The Myths People Believe

by Tom Kando

I was chatting with a Republican friend at my health club. Just a friendly chat, nothing political. I mentioned that our newspaper - the Sacramento Bee - is going down, like so many other newspapers, due to the Internet revolution. For instance, our newspaper is discontinuing Saturday deliveries. I told my friend that I deplore this, because I enjoy reading a printed newspaper with my morning coffee rather than reading from my computer screen. Also, I want to get the local news.

His reply was that newspapers are useless anyway, because they are just a bunch of lies and propaganda.

This reminded me of Trump, who believes and says that the media are the enemy of the people, echoing what dictators have said throughout history.

This is, of course, a falsehood. The truth is the opposite. A free press and the first amendment are the most important guarantee that our society remains a democracy and that people remain informed. American newspapers distinguish between facts and opinions. The latter are on the editorial and opinion pages. The American press - the Fourth Estate - is our democracy’s life jacket. The fact that many millions of Americans believe the opposite, along with the president, is tragic. These people’s preferred source of information is the Internet, which is incredibly unreliable. While digital has the advantage of providing access to many different news outlets, I am not sure that most people bother  to discriminate between (correct) information and misinformation, both of which are plentiful on the Internet.

This prompted me to make a list of other similar myths, stupid and wrong beliefs, to which vast numbers of Americans - possibly a majority - subscribe:

Error #2: “The government is the problem, not the solution.” We can thank Ronald Reagan for popularizing this stupidity. One does not need to have read Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to understand the “Social Contract” theory: In order for society to function harmoniously and for citizens to thrive, they must give up some of their freedoms and accept cooperation, law and order - in other words Government. As Thomas Hobbes phrased it, without this compromise, human life would remain nasty, brutish and short. In the state of nature, man’s life is a war of all against all. The social contract theory remains foundational. It is a legacy of the Age of Enlightenment, of which America’s Founding Fathers were also an eminent manifestation. This is what anti-government zealots have been turning their back on, ever since Reagan. 

Error #3: “All politicians are crooks.” Folksy figures such as Mark Twain and Will Rogers popularized this stereotype, but there is no clear evidence that it is true. Sure, some politicians are corrupt, but as a class, it isn’t clear that they are more so than, say, businessmen, lawyers, cops  and other occupations.

Error #4. “Unions are bad.” Again, what is the evidence for this generalization? Some unions have been bad in the sense of being criminally corrupt, like the Teamsters Union in the past. But the most frequent charge in recent decades is that unions such as those that represent teachers and public employees are too powerful, and that they impose their agenda upon the public. The truth is that Union membership in the US has declined from 35% in 1954 to 10.5% in 2018, with a concomitant decline in workers’ earnings and unions’ power and impact on politics. The US has one of lowest rates of unionization among OECD countries. (See Union Membership ).

Error #5: “You don’t need a college degree to be successful.” All statistics show the very strong correlation between income and educational level. It is what it is. I may agree with those of you who feel that we should not expect everyone to have a college preparatory education. An industrial arts apprenticeship path, such as in Germany and Switzerland, would be great. However, that’s not where America is at, right now. 

Error #6: “Guns don’t kill people; People kill people.” Wrong again. The fundamental fact is this: The more guns there are among a given population, the more people will be murdered by guns in that population. Simple.

Error #7: “If you are poor, it’s your fault.” By and large, poverty is inherited, as is wealth. Again, statistical probabilities have long demonstrated the partial contributions made by a host of factors to people’s economic success and failure. The role of individual effort is dwarfed by background factors such as race, gender and most of all social class.

Error #8: Immigrants bring in trouble, they “infect” American society and they are a burden on taxpayers. The opposite is true: Immigrants’ crime rate is lower than that of the general population. Their contribution to the economy is disproportionately greater than their number.

There are many other errors which many or most people believe to be true, myths which I won’t touch. They include people ‘s beliefs about religion, God,  race, sex and assorted other topics. But my comments about these erroneous beliefs might get me in trouble.

Anyway, you get my drift: At the core of today’s political crisis is the fact that too many people subscribe to erroneous beliefs.

© Tom Kando 2019;All Rights Reserved

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