Feeling It

"The transition from democracy to personality cult begins with a leader who is willing to lie all the time, in order to discredit the truth as such. The transition is complete when people can no longer distinguish between truth and feeling."
Timothy Snyder "The Cowardly Face of Authoritarianism"

But people have always been poor at this, in part because people expect their feelings to inform them of truth. "Go with your gut," "listen to your instincts," "do what feels right" and similar sayings are all designed to convey the message that the things that people feel are an accurate enough reflection of reality that they can (or even should) be safely acted upon. And this is evolutionary. Bears are frightening, because they're capable of killing a person. Children are cute, because they can't care for themselves and the nurturing impulses that juvenile traits activate help to keep them alive. But these are both experienced as feelings. They're designed to allow for immediate action specifically because we don't have to ponder them and arrive at some sort of objective truth about the situation.

Objective truth is not an end in itself. It's a tool that we use to understand the world, just as feeling is. Fear and anxiety, and the impulse to alleviate them, have always been the basis of politics. The relative securities; food security, safety from wild animal attacks, reliable shelter from the elements et cetera that many (but not all) people in the industrialized world have today are anomalous in human history. The need for communities to coordinate and plan and (most importantly) choose courses of action to assure their survival, to alleviate the fear and anxiety of everyday life; to avoid extinction; has always been there. And because the "best" choices, or even the effective choices, are non-obvious, the search for ways to evaluate them in an environment of limited information is neverending. And so personal credibility is important. "Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Africa" or "Donald Trump is a racist who refused to rent apartments to Black people" are not about replacing thinking with emoting; they're about winnowing down the choices that people are confronted with by taking those offered by untrustworthy people off the table. It's logically fallacious, and not the best way of going about it, but it gives good enough results and only needs a low level of investment. And so undermining the credibility of opponents; getting other people to distrust the people that the actor distrusts, whether that be by spreading active falsehoods or irrelevant truths has always been foundational in politics.

And given that the amount of information needed to make genuinely informed policy decisions these days is prohibitive for just about anyone who has a full-time job other than policy wonk, shortcuts are pretty much a necessity. And so expecting people to reliably distinguish between truth and feeling, even when there isn't a "personality cult" that one dislikes afoot, is perhaps unreasonable.