The lie is primarily used for self-deception. It is not intended or employed to deceive or to persuade others, but to reassure oneself.*
And this desire for self-deception is at least partly sympathetic, as it has to do with something like theodicy — an attempt to make sense of senseless suffering and to explain the inexplicable.
I’ve often made fun of the biblical characters Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar — the three friends of Job who beclown themselves by desperately seeking some rational explanation for his suffering. They are fair game — the whole point of the story is that their foolishness is foolish. The narrator of the story tells us they’re wrong from the get-go, and by the end of the story God is showing up Godself, in person, to confirm that they have no idea what they’re babbling about.
But we should also have some pity for this poor trio (or quartet, once Elihu joins the party to offer his also Very Wrong ideas about what Job must have done wrong to deserve his fate). They’re scared. Senseless, awful suffering is scary. Their friend Job is the best person they have ever known and he suddenly loses everything — his children, his possessions, his home, his health. If that could happen to the best person they know, then it could just as easily happen to them, at any moment.
That’s horrifying to contemplate.
Here is a pre-Dobbs news story about one family’s heart-breaking reliance on the reproductive care now denied in “pro-life” jurisdictions, “One takes from this that pregnancies can go very, very wrong, very quickly,” the doctor says in this story.
That’s scary. That’s scary in a way that tempts us to latch onto any alternative to the reality in which it is true — or to any fantasy explanation that will, at least, allow us an excuse not to think about it.
Back in Job, Bildad et. al. respond to their terror at the possibility of senseless suffering by latching onto the sense-making insistence that Job must have sinned somehow. This is an utterly human response. Thousands of years after this story was first told, it is a thing we humans still do. Confronted with the terrifying, unsettling possibility of senseless suffering and anguish, we seek comfort by accusing those who are suffering of some sin. Surely this Bad Thing would not have happened to them if they had not themselves done Bad Things. Surely suffering would not visit itself upon innocent people. Surely it must be punishment for their sins.
That’s a huge part of this lie. And that part of it isn’t so much a lie at all as a fantasy — a desperate desire to believe a comforting thing in the face of otherwise confounding, upsetting, inexplicable suffering.
This is what makes debunking and refuting this lie so difficult. It is, in large measure, a comforting self-delusion resorted to by people who cannot otherwise bear the reality of unimaginable, arbitrary, meaningless suffering. It is hard to displace that fantasy without replacing it with some equally comforting explanation, but no such comforting explanation exists for us to offer. Like the author of Job, or like the God who appears in that story, we do not have any tidy explanation to make sense of it all, making the unbearable bearable for those confronted with — and terrified by — the prospect of senseless suffering.
But given all of that, we still need to refute and debunk this lie because it is not only about that. It is also, explicitly, a vicious slur directed at millions of people. It is a particularly nasty and egregious example of bearing false witness against our neighbors. And so we are obliged to protect and defend those neighbors — and to protect and defend the truth — by testifying truthfully, denouncing the lie, and correcting it with the truth.
This brings us to the other motive driving this lie. If it is partly a tool of self-deception providing a facade of reassuring theodicy it is also partly a tool of self-deception providing a pretense of personal virtue. It’s about identity and self-concept — something that involves even higher stakes for those invested in embracing this lie. They cling to it because it reassures them that they are good people. Or, at least, it reassures them that they are relatively good people — better than those other people, those sinister sinners and sluts.
These two motives for self-deception are intertwined. This desire to regard oneself as virtuous, or as better-than, is never exclusively a product of self-righteous and the boastful pride of life. It’s tangled up with that Bildad-ish terror at the inexplicable injustice of a world where suffering and loss often seem senseless, arbitrary, and capricious. The desperation for some reassurance that we are safe (or relatively safer) from such suffering can always tempt us, like Bildad, to assert that those suffering pain and loss must be wicked sinners who deserve it.
All of that fear and fearful need for reassurance leads to these folks eagerly, urgently bearing false witness against their neighbors just the way that Bildad bore false witness against his friend. This is why this pernicious lie is so resistant to simple “fact-checking.” Correcting its false, inaccurate claims with truthful, accurate claims is no more effective than when the narrator of Job steps in to remind Bildad, et. al., that Job was “blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil.”
But on the other hand, the high-stakes emotional need for the reassurance this lie provides does not alter the simple fact that the lie itself is completely bonkers.
It makes no sense. There is no credible, plausible story that can be constructed around it that can turn this lie into a believable claim about how any believably human humans might behave.
The lie is, on the most basic level, dumb. Really, really dumb.
Unbelievably dumb and incredibly dumb in the literal sense of both “unbelievable” and “in-credible.”
So while it is understandable, for all the reasons discussed above, that people might want to believe this lie, it is absolutely not possible than anyone actually does believe it. Not in its most blatant, Trumpian form — “they’re executing babies.” And not in its more polite, elliptical forms. ( “I was disappointed that Harris was not clear about opposing abortion in the seventh, eighth, and ninth months” is one such polite form seen recently.)
Pointing this out to them is sometimes constructive, Asking “What is it you imagine is happening here? And how and why would such a thing ever happen? Tell me the version of this story that you imagine is happening, at scale, and explain what might motivate the characters in this version of the story to act in this way.”
Don’t put them on the spot by forcing them to supply an answer right then and there. That will just get you sidetracked into a discussion of urban legends about prom babies and the shameful embarrassment they’ll feel from stammering such nonsense sometimes causes them to double-down defensively.
Before Dobbs, these half-baked, half-assed, half-imagined fantasies about the implicitly fiendish motivations for late-term abortions or for non-existent “post-birth” abortions were somewhat easier to trick oneself into believing. But now that every week brings new reports of the agonizing stories of the real people, the real and really wanted pregnancies, and the real human suffering and tragedy that’s really happening, that pretense is harder to maintain. It becomes harder and harder not to look “exactly where you don’t want to look, where you never want to look” — at the truth.
And it becomes harder not to see the ugly, indefensible way that truth has been rejected outright by “godly” people who have no qualms about bearing false witness against their neighbors and doing so in the most vicious, nasty, ridiculous ways possible.
* This is obvious once you think about it for a moment. Bearing false witness against your neighbors is not an effective way of winning over those same neighbors. This is why Tom Hanks will never join Q-Anon.
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