s just that for most of them, Trump’s compromised ability to tell the truth has almost zero actual impact on their day to day lives. Of course, the reality is that having a pathological liar in the White House will likely enact severe downstream consequences on our country and the rest of the world, but the actual effects of Trump lying for most of his supporters are minimal.

On the other hand, permitting his moral transgressions, even defending them (“locker-room talk”), can serve all kinds of purposes, one of the most valuable ones being a tool that makes media elites squirm. Another value is just pure entertainment. It’s why people don’t care that reality television is edited to conform to fictional narratives.

The utility in believing the lie has now outstripped the utility in believing the truth.

Fiction that looks, feels, and purports to be real but isn’t the purest drug of them all. It’s why non-fiction books that are debunked as lies continue to sell.

This doesn’t just apply to Trump’s personal behavior, of course.

Another example is climate change: in stark economic terms, it probably doesn’t actually matter to individuals whether they should believe the scientists. It just doesn’t. The effects are too slight and will be felt over generations. Most humans just do not have the innate capacity to think this long term and selflessly about their environment.

But believing the lie that climate science is a lie? There’s actually some value there. It means bigger SUVs. Better profit margins for oil businesses. Rejecting elites and their graduate degrees and careful research.

And racism works the same way: why bother acknowledging the ugly truth that slavery and generations of systematic oppression has corrupted the basic tenets of humanity in our country when it’s easier, materially speaking, to think the opposite?

Trump’s presidency represents a weaponization and generalization of Upton Sinclair’s famous remark that “[it] is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

So how do we make people care about internalizing truths that may not serve their self-interests?