Addicted to Outrage

by Glenn Beck

  Fake news is baked into our system of government, and I contend, along with those of the founding era, that the citizen must have maximum freedom of thought, speech, and expression if we indeed intend to stay free. But we must also engage in critical thinking and exercise our responsibility if we are to retain our rights.

  I have deep and profound respect for those I may disagree with, but only if they have fixed reason firmly in its seat and asked the honest questions with boldness. We rarely see an honest question. We see “gotcha” questions, questions designed to trap or defeat an opponent. But how many times have you seen or heard a journalist ask an “honest question”? A question at whose heart is uncertainty, where, depending on the answer, anything could happen—not just in the interview but even in the life of the person asking the question. Honest questions are truly asked only by those who are still humble enough to actually still be seeking the truth. Most of us are no longer on that journey. It is why we become old, embittered, and calcified in our beliefs. It takes great courage to even ask the kind of question that could change the course of your life. But it takes even greater courage to accept the answer you get back when the truth is not in line with what you thought or want. It is at this point that each of us has a choice: accept it, grow, become stronger, and, yes, perhaps do some hard thinking and hard work to realign your life to what you now know is true, or ignore it. But if you ignore it, know that the cognitive dissonance in you will, over time, twist what you heard. It will corrode and allow the comfortable or convenient lie to rot your life like rust on steel. To me, this is what “follow your heart” means. Do your homework and search for the truth with great courage. Your feelings, hopes, or fears may want to pull you off course, but your heart, when coupled with reason, knows when something is true. Follow that path, no matter how frightening it may be.

  I really do understand the fear. It is frightening to think that you are wrong about a fundamental belief, and you begin to wonder what else you are wrong about. I don’t know, but when I began this journey twenty-five years ago, I found I was wrong about most things. Still today I am questioning, researching, and realigning. If you are not still questioning, learning, and making course adjustments, you either are Jesus or think you are. But, guessing that you are not actually Jesus, if you stay this course, life itself will crucify you in the end.

  I am wrong more than my fair share, and I am guessing that you are, too. That is normal and doesn’t bother me. What does bother me are those people who are so desperate to be right, to win or to grab power or fame, that they will knowingly lie, cheat, and con—even themselves.

  “An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public” (Talleyrand).

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  How to Think, Not What to Think

  Where there is doubt—there is freedom.

  —Latin proverb

  To truly answer the questions set forth at the beginning of this section, our search for what is true must begin with how do we even find what is true? What source can you trust? Especially when we are taught to assume that those who have opposing views are wrong, know nothing, and therefore have nothing to teach us. How do we find the truth or avoid errors when we will accept nothing but absolute acceptance of the entirety of our theories, ideas, or policies?

  For instance, I have been accused of being a “dangerous global warming denier.” Just that sentence alone should give each of us pause. My crime? I believe that the globe is warming as much as we can trust and verify the trends. But for this example, let me accept the current claim that the world has warmed by .7 degrees in the last hundred years. I also accept that man can do significant damage to the planet and has done some damage over the Industrial Age. It makes sense to me that belching toxins into the air is not good for any of us, including the planet and its other inhabitants over time. It is one reason I own a home that is as close to 100 percent solar as I can get, and if it needs a backup due to lack of sun, I use wind power and natural gas, the cleanest fuel I can burn without turning to our friend the atom. My home was built with the maximum R rating and can withstand temperatures of twenty below without heat and power and keep a steady temperature of sixty-eight degrees with no more than one fireplace. It isn’t something I was promised, it is something that we have done for almost three weeks. I promise you, Leo DiCaprio’s house is not as green as my home.

  My daughter, who lives next door, has gone so natural, recyclable, and reusable that she considered for half a minute the “using moss for toilet paper” thing. Thank God she didn’t, or I would never have been able to eat any of her yummy pies. She believes the same as I do, “not sure,” “could be,” but we all should do what we can to be good stewards, even if it turns out all of the science is bunk. My grandparents didn’t believe in the “coming ice age” that was the big scientific rage back in the 1970s, but they still reused, recycled, and fought against waste.

  Here is where I differ with the climate-change crowd. The cost of doing what you say will help will cripple the global economy. People will starve. This is not a reason to NOT act, as it certainly was not an acceptable reason when the South made that same argument against freeing its slaves. However, if science has shown that your suggested action will not effectively make any significant impact and could possibly make things worse, how is it you expect my blind obedience?

  So, am I a denier? Dangerous? Should be silenced or even jailed, as some global warming activists now believe should happen to anyone who doesn’t buy in 100 percent?

  When activists were insisting that we all begin to drive electric cars, I asked where the electricity would come from, as the outlets are not magic. I was shouted down by those outraged that I hated polar bears. Studies now prove that the amount of CO2 put into the environment by electric cars by 2025 will be worse than that produced by gas-powered cars because of new clean technology for the combustion engine. In fact, the average gasoline combustion engine in 2018 produces less than 1 percent of the smog-causing pollutants engines did in 1960. Think about that: a 99 percent reduction, meaning electric cars have a higher net carbon footprint than do gasoline-powered cars. So will we now have to shame those who drive a Prius or jail Elon Musk?

  This is why we must first fix reason firmly in its seat before we begin any search for truth. But we mustn’t accept anyone else’s word on truth. Do not take any fact from this book unless you have checked it out yourself. Do your own homework, internalize the search, and the truth you will find. You will be able to defend it, if you have made it yours. But even then, your search for truth has not ended. New facts, conditions, and variables will come to light. You must always approach truth with the eyes of a child, always exploring new ways of thinking.

  Certainty and a lack of intellectual diversity always lead to dark places. When you demand absolute acceptance of your theories and back your “science” with arguments of moral outrage, you end up having to shove, shout, and, in the end, shoot.

  I look at global warming theory the same way I look at religion, just as I do with my faith in God. I will do all that I can by choice, as I study it out and remain open to new information on both sides, and if turns out I was wrong, it didn’t hurt me; in fact, it made me a better person, citizen, and steward. Unfortunately, the advocates also look at climate change as a religion, the difference being that the hard-core advocates look at it much the way Torquemada did in 1490. Submit, confess, or be silenced.

  But the problem isn’t just with global warming or on the left. It is gravely advanced on the left, as they have received virtually no real pushback from the mainstream media. Again, see Evergreen College. If that had happened with hard-line fascists, the school would have been closed down by now. When you compare the coverage, rightly so, of the Nazi rally in the summer of 2017 compared to the Antifa riots the same year, that are still going on (see Portland Antifa riots, June 2018), it is not hard to see why the far left is
worse. They have not felt any real ramifications of their actions yet.

  So how do we find truth and avoid falling into political team sports?

  HONEST QUESTIONING OVER BLINDFOLDED FEAR

  In 1938, a physicist named Enrico Fermi emigrated to the United States to help his wife escape the strongly anti-Semitic Italian Racial Laws. He was enlisted in the Manhattan Project. One day, he found himself in the company of a couple of U.S. Army officers. After being told that some general was a “great” general, he innocently asked how they had arrived at that conclusion. Carl Sagan recounts the dialogue in his book The Demon-Haunted World:

  “I guess it is a general who’s won many consecutive battles.”

  “How many?”

  After some back and forth, they settled on five.

  “What fraction of American generals are great?”

  Fermi, a mathematician, continued to ponder the issue, ultimately determining that there is no such thing as a great general. Assuming the armies are equally matched, the winning or losing of a battle is purely chance, the result of a million small chaotic events that are outside a general’s control. And if it was random, the odds of winning a given battle is one of out two. Winning two battles in a row would be one out of four, and so on. So by simple arithmetic, the odds of winning five consecutive battles ends up being one in thirty-two. Only about 3%.

  Sagan tells us how Fermi concluded the example of critical thinking, saying “Now tell me, has any of them won TEN consecutive battles?”

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  THINK

  The average time Americans spend on a story is 7 SECONDS—translation: Most read only the headline.

  We talk about fake news, but how do we know what is fake and what is real? To find that answer while in discussion with most people, it is usually quite simple: Did you read more than the headline? Did you read the entire article? Who wrote it? What was the platform you read it on? When was it written? (This last one is amazingly hard to get people to even check: THE DATE. How many stories have been sent around and stirred outrage that were written years before?) Does the story sound too good to be true? Have you found it on any other sources? How many? What were they? How many sources (“witnesses”) were there in the article itself? Were the sources in the article named? If so, have you looked them up? If not, why? Did you go back and see how the reporter phrased their connection to the event described? I.e.: sources close to X, sources in and around X, sources that have spoken to X, and, my favorite, “thirty-two sources that include XYZ.” Well, wait, that list included friends of the subject and “experts” who have no connection to X or the event. Just doing this will improve the quality of your information and a reduction of dopamine and cortisol, as it will reduce your stress and outrage a great deal. We need to learn to be skeptical again. Ask honest questions and weigh it out in our mind like Fermi did. There may be more than one answer. Both binary options may be wrong—or both are correct. “Children who play violent games tend to be more violent when they grow up.” We tend to rush to convict or defend. But did the game cause the violence, or do violent children prefer playing violent video games? Very likely, “both are true.”

  Finding the original source when you can, asking the right honest questions, having a humble and open mind, and seeking other options than just the binary choice presented are good places to start, but you also need what Carl Sagan described as a good baloney detection kit. He felt that a kit like this would teach us what NOT to do and would help us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. So, I have created a Baloney Detection Kit for 2018. Here goes:

  Argument from Authority. Did someone just suggest you surrender your own judgment to the decisions of others? “President Trump has a secret plan to take down the Communist regime in China. Because he’s the president, we should just trust him; after all he was elected to make these kinds of decisions.” Ayn Rand once said, “Trust nothing above the verdict of your own mind.” Sure, Trump may be smart, and yes, he was elected and is the president, but anytime someone suggests you need to surrender your own capacity to examine evidence and use reason to evaluate something, you should certainly be skeptical. God gave you senses and a brain—use them!

  Argument from Adverse Consequences. “If he hadn’t acted, things would have been much worse.” Ever heard that type of argument? This was used by the Obama administration many times over the course of his two terms, usually related to the economy or unemployment: “If Obama hadn’t bailed out GM, the economy truly would have crashed” or “If we don’t regulate puddles on rural farm properties in Idaho, we won’t have clean drinking water in Seattle.” This is called suggesting that adverse consequences will ensue and is often used to justify action when the cure ends up being worse than the disease.

  Argument Ad Hominem. Is the argument against the concept or against the person? Next time you’re listening to or witnessing a political or philosophical debate, watch out for instances where one side makes an attack against the person as opposed to the subject of the debate. Attacks “ad hominem,” against the person, generally indicate weakness of argument against the subject up for discussion. When the statement “Firearms are used by private citizens for self-defense over 1 million times per year in the U.S.” is met with, “Have you noticed Donald Trump’s comb-over blows up like a sail when it’s windy?” it’s a good bet one side is armed with facts and the other is armed only with insults.

  Argument from Ignorance. Don’t you love it when someone points to the lack of evidence for something as proof that it must be true? “The fact that we don’t have any evidence of a UFO/aliens visiting Earth proves the government is covering up UFOs” or “The fact that we have zero reports of police brutality against minorities just means the media is biased.” Presenting negative evidence as a demonstration of proof of something doesn’t always mean the argument is wrong, but it certainly should cause you to raise a skeptical eyebrow.

  Observational Selection. “School shootings in Parkland and Sandy Hook prove that school shootings are on the rise.” When someone selectively identifies a few examples as proof of an overall trend, you should always ask to see the complete data set. DOJ crime statistics show that firearm-related deaths in schools are down 75 percent since the mid-1990s, but throwing out a few traumatic or glaring examples (and expressing outrage about them!) is supposedly proof that empirical data is wrong. Objective evaluation of all the available data is necessary to fully and reasonably evaluate any subject.

  Argument through Intimidation. Be wary of pleas that appeal to emotion. “We have to save the children! If you support gun rights, you support children being murdered!” Arguments designed to overwhelm facts and reason with emotion, guilt, or shame should generally be dismissed.

  Statistic of Small Numbers. People love to point out one or two personal examples to disprove evidence-based arguments. When you cite a statistic that demonstrates home-schooled students dramatically outscore public-school students on SAT tests and someone says, “Well, I went to public high school and I got 1500,” that’s good evidence they don’t have any other evidence. (But good for them on the score!)

  Suppressed Evidence and Half-Truths. Watch out for contradictory interpretations of the same actions. “Trump has separated families and is keeping kids in dog cages, proving he’s a racist pig!” But “Obama only separated families and kept kids in dog cages because it was required by the law” (that is, if you can get them to even admit that Obama kept kids in dog cages at all). If it’s wrong when one person or party does it, it should follow that it is wrong when another person or party does the same.

  Inconsistency Bias. It’s always fun when people are selective about when to trust and use stats versus when they’ll choose to ignore them. The temperature going up about .5 degrees over the last hundred years is proof of anthropogenic global warming, but health care costs going up by over 25 percent per year since Obamacare was passed is not evidence that gover
nment-funded health care causes imbalances in the normal supply/demand of market economics. This type of inconsistency is usually a good indicator of irrational and emotionally driven bias and should at least raise doubts about the argument.

  Non Sequiturs. “The stock market won’t crash because Trump is a good businessman.” This type of non sequitur represents a logical fallacy based on the belief in one thing overwhelming logical deduction. The stock market rose by over 60 percent while Obama was president. Because he was a good businessman? You know you’ve fallen into this trap when someone says back to you, “By that logic, then this and this are also true.” Really what they are saying is, “B doesn’t necessarily follow A.”

  Slippery Slope Fallacy. Beware of the slippery-slope argument. Sometimes the slippery slope is true and should be examined, but it is proof of nothing. “If we let Democrats regulate bump stocks, soon they will come for all guns” or “If we allow Republicans to outlaw partial-birth abortions, soon women will lose all rights to their own bodies.” Again, it isn’t that the argument of a slippery slope doesn’t sometimes prove to be true (ask a Holocaust survivor about having to wear armbands), but if the ONLY argument someone offers is that A or B is a slippery slope to C, it might mean a little more examination is in order.

  Softened Language Fallacy. Beware of “weasel words”; when someone renames something to make it more (or less) sinister, it’s time to have your guard up. When a “war” becomes a “police action” or “aborting a human baby” becomes “planned parenthood,” you usually know they’re hiding behind language and labels instead of presenting a reasoned, evidence-based argument.