Can you trust your senses? 

It is very unsettling for your senses to deceive you day in and day out. From the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep, your brain is bombarded with information which you have to assume is accurate. It simply must be. Because otherwise, your entire identity is compromised. 

This metaphor of psychosis can be applied to political news. You’re receiving conflicting information from many different news channels all day, every day, and if you’re paying attention, you’ll realise that nothing makes sense. Nothing feels real. You need to read between the lines to see beyond the deception. 

In both psychosis and post-truth politics, the perception of reality is flawed. However, psychosis isn’t deliberate: you can’t knowingly spread psychosis. Yet, we recognise psychosis as a pressing public health problem, and attempt to treat it with medication, and in extreme cases, institutionalisation. What is being done to counter the spread of misinformation? What is being done to counter this sinister entity in every newsroom, every newspaper office, and every social media page? We ‘fight’ the fire with fuel. Let me ask one last question: why do we knowingly exacerbate a problem that deliberately distorts our perception of reality, while we seek to treat a similar problem? 

The answer lies in the consequences of these problems: one contributes to the disease burden and therefore must be eradicated, while the other serves to unsettle, agitate, and polarise the public for financial gain and therefore must be encouraged. 

Financial gain is a major motivator in many cases. B.F. Skinner proposed the Incentive theory in the middle of the last century, which posits that people only act to obtain external incentives. This theory heavily relates to his other theory of operant conditioning, which simply suggests that human behaviour can be explained with simply seeking rewards and avoiding punishment. Skinner says that there are many external incentives – or rewards – which may drive people, such as getting good grades, maintaining good relationships, or money. All of these factors activate the reward system in our brain, which is why we seek to obtain them. The problem is, when these external motivators are present in abundance, they tend to undermine intrinsic motivators. As a result, we only perform the desired behaviour when the external motivator is present, and go back to baseline once that external motivator is removed, because we can’t motivate ourselves to perform that behaviour.  

The Incentive Theory can explain a lot of post-truth politics: the people pushing post-truth narratives are often heads of major mainstream media corporations, who have access to vast amounts of money, and they can only be motivated by a financial incentive. In its absence, they can’t be motivated to report the truth. 

The implications of the pseudo-psychological warfare vary. At the smallest scale, you get people whose trust in mainstream media is eroded. These people turn to their carefully-curated social media echo-chambers to find out what the ‘real’ story is, only to find more misinformation. We’d be lucky if it stopped there. At the largest scale, you get people rioting because of election results they don’t like. No matter what your political stance is, you would agree that rioting is a very dangerous symptom of public dissatisfaction, and in this case it was incited through social media amongst cries of ‘Stop the Steal’ despite private confessions acknowledging the electoral loss.* 

Skinner’s theories can lead to worrisome predictions about the future of the political climate. According to these theories, people follow societal rules because doing so would allow them certain benefits like security and justice while also helping them avoid unpleasant consequences such as legal penalties and social ostracism. If we assume that the social contract – the foundation of society – is held together by a series of reward-seeking and punishment-avoidance behaviours, it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to predict an erosion of the social contract if following the rules doesn’t necessarily yield the expected benefits. If rewards for adhering to the rules, or punishments for breaking the rules become inadequate, people won’t see the point in foregoing self-interest for the greater good of society. 

That would be a very dangerous point to reach. People’s trust in the government’s power to maintain a fair social order is essential and must be prioritised, because when people’s perception of the government’s motivations shifts, their incentive to cooperate in a fair society diminishes. And when incentives to cooperate across groups diminishes due to the political polarisation typical of the post-truth era, who’s to say people won’t create new incentives for a new, potentially dangerous goal? 

*Ex-Trump aide says Trump admitted privately that he lost the election. (2022, June 19). CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/06/19/trump-admission-2024-election-sotu-vpx.cnn