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as liberators. Now compare that to the ‘formidable opponent’ AEI Fellow Dick Cheney’s April 15th, 1994, view (C-SPAN interview)91 that a war in Iraq to take down the regime would result in our soldiers being stuck in a quagmire, since we wouldn’t have anything to put in place of the regime to keep the country together. With such formidable opponents as these, which Dick Cheney should we trust? It would be hard to say before the invasion. In retrospect, it looks like we were greeted as liberators. But that the embrace was short-lived, as it proved difficult to keep the country together and get a new government working well. Both Dick Cheneys seemed to be on to something, yet their advice was geared to steer us in different directions.

We endorse policies or policy-tendencies via our support of parties and particular politicians and advocacy groups. Nonetheless, it seems that undergirding all of this is a basic gut-feeling informing our decisions. We value various things and try to determine what will promote our values. We try to figure out which sources of information to trust, and who will most likely represent our interests. It’s not that we ignore facts; it’s that we select which “facts” presented to us we will accept as facts. And we do this not because we already know that they are facts, but because we follow our guts and trust the people whose hearts we feel we know.

Democracy invites the tools of mass persuasion by its promotion of the individual’s opinion and these tools generate at least as much bullshit as anything else. When there are too many ‘facts’ to be accessed, and the situation is too complicated for an individual to understand fully without dedicating his whole waking life to the issue, truthiness seems to be the only thing we have to go on. That said, a recognition of the practical inevitability of truthiness emerging as a useful tool does not require us to abandon a commitment to more objective truth as well.

Wishing and Dogmatism

This is where Colbert’s conception of truthiness comes into play. Colbert said that truthiness was about stating things you wish were true, not what you know to be true. And he said that one then refuses to think that anyone else’s view may be correct, becoming stubbornly ideological. As already noted, these two out-of-character additions go beyond the on-air definition. But the character of Stephen certainly is self-deluded and dogmatic. So while Stephen defines truthiness in terms of following the gut and heart, while resisting submission to authority, Colbert uses the character of Stephen to show that this rhetoric may be a rationalization for delusional dogmatism. But does this mean that truthiness always dissolves into abandoning the humble respect for objective fact that we noted was essential to the truth-oriented person? Let’s look at these two additional elements that Colbert attaches to Stephen’s definition of truthiness.

So what about wishful thinking? If by this we mean believing something is true when you know it’s not, then all wishful thinking would seem irrational. But is it even possible to know something isn’t true, yet believe it anyway? Perhaps. When we speak of self-delusion and self-denial, we speak as if some part of the person deceives another part of the person. After all, the same part that knows the truth cannot not know it at the same time. But the part that knows can’t be the conscious part of us, since then we’d be aware of the very thing we are not aware of. I can only delude myself if I’m not really conscious of my act of self-delusion, if I don’t consciously know the truth I’m trying to keep hidden from myself. And I can only be in denial of something as long as I am not consciously aware of its reality. It would be a bit of a puzzle to think that I consciously do this to myself. So, maybe it’s some unconscious or subconscious mechanism in the brain that keeps information from the conscious part of us. Or perhaps we make conscious decisions to keep things on the periphery of our conscious mind, which successfully keeps us