Trump, Truth and the Power of Contradiction
From the standpoint of classical logic and mathematics, what’s bad about a contradiction is that it leads to absurdity. You can derive any proposition you wish from a contradiction in a few simple steps. Yet that’s precisely what makes them so useful from the point of view of political psychology — indeed, the more blatant the contradiction the better.
.. Walking a comment back says you are taking responsibility for what you’ve said. Blatant contradiction puts the responsibility back onto the shoulders of the listener. If I simply deny what I earlier affirmed and act as if nothing has happened, then you are left having to decide what I really meant. And psychology, as well as common sense, tells us that human beings are prone to “confirmation bias.” That is, we tend to interpret evidence so that it conforms to what we already believe.
.. But it is also because when a person says something as well as its opposite, his listeners can infer that he really believes whichever statement they wish him to believe.
.. To some, that he is contradicting himself so freely shows that he really doesn’t care what “they” (read: the news media, liberals, women, minorities) think. The signal this sends is one of strength: Only the strong can afford not to care.
.. In George Orwell’s “1984,” the protagonist is tortured until he agrees that two plus two equals five. The point, his torturer makes clear, is to make him see that there is no objective truth other than what the party says is true. That’s the deep power of contradiction. Repeated enough, political contradictions can lull us into giving up on critical thought altogether. And once that happens, we risk giving up on truth. At which point contradictions — and everything other than power — will no longer matter.