EmotionalTruth
Emotional Truth
"Truthiness — the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support."
Stephen Colbert
People spread false information for many reasons, some to make money (using ‘clickbait’); others to cause trouble and undermine or destabilise rivals; and many (perhaps most) to impress, amuse or inform people in their circle of ‘friends’ (which they often do without malice or forethought).
But there is a significant minority who circulate fake or misleading materials with the express intention of promoting what they consider to be a deeper ‘emotional truth’, regardless of the ‘facts’ and often in contradiction to scientific consensus. This page attempts to define this last group and explore some of the implications that its activities are having on society.
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1   Emotional Truths Should Know Their Place
Emotional truth is about what people feel regardless of evidence. Emotional truth provides the likes of antivaxxers, pro-lifers and homophobes with a justification for circulating rumours, lies and falsehoods — and inevitably manipulating the truth in the process. They do this because they see the general message as broadly in line with their convictions or beliefs — in posting such material they are essentially making a statement about their views and confirming their allegiance to the cause or group. And for these people, the end invariably justifies the means. The same can be said of die-hard nationalists (see below).
Deeper emotional truths seem to come into play when people’s understandings or beliefs are threatened or contradicted, and this seem to apply most frequently in respect of religion, race, culture, gender or identity. Emotional truths are also evident in respect issues such as animal rights, veganism and vaccination, and increasingly, concern about climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. Here are some examples:
•    belief in the ‘truth’ of holy texts (ie ‘God’s word’) — “life begins at conception” (Christians); cows are revered as a symbol of life and may never be killed (Hindus); “one must never kill another living being” (Jains); etcetera;

•    the views of white supremacists, members of black power movements, and some ultra-orthodox Jews (the “Chosen Ones”);

•    Islamophobia, where people see Islam as a threat to their way of life and freedom of speech;

•    homophobia — the rejection of everything the LGBTQ+ community stands for, including same-sex marriage (often because it is not sanctioned by their culture or religion); and

•    the no-platforming of people whose views are seen as unacceptable and thought likely to cause offence to people of faith, students or minority groups.
There is a place for emotional truths — in fiction (see Annex) — but it contributes little or nothing to building an educated and informed public. Indeed, it often distracts people from other, perhaps more pressing issues and has helped coarsen public debate and polarise opinion.
2   My Country, Right or Wrong[1]
Belief in ‘The Motherland’ can be considered a ‘emotional truth’, at least for passionate nationalists. [2]  In Russia this is something that the Kremlin has been keen to promote, not least by praising and working closely with the Russian Orthodox Church. [3]
To what extent deeper emotional truths lie behind the pretentions to power of unelected dictators or ruling cabals is unclear, but a diplomatic cable from the US Ambassador to Turkey leaked in 2010 noted that Recep Tayyip Erdogan had “unbridled ambition stemming from the belief God has anointed him to lead Turkey...” And one must assume that other dictators believe that they have a ‘God-given’ right to power (whether they believe in God or not!)

A kind of ‘higher truth’ might also be said to exist in the minds of charismatic leaders in some liberal democracies — the term ‘charismatic’ derives from the Greek ‘gift of grace’.
Sverre Spoelstra wrote about this recently, echoing the New York Times’ wry observation that Trump is “trying to create an atmosphere in which reality is irrelevant”. Spoelstra observes that “by demonstrating a lack of interest in the past and the present, charismatic leaders create the image that they belong to a higher sphere” with their vision “seen as a ‘higher truth’ by the leader’s supporters or, alternatively, as a ‘great lie’ by their opponents.”[4] See below for further about this.
3   How Emotional Truths Impact on Public Debate
"Misinformation is not like a plumbing problem you fix. It is a social condition, like crime, that you must constantly monitor and adjust to.”      Tom Rosenstiel
Here are some examples of where ‘deeper emotional truths’ appear to have influenced or driven actions which have had an adverse impact on public understanding, attitudes or behaviour, or threaten to undermine the democratic process:
•    British women seeking an abortion have been directed by Google to “pregnancy crisis centres” linked to religious organisations where Pro-Lifers would try to persuade them not to have a termination;  [5]
•    the Alt Right in the US was determined to destroy Hillary Clinton’s Presidential aspirations, and by any means, including circulating false information about her on social media — one advert, which went viral, was designed to affect voter turnout (it told people that that they could vote from home); another, that the election would be run over two days (which was also not true);
•    some Brexiteers and Remainers deployed highly dubious tactics during the 2016 EU Referendum Campaign, including Vote.Leave’s infamous message on a bus: “We send the EU £350 a week let’s fund our NHS instead”, and the advert (shown here) which implied that 76 million Turks could come to the UK after being granted ‘visa-free travel’ by the EU. Achieving Brexit was more important than understanding the more complex truth. [6]
One Twitter troll named ‘True Brit’, who was tracked down and confronted by someone he had been sending unwanted Islamophobic comments, shrugged off the question of why he was willing to circulate demonstrably false facts and claims, by saying “You don’t know what’s true or not these days, anyway”.
4   Social Media's Dilemma
So often Facebook fails to take down false information from its platforms. Indeed, its recent decision to allow politicians to make false statements in paid advertisements provoked Democratic senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren to take out a Facebook ad that deliberately made false statements — Warren ‘claimed’ that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook had just “endorsed Donald Trump for re-election” in 2020. This statement appeared above a photograph of an Oval Office meeting between the two. The statement isn’t true (as the ad made clear), but according to Nick Clegg[7], the company’s policies banning false statements from paid advertisements “do not apply to politicians.”  This is tacit support for people spreading their emotional truths.

Pre-election political brawls aside, Facebook cannot possible monitor the sheer volume of traffic on its various platforms (including encrypted exchanges on WhatsApp).
In just 60 seconds Facebook users are uploading more than quarter of a million photos — and on WhatsApp, one million photos and more than 29 million messages. Indeed, despite Facebook’s colossal wealth and technical expertise, the organisation is only able to identify and take down a tiny fraction of the false information circulating on its platforms. It faces a permanent tension between “allowing free speech” and “promoting a safe and authentic community” and preventing the spread of emotional truths and other mis/disinformation.
Facebook says it “works hard to find the right balance” between the two and believes that “reducing the distribution of inauthentic content strikes that balance.”[8]   Basically, Facebook allows people to post mis/disinformation as “a form of expression” but says it is not going to show this at the top of News Feed. This is hardly reassuring.[9]
5   The Deep Truth about 'Fake News'
How polarisation surrounding emotional truths plays out in society was examined in one study in 2016, which analysed what was happening on social media in the week following the Presidential Election in the US, and in particular “a unique dataset of 60 million tweets referencing the US election.” It identified: “a richly complex media landscape for conversations about living in the ‘post truth’ world.” Researchers mined through the data for all the tweets about ‘post truth’ and ‘fake news’ to see who was talking about these topics and what they were saying.
What they found was that two very different conversations were taking place: “The post-truthers were mostly elite media commentators engaging in ‘navel gazing’ by talking about each other and themselves” whilst the ‘fake news aficionados’, mostly grassroots groups and independent media outlets, including a large number of Trump supporters, who “actively criticized the ‘establishment’ media as untrustworthy and unreliable.
These people were much more prone to trust information from authoritarian sources aligned with their worldview than the ‘authoritative’ sources (like scientific expertise or official media outlets)...
The liberal-minded critics saw a failure of establishment media to present the facts reliably while the conservative-minded critics saw a failure of establishment media to represent their views of the world. Both had important things to say, yet each was talking past the other. While the ‘fake news’ critics sought to undermine the credibility of science by elevating their own authority figures, the ‘post truth’ critics argued that more people should trust the real media so that “we all behave more rationally.”
6   Populism
Populist politicians are masters of appealing to people’s emotional truths.[10]  They thrive on lies and false promises — it is relatively easy to fuel people’s emotions if you feed them fabricated stories of imaginary crises. A new book by Catherine Fieschi (former head of the Think Tank Demos[11] ) explores the phenomena. Here are a few edited extracts from an article by the author:

•   Populism has become a significant feature of mature democracies in the twenty-first century and the rise of populist parties is proving a powerful and disruptive force.
•    Populism is effective because it originates from within the democratic tradition and has been able to turn some of democracy’s key strengths against it — what Fieschi calls ‘Jiu-jitsu politics’.

•    Populism needs to be understood not simply as a response to globalization by the ‘disillusioned’ or ‘left behind’, but as a consequence of the digital revolution on our political and democratic expectations.

•    New dynamics unleashed by social media — the fantasy of radical transparency, the demand for immediacy and the rejection of expert truth and facts — have been harnessed by populism, enabling it to make unprecedented inroads into our political landscapes.
“Politicians have, of course, always dissembled, but the traditional political lie was designed to cover up an unpalatable fact. No one wanted to be caught lying. If accused, they had to explain (‘I didn’t inhale’, ‘I am not a crook’, ‘not … with that woman’, the dossier wasn’t ‘sexed-up’) and they might then fall from grace, face a public inquiry, or indulge in that staple of political redemption exercises, the televised apology.”

“Populist lying, by contrast, is designed to be seen — it is the opposite of a cover-up. In the populist playbook, lying itself is glorified; it is an instrument of subversion, its purpose to demonstrate that the liar will stop at nothing to ‘serve the people’. The lies are signals that these politicians are not bound by the usual norms of the liberal democratic elite. Liberals have virtue signalling — populists have outrage signalling. This is the politics of appealing to the gut over the brain.”

“Populists have been quick to turn the value placed on authenticity to their advantage. Not by striving to be truthful, but by demonstrating that they are authentic (or instinctively connected to the experience of ‘the people’, who are authentic) to the point of not caring about being shown to be liars — as long as the lies are told ‘in the interest of the people’. They tend to either sweep away the evidence that they lied with great nonchalance (well, I might have said that, but so what?), or flaunt the lie to show their chutzpah, their willingness to game the system — and to highlight the supposed hypocrisy or stupidity of whoever is being deceived.”

The deeper ‘emotional truth’ here is “the interest of the people”.
7   It's a Mad World
"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?” Ursula K. Le Guin
I have long thought the world is mad and was pleased to come across a paper by Michael Hauskeller, which maintains that: “The world has not gone mad. It has in fact always been mad... We need to give up the idea that the world is organised in a rational way.”

Hauskeller cites the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who argued that “at the heart of everything — and that includes us — is not reason but blind will. This, he wrote, explains why the world is in such a sorry state. We tend to assume that people do things and want things for good reasons. But very often we want things that it makes no sense to want because they are clearly harmful. When someone tries to reason with us, pointing out all the factual and logical errors we commit, we just ignore them and carry on as before.”
Hauskeller goes on to ask if there is anything we can do about this. “How do we keep our sanity in a world that seems to be getting more insane by the minute?” and he outlines various coping strategies that have been proposed by great writers of the past: “Schopenhauer thought we should find a way to negate the will and turn our backs on the world for good. Melville suggested amused detachment, Marcel Proust an escape into the world of art. Tolstoy found meaning and solace in faith, Dostoyevsky in universal love and Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in being grounded in God. Nietzsche thought we should embrace and love whatever happens to us, and Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that we should live in and for everything that is good and beautiful.” [See Annex for more examples.]

These strategies may well have provided comfort for these remarkable individuals, but they do nothing to tackle the problems of ‘blind will’ which is manifest today with a vengeance as a result of social media, mobile technology and artificial intelligence.
Conclusion
I trust it will be clear from this brief foray into emotional truth that we should not assume that many of the people who are circulating dodgy or deceitful information would be open to reasoned argument. Social media has enabled them to spread their poison / cause trouble with little or no sanctions or restraint. Indeed, the individuals involved believe that they are ‘doing the right thing’ and endorsing deeper truths.
Tackling the problem is turning out to be particularly difficult. A recent report by the Oxford Internet Institute concludes that many countries are struggling to find effective ways to curb the spread of disinformation and that “broadcast bans, the introduction of government-run fact-checking initiatives, and the use of existing laws or new legislation to regulate social media [12]  are often met with criticism and accusations of censorship” and “as a result, draft legislation is often slow to come to fruition.”[13]  There is also growing recognition that with some of the policies that have been tried there may be serious unintended consequences. [14]
Clearly society needs to step up efforts to find a solution to the problem — and the polarisation and division it causes — and we need to do this sooner rather than later given what’s at stake, the demise of civil society and democratic government. Sadly, this is not a problem that will go away soon. And tackling it will require more than logic and reason. Much more.
Annex:  In Defence of Fiction — but not disinformation!
"Many fiction writers and literary critics strive to say that, ‘the feeling created by a fictional story is sometimes truer than what results from reading the facts.’ Mark Twain called this ‘lying toward the truth’.”   Steve Yates
‘Fiction is a Lie That Tells the Truth’ [Abraham Rothberg]
“Fiction can introduce you into the lies and truths of other people's minds and hearts, to your own country and time, or strange, foreign places and other eras, into the most public forums and the most private scenes of human intimacy; it can make you see, hear, feel, love, hate, forgive, judge, understand, and yet not be bound by the consequences of all those activities, though you are there as a participant-observer in the most personal and informed ways. You may come to know Becky Sharp or Hester Prynne or Ivan Denisovich or Robert Jordan better than you know your own closest cronies. "
“You may learn more about the French Revolution from Charles Dickens's A TALE OF TWO CITIES and more about the American Civil War from Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND than from your history books, though not perhaps as accurately, more about America's racial problems from Mark Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN, more about how money and sex affect the lives of Americans through Theodore Dreiser's THE FINANCIER, SISTER CARRIE, and AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, than from the daily life around you. We know how and what these literary characters think and feel, how they conduct themselves and why, what happens to them more fully than we can know our families, our neighbors and our colleagues...
By unlocking secrets of the human heart and mind, fiction can allow us to know how people different from ourselves think and feel and live. The fiction may be both a lie — that is, a made-up, imagined untrue creation — and true —true to life and lives of others we might never otherwise know or meet, or cast light on those we do know and whose lives we are acquainted with, as well as give us insight into our own lives.”
‘Defining Emotional Truth’ [Mike Ruso]
"Great and enduring works of literature are said to have an emotional truth, a core emotional experience, that transcends the time and place in which they were written.”     Mike Ruso
“I grew up in the South and many of my family members are evangelical Christians, and abortion is a very emotional issue for them. Many evangelicals believe that daily birth control pills are a form of abortion because they prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall. Factually, that is absolutely false and a serious misunderstanding of birth control, which works by preventing ovulation — fertilization never takes place. 

Nevertheless, this emotional truth (birth control = abortion) is so strong, it was used recently in Supreme Court arguments opposing insurance coverage of contraception. Lawyers for the plaintiffs actually argued that the facts about birth control were irrelevant to the case because while wrong, their clients' held heartfelt religious beliefs. This is an instance of people allowing emotion to get in the way of truth. 

But that isn't what we're talking about when we talk about emotional truth, is it? No. In the context of writing fiction or CNF [Creative Nonfiction], we're talking about writing in such a way that readers feel the joy, sorrow, love, and hate that the characters feel. It is different than simply an erroneous belief shielded from evidence by emotion. The person who rejects emotional truth as truthiness is conflating these two things... 

The collision between our heartfelt beliefs and irrefutable facts can be a big source of internal conflict, especially when those beliefs make up our identity (as being anti-abortion is with evangelical Christian identity). A story about such a collision and how a character either accepts they are wrong and changes because of it, or stubbornly resists (and is also changed by such stubbornness) could reveal to a reader a core emotional experience that transcends the particular issue at hand. And that is what is meant by emotional truth.”
References
I should like to acknowledge the following papers, which have informed my views on emotional truth:

•    Mark Andrejevic: ‘People who spread deepfakes think their lies reveal a deeper truth’, The Conversation, 23 Jun 2019
•    Joe Brewer: ‘The Deep Truth about ‘Fake News’’, Art Plus Marketing, 16 Dec 2016
•    Catherine Fieschi: ‘Why Europe’s new populists tell so many lies – and do it so shamelessly’, The Guardian, 30 Sept 2019 — her new book is called ‘Populocracy: The Tyranny of Authenticity and the Rise of Populism’ [Agenda Publishing, 2019]
•    Michael Hauskeller: ‘It’s a mad world: but these great thinkers may help you understand the current political mess’, The Conversation, 7 Oct 2019
•    Abraham Rothberg: ‘Fiction is a Lie That Tells the Truth’, EdTek, 2009
•    Mike Ruso: ‘Defining Emotional Truth’, MikeRuso, May 2014
•    Sverre Spoelstra: ‘Donald Trump’s war on facts is the latest play in a long-established tradition to create a post-truth reality’, The Conversation, 24 October 19
•    Steve Yates: ‘Working definition: Emotional truth’, fictionandhistory, 3 March 2010

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Notes
1      This famous phrase is attributed to Stephen Decatur, in an after-dinner toast of 1816–1820: “Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!” This was later amended to: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” [This modification is often attributed to Carl Schurz.]

2      Nationalism is defined as "loyalty and devotion to a nation especially : a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups." Nationalism has a number of near-synonyms: “Patriotism is similar insofar as it emphasizes strong feelings for one’s country, but it does not necessarily imply an attitude of superiority. Sectionalism resembles nationalism in its suggestion of a geopolitical group pursuing its self-interest, but the group in question is usually smaller than an entire nation. Jingoism closely resembles nationalism in suggesting feelings of cultural superiority, but unlike nationalism, it always implies military aggressiveness.” [Merrian-Webster] It is sometimes said that patriotism is "pride in who you are" whilst nationalism is "pride in who you aren't".

3      This patriotic sentiment clearly plays a part in the Kremlin’s aggressive policy of ‘reflexive control’, which is explicitly designed to undermine / weaken western democracy. The strategy involves inter alia the wholesale manufacture and spreading of fake stories via the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency and its many proxies — and denying responsibility / inventing fanciful alternative explanations when things go wrong (as happened with the downing of MH17 over Ukraine and the Skripal poisonings). Ben Nimmo has written extensively about these tactics, see e.g. this article.
4      “Such future-oriented speech,” Spoelstra says, “cannot be fact-checked because it belongs to the domain of the potential, the as-yet-unrealised world of what might yet come to be."
"By lying about the facts, Trump and other post-truth leaders aim to deceive people into thinking more highly of them and their policies than they deserve... Trump’s lies are [also] as much a demonstration of power as they are statements that intend to deceive... What is new in post-truth leadership is not its disinterest in reality, but the way in which it demonstrates its otherworldliness: not by avoiding factual statements, but by showing contempt for their importance... In demonstrating his otherworldliness, a figure like Trump also creates a faith-based world in which he can define what is true."
Ian Hughes argues in The Conversationthat leaders with certain mental disorders may be incapable of carrying out the duties of office and may pose a danger to society. Trump, he says, "displays repeated and persistent behaviours consistent with narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. These behaviours include craving for adulation, lack of empathy, aggression and vindictiveness towards opponents, addiction to lying, and blatant disregard for rules and conventions, among others. The concern is that [such] leaders... may be incapable of putting the interests of the country ahead of their own personal interests. Their compulsive lying may make rational action impossible and their impulsiveness may make them incapable of the forethought and planning necessary to lead the country. They lack empathy and are often motivated by rage and revenge, and could make quick decisions that could have profoundly dangerous consequences for democracy. But, as he also points out, discussing the mental health of political leaders is highly controversial. Indeed, in the US “the ‘Goldwater Rule’ of the American Psychiatric Association states that it’s unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion concerning a public figure unless he or she has conducted an examination of that public figure and has been authorised to do so.”

5    This was exposed by an investigation in Nov 2018, which noted that researchers in the US found that pro-life centres had categorised themselves on Google Maps as abortion clinics. It is said that their websites are “expertly peppered with keywords and phrases like ‘abortion advice’ and ‘abortion help’” and the names of their clinics appear higher in Google’s search engine.
6      More recently, did Prime Minister Johnson’s insistence that the proroguing of Parliament — not only for an almost unprecedented 5 weeks period but at a critical time in the Brexit dispute — really have “nothing to do with Brexit”? Was not a deeper emotional truth at work here, achieving Brexit / “meeting the will of the 17.4 million who voted to leave the EU”?

7      The exemption has drawn particular attention due to Facebook’s decision to allow Trump to run an ad that was rejected by CNN for promoting a “demonstrably false” narrative about Joe Biden.

8      Sophia Rosenfeld explores this issue in her book ‘Democracy & Truth’: “Citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way.” She points out that there’s a tension at the heart of Western democracy between the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite of trusted experts. “What we are witnessing,” she says, “is the unravelling of the détente between these competing aspects of democratic culture.”

9      There are growing calls for Facebook to be split up. In terms of monopoly and consumer lock-in / choice Facebook is in a class of its own: the monthly users on the platforms that it owns (Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger & Instagram) number 6.2 billion and exceeds by some margin those using platforms owned by YouTube, WeChat, TikToc, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat combined (4.8 billion). Datamation describes Facebook as the “first major dominant product in the history of technology where the main reason for choosing it has almost nothing to do with product quality, or by the attributes created by the company. Everybody is on Facebook because everybody is on Facebook.”... Facebook's ‘monopoly on everybody’ means that “the company is in the position to abuse users without losing them... [it] forces competitors to actively contribute to Facebook's continued and growing dominance... or go out of business... [and] un-levels the playing field [representing] a barrier to entry to new competitors... Anti-trust legislation needs to be updated to include this new kind of monopoly.” 

10      Populism is defined as “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” [Oxford Dictionaries]

11      I can relate to the observation by the current head of Demos, Polly Mackenzie, that “After the Brexit referendum, the most depressing research I saw was from Britain Thinks, who argued that people didn’t mind not getting their £350m a week for the NHS because they never believed it in the first place... The problem is that possibilism is much more boring than populism, in the same way that a pony is more boring than a unicorn.”

12     Moreover, there also seems to be growing consensus that the social media platforms that carry much of this mis/disinformation are currently unwilling or incapable of taking it down, and a strong case can be made for splitting them up and seeking to make data an actual property right for the individual. Tim Wu’s new book argues for the break up of data monopolies and forcing companies to pay for data access with some of that money potentially used to fund a data watchdog. “We need a fair playing field where we’re trading data and information like financial markets are trading capital flows. We need the same kinds of regulation for data as finance.”

13      The report further notes that “There does not currently seem to be any quick fix that would allow governments to curb effectively the spread of disinformation through legislation without prompting criticism. Alternative solutions (‘information troops’, media literacy, etc.,) have had – thus far – mixed results or have been trialled on too limited a scale to assess accurately their success in the fight against disinformation. 

14      We need to learn from Germany’s heroic attempts to stamp out hate speech from social media platforms (by imposing heavy fines on platforms that failed to take in down within 24 hours — the NetzDG law). This made platforms very nervous to the extent of censoring material that might have been thought contentious, and groups complaining their material was being censored.
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