31 December 1998, 810 words
People often make a curious distinction between fact and truth. A fact is simply an empirical statement: something testable either by our senses or by experiment. Truth, on the other hand, is often viewed as a sort of higher-order reality- so much higher that it need not be dependent on fact at all. Most people believe that the truest truths, or Truth, reside in things that need no proof save "intuition" or religious tradition. Indeed, many people will actually assert that you cannot truly understand reality by sticking only to the facts.
People adopt such attitudes because facts are awkward beasts. Facts come in all shapes and sizes, are hard to handle, have sharp edges, and you often have to carry them long distances. (If you're one of those persons who did most of their shopping on Christmas Eve, you'll understand exactly what I mean.) The average person, being lazy, thus has an ambivalent sort of attitude towards facts. They know they must attend to them to survive in the real world, but they also try very hard to ignore any or all facts which are inconvenient to them. ("Inconvenient" is defined as a fact which interferes with their ego, contentment, or power.)
You might think some facts are incontrovertible: most people know they will die or be seriously injured if they jump off a building or step in front of a speeding car. Yet many people treat even hard facts as quite controvertible (yes, that is actually a word): the man who drives fast, especially when drunk, knows there is a high risk of him being killed or maimed. But he does it because the risk bolsters his self-image and gives him a sense of power which he no doubt lacks in those aspects of life which do not include driving a car very fast.
It is for this reason that politicians are the biggest liars of all. Facts are powerful things and because they are so powerful, politicians and their supporters often go to ridiculous lengths to deny them. The best example, of course, is Prime Minister Basdeo Panday dismissing reports of attacks on journalists at the UNC rally as "fictitious", when the entire TV-watching nation had seen exactly what happened.
This kind of Big Lie will convince the converted, but is quite useless otherwise. But people who have a political agenda will always twist the facts to further that agenda. They do so with fairly standard tricks. The favorite ploy is the "straw man" technique: misrepresenting someone's position and then proceeding to criticize the misrepresentation. Brothers-of-a-feather Devant Parsuram Maharaj and Dr. Selwyn Cudjoe do this frequently. Another common technique is "stereotyping" - e.g. writing as though all Indians are Hindus and all Hindus have the same mindset. This is the technique used by Rajnie Ramlakhan, as well as Kumar Mahabir who always writes as though all Black Trinidadians are automatically anti-Indian. Mahabir also favours the "appeal to authority" technique: saying that So-and-So has stated a certain opinion, while never making it clear exactly what authority So-and-So has for their opinion to carry weight.
But the absolutely favourite technique of diehard political fanatics is the "two wrongs make a right" approach. If an accusation is made, you draw attention to your opponent's faults- e.g. 'the PNM was corrupt for 30 years'. This distracts from the pertinent issue: does past PNM corruption justify corruption now by the UNC? A similar technique is "pseudo-refutation": arguing that a person is saying something now that is inconsistent to something he said before. This does not necessarily mean that the person's present claim is false.
Most dangerous, however, is the kind of fact-twisting practised by Dr. Morgan Job, who gets people's backs up because there is usually some modicum of truth to his statements. People are not generally stung by assertions which are completely false or completely true. If an assertion is obviously false, we dismiss it. If it is true, then we already know it. So people like Job are pernicious, because those who are agree with him see only the truth and those who disagree see only the lie. Luckily, Job's intellectual limitations deprive him of the grace which would help make his assertions convincing.
Ours is not a culture which promotes objectivity and rational debate. But, in the modern world, facts are more important than at any previous time in human history. We live in the Information Age and no society can progress without a respect for fact and analytical thought. This is as true for engineering as it is for sociopolitical issues. If, as an individual, you wish to have a clear idea about what information is trustworthy, be alert to the techniques I have just outlined. If nothing else, it will keep you amused at the primitive hypocrisies of our politicians, ethnic activists and their supporters.
Copyright ©1998 Kevin Baldeosingh