The Will Not To Know, The Will To Believe

Why do we take blatant lies seriously? One popular explanation is that, especially in a democracy, we are easily duped by those with power. This seems to be James Bovard’s conclusion, and generally the view of the libertarians at the Future of Freedom Foundation. They are not alone. Last night, AWOT screened the film Power of Nightmares, and had an engaging discussion about the contemporary penchant for conspiracy theories. One of the recurring themes of the film is that a small group of organized and determined individuals – like the neoconservatives – can pull the wool over the public’s eyes, and convince them of extraordinarily exaggerated threats. And the numbers seem to support this view: As late as February 2005, 47% of Americans believed Saddam helped plan and support the 9/11 hijackers, and 36% believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction when the US invaded. By December 2005, those numbers were still at about a quarter of Americans.

Many liberals and progressives think the situation calls for exposing Bush’s lies because this will somehow shake the public out of its ignorant stupor. Bush has in fact inspired a whole industry of Bush watchers, tracking his lies, and producing them by the hour like a stock-market ticker-tape. But doesn't this rely on a radically over-simplified understanding of the problem? Don’t we have to understand the inverse as well: the national obsession with conspiracy theories? There is on the one hand a striking resistance to certain facts, and on the other a will to believe in the exaggerated power of small groups – Israel Lobby, Oil Lobby, neoconservatives, vast-right wing conspiracy, etc… Think also of the kinds of movies we produce – Matrix, V for Vendetta, Fahrenheit 9/11, JFK, Syriana, Manchurian Candidate (redux), X-files. If on the one hand Americans refuse to know the truth, on the other hand they are far too willing to believe in illusions. We will have more to say on the problematic political consequences of believing in conspiracy theories, but the point we’d like to make here is that this can’t be attributed to a straightforward problem of gullibility or even lack of information.

The problem isn’t one of information, education, or knowledge. As Slavoj Zizek points out in this interview, people actually prefer not to know even if they do know – they have a will not to know. The problem here is one of political power and ideology not facts. Instead of asking the question ‘why do people still believe Saddam had weapons’ we should ask what people are supposed to do with that knowledge? This may seem evident to some, but it is more complicated a question than it seems. If most are alienated from the political process, and see in government a power entirely beyond their control, what would they do with knowledge they have been lied to? Wouldn’t admitting to themselves they have been lied to only cement a view that politics operates according to mechanisms that are well beyond their control? Perhaps the will not to know is, in a very passive sense, a kind of resistance to the even more depoliticizing consequences of believing the truth. If the problem is something more like this, than mere ignorance or lack of education, then it suggests the best way to combat public ignorance is not through the condescension of throwing facts in people’s faces and griping about gullibility. Rather, the key is to address the alienation from politics, and the weak sense most have of their own political agency.