Two days after Donald Trump’s ominous inauguration as president of the United States, his advisor Kellyanne Conway famously coined the phrase “alternative facts,” describing false statements delivered with zeal at the administration’s very first press conference. The easily-debunked lies weren’t about anything important; they just reflected the type of fantasy required to appease the egomaniac now in charge of the executive branch. Still, this turn of phrase, offered by a person paid with public money to speak for the president, was an official notice to Americans — and the world — that truth wouldn’t carry much weight in the Trump White House. Conway’s words suggested that the U.S. government would reject reality whenever it failed to relieve the new president’s personal insecurities.
Predictably, for the next four years, the very concepts of facts and truth became political, pushing Americans into mutually exclusive lived realities. In one of those worlds, people still believed there’s a significant body of objective knowledge that is distinct from your own interests, and your fortunes depend on understanding that reality as best you can. Truth still mattered there. But in the other world, people came to believe that things can be just as good as true if you simply act as if they’re real. In that world, actual truth is much less important because reality can be whatever you want it to be. When people in the second world confronted people in the first, they could draw on a wealth of manufactured online “facts” to appear reasonable or even dominant in a debate. After all, what mattered was not the reality, but the performance. During these interactions, the people in each world seemed convinced that theirs was the only world, and that people in the other world were only pretending there was a difference.
This divergence has culminated in a disturbingly widespread belief among people who voted to re-elect Trump that he rightfully won the 2020 election, despite all evidence to the contrary. They have embraced the second world, sometimes incurring great personal cost to act in accordance with their “truth.” This past Wednesday, some of them forced their way into the U.S. Capitol, armed with weapons and zip ties for hostage-taking, intending to prevent Congress from procedurally certifying the results of the election. As a result of the incursion, five people are dead and many more were injured, including several law enforcement officers. We’re now learning how close the situation could have come to a much higher body count, as federal authorities begin to prosecute individuals who’d made no secret of their willingness to murder members of Congress as well as Trump’s own vice president. The fallout from this tragedy has caused some divisions in the second world, as its denizens mull which set of alternative facts best serves their preferred “reality” about their personal culpability in the ongoing national embarrassment.
For as long as I can remember, I've been an uncompromising inhabitant of the first world. It couldn’t matter less what you want the truth to be; it’s important only what the truth is. And I always want to know what the truth is. The more truth, the better, and as soon as possible. Knowledge is power. Red pill for me, every time. Watching Donald Trump and his sycophants these past four years, I often observed scornfully to family and friends: “Imagine being free of the standards to be accurate, thoughtful, reasonable, and consistent when you speak. Imagine a worldview where, if you want something to be true, you simply insist it is and shut out any evidence to the contrary. What a life!” The horror I felt when Trump was elected cannot be overstated, but it never even occurred to me to suggest he wasn’t legally the president. We first-worlders have now spent years shaking our heads in disgust at those who choose to delude themselves and others: So foolish. So sad. So weak.
But some truths are too horrible to believe, even for me.
Late last year, we learned that cancer had recurred and spread in my body. The following weeks were a sickening daze of uncertainty. How bad is it? Is it on my lungs? In my brain? What are my chances to survive it? And regardless of statistics, what will turn out to be true for me and my family? We put up our Christmas tree, wondering how many more times I would be around to participate in our annual traditions. John had a premonition of himself on a future holiday evening, after our youngest leaves the nest in a few short years, spending December alone in our family-sized house filled with his dead wife’s decor choices. Tears flowed regularly, at times sparked by some little detail of the day, and other times for no reason at all. Through it all, we tried to carry on with the unending but joyful struggle of work and parenting — you know, life.
I did have the advantage of a year’s preparation. After my initial diagnosis of intermediate-stage cancer in the fall of 2019, I’d realized quickly that living in fear and devastation is a way of losing your life even earlier. Mortality has a clarifying effect on your worldview, and I’d already figured out that the most important thing to me in this life is being a supporting, stabilizing figure in my kids’ lives for as long as possible. My greatest fear was, and is, having to watch them learn that they will lose their mom before they’re even adults, learn that they were wrong to count on me to raise them. Now that future, always possible for any parent, seemed much, much closer to us. I battled each day not to rehearse the grief and horror I associate with that outcome. As I advanced involuntarily to this more challenging dance with fear, my therapist asked me: “What would help you the most? Do you want to try to find some peace with what you’re afraid of, or do you want to focus on maintaining a hopeful outlook?”
Things can be just as good as true if you simply act as if they’re real. What do you want to be true?
In a way, Madame Red-Pill Face-the-Truth got to dodge the question by stalling for more objective facts, which happened to support my desperately-preferred reality. We learned that my cancer, though at Stage IV, presented no observable lung or brain metastasis, that promising treatments have significantly better-than-even odds for defeating the disease, or at least making it merely chronic, and living a long life. We learned that there’s even an FDA-approved contingency treatment. And, after my very first round of medication, we learned that the two known cancerous growths had begun to shrink almost immediately. My primary tumor is already basically undetectable.
Science! Facts! Truth!
But.
What if the facts were much less favorable, as they were for people in my exact situation just a few years ago, before the treatments I’m receiving had been developed and refined through experimental trials? The truth is, I wouldn’t be making peace with my darkest fear in that scenario, either. Instead, I would become laser-focused on seeking out and latching onto any information to support a belief that I could still beat this. I would shut out everything else. Because the alternative seems like nothing but misery and grief — hell on earth. In other words, no way to experience your one wild and precious life, especially when your days are numbered.
Countless cancer patients have found their way to this conclusion after being told that their illness will kill them and it’s time to put their affairs in order. Sometimes it’s fantasy, but sometimes it isn’t. I recently read about a woman who lived my worst fear a decade ago, before effective treatments for advanced melanoma were well understood. She was told her cancer was terminal and nothing could be done. But as the mother of a young daughter, she simply couldn’t accept that result, even if it was what the facts indicated. She sought as many other opinions as she needed and ended up leaving her family for three whole years to try various treatments across the country. Some of the treatments didn’t work, but enough of them did. She’s alive today with no evidence of disease. Both she and her daughter were deeply traumatized by the precariousness of the mother’s life and her long absence, but her child was ultimately able to grow up with her mother back in her life and is now a thriving young woman.
All of this is to say, I have a slightly more complicated view now about why people might choose to dismiss the evidence they’re presented with, to reject our usual ways of knowing. If evidence-based reality is existentially intolerable to you, by definition you cannot live there. You must create a different world to inhabit.
I’m using this lens to try to understand the attack on the Capitol this past week — why it happened the way it did, why it has so many apologists, and what it means for the future of the country. As I see mounting evidence of fringe ideas becoming mainstream among regular-seeming people, I can’t help but compare the situation to my metastasized cancer, which has put illness and fear at the forefront of my life but also wisdom and clarity. It feels like we’re afflicted with a potentially fatal disease, and we haven’t yet discovered how to fight it effectively. Not long ago, I assumed that the best treatment was simply for first-world inhabitants to persuade enough second-worlders that our team is better. But now I think that ship has sailed and was misguided anyway. We need another approach as things look grimmer and grimmer.
I won’t pretend to know what exactly the most effective treatment might be, but I think it will be based at least in part on the understanding that people go to the second world because it helps them fend off their worst fears and keep some deeply-held hopes alive. To be clear, I still don’t have much sympathy for the individual choice to live in a world based on delusion, and I have no inclination to validate the fear of losing some perceived advantage over other people. (Also, if we’re going to be reckoning with our individual fears, I’m going to need to be heard on fascism, misogyny, and climate change.) But I think this perspective might be at least somewhat constructive as a macro-level principle. As we continue to discuss and practice politics, craft policy supported by tax dollars, create culture, seek real unity and common ground, and generally coexist together, maybe this question should become more central to our aspirations:
How do we, the richest country in the world, foster a society where all of us are more able to live as if our worst fears won’t come true?
Thank you so much for reading Evening Docket. This free newsletter is my way of processing what’s happening in our content-saturated era and turning it into something that makes sense to me — although I do realize that I’m just creating more content. Still, I hope it helps you, too, somehow.
If you received this installment by email, please feel free to forward it to anyone else you think would enjoy reading it. To receive every installment, subscribe below! If you already subscribe, know how much I appreciate you, and please attempt to teach your email program that Evening Docket emails are not promotions or spam.