From the other side, November 29, 2025: “Why false beliefs feel safer than the truth”

A few weeks ago, I directed readers to an article in the Australian online news source Pearls and Irritations. Here I link to another of their publications: John Frew’s article addressing an issue in Australia but completely applicable to public discourse in America. One of the distinctive features of the rise of our Boss, his administration and his supporters of the MAGA movement, is the lack of debate and engagement. On their part, there is a constant assertion of false facts to the public, in the media, and in courtrooms. On the part of their opponents, there is a hysterical outcry about fake news, lies, disbelief that evidence, expertise, and rationality are rejected, and accusations of stupidity. Obviously, this is not a conversation.

Frew thinks that a similar impasse in Australia is not a question of intellect but of feeling. Read his discussion of our universal need for inner equilibrium at Why false beliefs feel safer than the truth | Pearls and Irritations. If you think he is right, that we humans are hardwired for inner balance, then come back here for the rest of this article, which applies Frey’s insights, gained from a long career in educating difficult children, to America.

It applies to American history, which begins with both the wide-spread exuberance of unexpectedly defeating a British army and the realistic fear that as a first ever self-created nation (at first, not even a nation), it was vulnerably set against the international world. The War of 1812 furthered the fear (when the British captured Washington) and the elation, when the Americans defeated the British invasion of Louisiana. The hundred years war against the indigenous peoples was perceived by the American public as a defense against invaders and attacks, even though violence and hostility were originally initiated by the colonizers and not the natives. The expansion westward mythologized the self-perception of Americans as victims repeated so many times in American stories and films. This paranoid myth of victim-hood became the essential element in the success of American expansion, in the firmness with which America progressed from a small and disorderly bunch of colonies to a world power. It worked and still works to give equilibrium to its people, providing the national feelings of security. In American history every act of aggression is felt by us and, thus, treated as a defense, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.

It should come as no surprise that our Boss called migrants traveling to the southern border an invading army, that drug gangs are a foreign invading army, that critics of his policies are terrorists. It’s our national identity used to solidify a political agenda.

Frew’s thesis can be applied also to the recalcitrance of the many business men and women who direct the national business which used to be our government. They are mostly wealthy and successful and, thus, wedded to the beliefs and practices that they think have made them wealthy and successful, the value of dealing from a strong position (however that position is achieved), the reveling in power and money and secrecy, the fear of poverty which makes risk-taking titillate and which also explains their denigration of the poor, the weak, and the sick.

Even the gratuitous violence of the ICE or other agents in dealing with immigrants and others caught in their operations can seem the result of the agents maintaining an inner balance by doing what has made them feel capable and secure, protected their self-identity during moments of insecurity. That violence is comforting, even elating and liberating. It feels like making order out of a disordered world, even as it brings real disorder to the world.

We seem to need enemies, barbarians, inferiors to keep our balance and placate our fears. What will we do without them?

I’m not sure I understand why Frew is so upbeat at the end of his article. Short of putting the whole country in therapy, what can we do to restore civic discourse? I was once at a discussion about immigration policies in Deming where I had a long conversation with a woman who had had her purse snatched by, she claimed, an “illegal.” That discussion really was a discussion in spite of her initial adamancy and refusal to engage because the convener made both of us first describe to the other the person we most loved. Civic discourse, which necessarily must include criticism and argument, only happens when based on an internal feeling of shared security, and shared feelings of love (not of the person loved but the commonality of the feeling itself) provide a basis of community and therefore of security.

This is the message Leo XIV sent out in his first Encyclical, Dilexi te (I loved you) on Saint Francis’ Feast Day last month. God’s love, says Pope Leo, is preferentially given to the poor. By poor he means not just the financially needy, but those poor in rights, voice, and dignity: the outcasts of a social and political structure created by a belief in self-interest and the marketplace, migrants, the downtrodden, and the despised. These form the crux of the Church which learns what God’s love is from the poor by working among and with them to build a future free of the political, economic, and social structures that maintain poverty today. Everyone should read Dilexi te, Catholic or not, Christian or not. JD Vance — who thinks love begins with the self, surrounded by the family and afterwards expands outward to finally embrace God at the farthest horizon from himself — should read it, newly converted to Catholicism as he claims to be. Here is a link to the whole text, which is 25 pages: https://www.vatican.va/content/dam/leo-xiv/pdf/apost_exhortations/Apostolic%20Exhortation%20Dilexi%20te%20of%20the%20Holy%20Father%20Leo%20XIV%20on%20Love%20for%20the%20Poor%20(4%20October%202025).pdf