Or Not to Know

Our Representative held a telephone town hall recently, and in attendance was one of the area's Trump supporters. When she was given the microphone, she claimed the problem with the mostly Democratic crowd was that they weren't clued in to Donald Trump's "plan." She was convinced there was a plan, and she told everyone that she trusted the plan, even though she didn't know enough about it to explain it to everyone. The next day, social media was having a field day with her, at least locally, with all of the standard name-calling and casting aspersions on her intelligence for believing in such a risible idea as Donald Trump actually knowing what he was doing. Clearly, several people proclaimed, she'd fallen for misinformation.

Which makes her, as near as I can tell, a lot like many other people one can think of. The modern information environment is full of things that are a) completely false, and knowingly concocted by people who intentionally lied and b) utterly inconsequential to the lives of the people who believe them.

For all that people felt that believing in a Trump "plan" was a bad idea, the fact that it wouldn't end well for the believers was, effectively a matter of faith. And as far as I'm concerned, it's a misplaced faith. Sure, every so often there's someone who does something, stupid, illegal and/or otherwise self-injurious because they place their faith in the wrong person, but the reason why "misinformation" persists as well as it does is because it only rarely exacts a price from the believers.

Big picture, believing in a candidate for President is small potatoes. There are much bigger things that people believe in, such as the Earth is flat, or that an international "Élite" cabal is after their children, that strike many nonbelievers as outright lunacy. But outside of damaging the odd personal relationship, people's live continue as normal. For all that people may see many of the misconceptions that people have about the world as actively dangerous, for the people who believe them, unneeded stress may be the only real downside. Q-Anon, for instance, doesn't electrocute people who turn out to be wrong about what they think they know. Home wiring, on the other hand, does.

And this might be part of why the "misinformed" carry such worry for those people around them. People believing in Donald Trump's plan back in November have enabled very real consequences for any number of people, whether they are immigrants who now live in fear of a raid that will result in their being imprisoned and deported, or government workers who face being tossed out of the jobs into an employment market that shows a depressed demand for labor. And sure, some of these policies will come back to bite some Trump voters, in the same way that Helen Beristain learned the hard way back in his first term in office, that when the President said that he'd deport people in the country illegally, he wasn't going to make exceptions for the families of people who voted for him.

But for the most part, political miscalculation is free. And when something is free, there tends to be a lot of it.