The other day I read in the next-to-latest edition of BBC History about how the BBC was swamped with complaints about a program that depicted a Roman Legion Commander as dark-skinned. The facts – lots of them – prove that while the Romans were imperialist bastards, they didn’t give a damn about skin color. Their upper class, all across the empire, had various skin tones. So did their slaves. Power and wealth mattered, not skin color.

Yet, to this day, people deny this, along with scores of other matters that go against what they want to believe, and in this time of “pick your own news” and pick only your own facts, this trend of denialism is worsening, certainly in the United States, and apparently in at least some of Europe.

So why do intelligent people believe things that are not so? It’s not primarily a matter of intelligence. In fact, studies have shown that intelligent and well-informed people, whether conservative or liberal politically, are often more likely to use their knowledge in support of matters that are not accurate or true than are less informed individuals.

In psychological terms, denialism is a person’s choice to deny reality as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth.

In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively straight-forward. Present strong evidence, or evidence of a strong expert consensus. Unfortunately, when scientific advice presents a picture that threatens someone’s perceived interests or ideological worldview, large numbers of people will reject those facts. The strength of rejection turns out to be related to someone’s political, religious or ethnic identity, and the strength of those identities.

In short, denial is notoriously resistant to facts because it isn’t about facts in the first place. Political or scientific denial, as well as other forms of denial, are an expression of identity – usually in the face of perceived threats to that identity.

And, unfortunately, right now, a great number of facts threaten a great number of personal identities, and many of those facts don’t appear to be going away.

I was recently featured on Con-Tinual’s “Hot Off the Press” program, along with other authors.

The Facebook version is live now at https://www.facebook.com/james.nettles/videos/6641981779153027 .

The U-Tube version should go live in a few days at: https://www.youtube.com/c/ConTinualConvention

Just because people feel strongly and voice those feelings persistently at high volume doesn’t mean that they’re right. It usually does mean than they’re feeling angry and frustrated. Sometimes, those frustrations are justifiable, as in the case of people who’ve been denied equal rights and fair treatment under law for generations.

And sometimes, they’re anything but justified. Like many Americans, I’m more than a little tired of those who shout and scream that the last election was stolen. It wasn’t. They lost fair and square, as shown by the numbers, counted in more states by Republicans than by Democrats, but the people who stormed the Capital on January 6th, as well as many others, continue to refuse to believe that. But such individuals equate their “cause” with those of civil rights protestors and black and other activists.

The difference between the two “groups” is simple. The civil rights and most other activists have the law and the facts on their side. They also had the numbers of the election results. The “Trump-related activists” just have anger that they didn’t win an election that Trump then tried to steal. They’re also angry that the other guys might have gotten a little more power. So they shout and scream louder.

The same is true of the conflict arising over vaccinations. I’ve read and heard a great deal from both sides, but the plain fact is that vaccinations work on an individual level, and the Covid vaccinations have a higher level of effectiveness than any flu vaccine, as well as many others.

All the arguments against the vaccinations are, from what I can tell, based on the literature, flawed or theoretical. The facts are simple. Over 93% [roughly] of the hospitalizations and deaths are among the unvaccinated. So the vaccines don’t last forever. Many don’t. So they don’t stop the spread. Of course, they don’t, not when anywhere from thirty to fifty percent [or more] of the population, depending on the state and locale, aren’t vaccinated.

Yet far too many Americans, including many considered intelligent, ignore the basic numbers in so many areas and argue, vociferously, on the basis of feelings not grounded in hard fact or grounded in hard facts that are largely irrelevant.

Millionaires argue for lower taxes, saying that all that excess wealth creates jobs, and it does, but far too many of those jobs pay so little that those who hold them live below the poverty line, and with each reduction in tax rates for the wealthy income inequality and the federal deficit and debt increase.

The numbers show that negative media and Facebook presentations gain more supporters than balanced or positive ones, which is one case where following the numbers “works,” at least for those owning those media outlets.

Just follow the hard basic numbers and learn what they mean, not what you think they mean.

The so-called labor shortages facing the U.S. today are the result of a number of underlying factors, some of which have been ignored or dismissed.

A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis reveals that more than three million baby-boomers retired early. While the study doesn’t and likely can’t quantify the reasons, the most probable reasons are attractive incentives to retire early, discomfort with COVID in the workplace, and layoffs or forced retirements of older workers.

In addition, I know, if anecdotally, of hundreds of senior white collar job layoffs across a range of institutions and professions, and most of those individuals are going to find it difficult, if not impossible to find similar or equivalent positions, which will mean that many are unlikely to return to the workforce unless absolutely necessary. Law firms also aren’t hiring as many law school graduates as in previous years. As a result, those remaining in many organizations are being pressured to produce more, and those workplaces are becoming more stressful, which is leading to more departures and retirements. And paradoxically, the result is a slowly growing shortage of people with the same skills as those who were forced out, but those who were forced out appear reluctant to re-enter the workforce under current conditions.

I also know a number of small-business people who have been looking for workers, sometimes for well over a year, but can’t find people who even want to interview. I see signs everywhere saying, “Now Hiring,” or the equivalent. So there’s clearly an imbalance between the jobs that are open and what they pay and/or require in terms of working conditions and those who are unemployed or seeking jobs.

In certain fields, those imbalances have existed for years. There are far more trained singers, either classical or in any other musical genre, than there are available jobs. The same is true of theatre arts graduates. Creative MFA programs turn out far more would-be authors than can be published.

Yet there are shortages of workers in skilled trades.

The other day, I spent some time at a highly regarded and accredited post-high-school technical training school. While the institution’s graduates are in demand, those available jobs are located in other towns and cities. For example, there are jobs available for every automotive technician being graduated – if they’re willing to leave Cedar City. At around 50,000 people, Cedar City just isn’t big enough to provide jobs for all of them. So while their skills are needed elsewhere, the “entry costs” [i.e., housing, transportation, moving expenses] to relocate to those communities are often almost prohibitive. And if a family has two parents working, which has become more and more economically necessary, relocation may cost the other parent a job.

This doesn’t occur just here, either. In many east coast areas, people are commuting hours each way because they can’t afford decent housing and schools for their children closer to their jobs. Women often can’t work because they can’t find reliable, affordable, and decent childcare.

But, so far, I don’t see politicians and businesses addressing these and other structural imbalances… and with the comparatively smaller numbers of workers in generations younger than the baby-boomers, these worker shortages/imbalances aren’t going away any time soon.

At the time when the Founding Fathers codified freedom of speech, they had few illusions about the press or its truthfulness, but at that time, they were used to untruthfulness being applied more to character and personal acts, or to failures in acting responsibly. While there were instances of false news and manufactured blatant non-personal falsehoods, since media consisted largely of local newspapers and broadsheets, the impact of such was largely restricted to specific and limited numbers of cities.

Even with the growth of newspaper chains in the 1890s, it took significant personal and corporate resources to manufacture and spread totally false and incorrect news on a wide regional or national scale. This was largely the case until roughly the early 1990s, when the internet and low-cost and sophisticated electronics made low-budget national media campaigns possible, including those spreading total falsehoods. But the full impact of the Media Revolution didn’t really register on the public consciousness until after the Founding of Fox News in 1996, and particularly after Roger Ailes became CEO in 2001.

The greatest danger of false news is that so much of it is designed to appeal to people’s emotions, rather than to their intelligence, and it’s often so well designed that even highly intelligent people are sucked into believing things which are factually untrue. A peer-reviewed study by researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France has found that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions as did more trustworthy news sources, such as CNN, BBC, or the World Health Organization.

Under current statutory and case law, it is perfectly legal to print absolute falsehoods, no matter how untrue or outrageous, so long as they do not cause verifiable and provable damage to an individual, and usually that damage must have an economic component.

One of the legal rationales for this is the idea that any law that criminalizes falsehoods places the definition of a falsehood in hands of the government, which can and, in the past, has led to the destruction of freedom of speech.

In the end, the only thing that can halt the spread and growth of misinformation, falsehoods, and disinformation is for individuals to monitor their sources of information for accuracy, rather than for comfort – and that’s largely contrary to human nature, which means that false news is here to stay. Because it is here to stay, it’s likely that a greater number of politicians will espouse views and actions unsupported by facts or even reality.

Welcome to the world of newspeak.