CSB time:
So yesterday, after making a comment about lawyers and used car salesmen, I was subjected to a half-hours' worth of enthusiastic gushing from my turbo-conservative landlady.
Lawyers are basically paid mercenaries, she said, people paid to present a point of view, which is true as far as that goes. But when I referred to some of them as "paid liars," and that I regarded them as a necessary evil and that we could agree to disagree here, she shook her head, and angrily "corrected" me--she does this when people disagree with her, since she can't tolerate people with differing points of view in her personal sphere, and bludgeons you with her point over and over and over again until you agree with her.
The general gist of her argument was that "truth" was a highly subjective thing and depended on your point of view. She seems to regard "facts" as strongly-held opinions, "fact" and "truth aren't really the same thing at all, and that their actual reality really depends on whether or not you choose to accept them and how many other people you can get to accept them by argument.
In other words, Facts are nothing more than strongly held opinions, and if you can lie convincingly enough or smash enough opposing points of view, then they become reality, whether or not "reality" matches up or not. Belief literally trumps reality, and people who can convincingly argue in favor of things that aren't actually "true" are completely awesome.
Of course, she said, a lawyer had the freedom to be a bleeding heart if he wanted,and handle cases for free or whatever. Domestic violence or some other social crusade or whatever. She said this a bit disparagingly, mostly as an afterthought, or a halfhearted attempt to make them more appealing to me--I honestly don't think she was completely aware of how she sounded, but she doesn't have much practice with talking to non-wingnuts. Other people don't much concern her, really. Then she started to froth at the mouth about the people who sued tobacco companies, since she sees that as poor, stupid people trying to steal money from people who have more than they do. I made an excuse and left.
When I got back she was ready to resume the "argument" because...I hadn't agreed with her, so I obviously didn't understand, and that bothered her. Like, a lot.
She's a climate-change denier, but she goes back and forth from "It's not happening," to "Who cares if it is? Climate has always changed and if we're contributing to it, oh well." And while she's about as nonreligious as they come, she honestly wasn't aware that the GOP is THAT infested with theocrats, fascists and young-Earthers (she refuses to believe that YECs are a majority view among religious conservatives, or even a significant minority), because she willingly chooses to insulate herself from news and information that runs contrary to her own opinions,or what she'd prefer to believe.
Anecdata aside, the point here is that there seems to be a very, very large percentage of conservatives, religious and otherwise, in this country who honestly DON'T see things like "fact" and "truth" in the same way that other people do, and don't use those words the we way do. They think that these things are negotiable and subjective, and depend solely on the strength of how much you believe in them, or sway other people to your way of thinking by argument and rhetoric--experimental and statistical validation is far, far less important than the strength of your argument. People like Schlafly, my wingnut relatives, the people I work with and my landlady honestly think that scientific fact can be decided by a team of lawyers sitting in a courtroom, and that that settles the matter regardless of what any amount of experimentation and real-world statistic says. If anything, the MORE utterly unlike reality it is, the more pleased they are with it. Old Viking made that point relatively recently. Other people noted it years ago. To be sure, it's seen on both sides of the political spectrum...but its roots on the political right run very, very deep.
Ideology trumps reality--and that's what they think "objective truth" is. Everything boils down to political framing, regardless of what's real.
