The Truth, and Falsehoods, are Out There

“Why” Noelle said to me on the phone ”do people get angry when you tell them the truth?”

My immediate thought were of people asking for an opinion on how they looked, or the taste of a newly tried recipe, or a student asking “is this ok?” about some idea for a paper. That was not what it was about.

Noelle’s son is in a parochial school. It was a little before Christmas. His teacher had told his class a story about the meaning of candy canes. The teacher said that the hook shape is the letter J for Jesus, that the red stripes were for the blood of Christ shed on the cross. She had a Christian meaning for everything. (you can find this kind of interpretation with minimal Google searching on the internet). Even the pepperment flavor has been linked to a biblical herb.

Noelle had thought that this sounded bogus, so she looked up the origins of candy canes. All even semi-scholarly accounts had them starting as simple sugar sticks as a treat for kids that were initially bent (according to legend) in shepherd’s crook shape by a Choirmaster at a cathedral who would give them to the children there in the 17th century. They hung nicely on Christmas trees and caught on. People made them at home, simple white bent sugar sticks hanging on Christmas trees. Some played with flavors and colorings.

The “traditional” flavor and striping are 20th century additions. The red stripes were pretty on the trees, the peppermint flavor cheap and popular, and were incorporated by commercial manufacturers. They sold well.

Noelle told this to her son, and then, out of curiosity asked her husband what he knew about candy canes. Even though he is an atheist, he repeated the blood of Christ story, which he had heard when he was young. When Noelle told him that that was modern myth-making, he was angry.

So, the phone call: I said that I found the attached meaning to be pretty harmless. If it had been my kid, I would probably have looked it, found it not to be true, and told the kid that that wasn’t the origin, but that adding the meaning to the modern red striped canes helps remind us of the origins of Christmas. If I had been the Catholic school teacher (and more religious than I currently am) I would have said that the red stripes can remind us of the blood of Christ who died on a cross for our sins, and if you turn the cane upside down it is a J, and if we do that, even this simple candy treat can take on Christmas meaning for us.

Noelle was not impressed.


Since then I have been thinking about this often. More and more I am seeing in it an underlying flaw in human nature. People tend to make up or hear stories that they like. They invest in them emotionally. They go through all kinds of avoidance and denial of any facts that might show the story to be false. On occasion this can be helpful, or harmless, but more often it is counterproductive or even harmful.

People take hypotheses or even cobbled together bits of poorly sorted observations and treat them as if they were true facts and explanations, not unsupported ideas. Then they willfully adhere to them in the face of contradictory information, or simple refuse to look and see if they might be false.

Our student newspaper had a headline “Parents say MMR vaccine linked to autism” when the article was about a court decision to not allow people with autistic kids to get monetary compensation from a vaccine-related damages fund. The article went on to correctly report that huge studies have found no link between autism and vaccines and that author of a founding study that led to the idea of the connection had been found to have manipulated and falsified records to support his hypothesis. Yet, the headline implied the well-refuted hypothesis.

For ten years individuals advocacy groups have been raising money wasting time and energy on a incorrect hypothesis. There is no problem with that initially, as hypotheses need to be tested, but once it is clear that they are wrong, work on others! Years of time and money that could REALLY have made a difference wasted. Children were put at risk, and some died due to fears about vaccinations.

Interestingly, the student newspaper also reported a story about Beer Pong and infectious diseases such as herpes, supposedly reported by the CDC. Um, no. That study has not in fact been done. Once one newspaper reported it, large numbers of others picked it up. It was an the kind of story the student newspaper wanted. The editor published a well thought out apology for jumping on the bandwagon without checking the facts.

Needless deaths, our history is full of them, and often they are due to willfull belief in falsehoods. What about the Bush administration’s belief, or if one is more cynical, the Bush administration’s success at getting many Americans to unquestionably believe, that there were WMDs in Iraq. How many lives did that cost? How many trillions of dollars? If only people had paid attention to the quality of the evidence. Certainly, one can argue that Saddam unchecked would have cost many many lives as well, and that would be true, but that was not the argument that took us to Iraq. I suspect that there would have been MANY better possible solutions that what happened, many that would have not cost so very much in money and destruction and lives.

I talked to a bunch of people in Colorado in 2004 who had allowed themselves to be convinced that Saddam had orchestrated the bombing of the World Trade Center. When I tried to say no, all the evidence points elsewhere, I was accused of having been brainwashed by the "liberal media". I wonder if there are still people who believe that. Alternatively, a couple of Middle-eastern students on campus told me that it was an Israeli plot and that all of the Jews had been warned in advance and so didn't go to work in the towers that day. All the information about Jewish people who died in the towers was ignored, or said to be misleading lies. Craziness.

What about the long denial by smokers that smoking was harmful? What about the conspiracy theories that perpetuate hatred?

Why do people want to believe things that aren’t true? These days it is so easy to go online and sift through information from a variety of sources and often quickly determine what is likely to be valid, and want is just rant, and opinion, and uncontrolled observation. Why is that so hard to do?