Americans Can No Longer Tell Facts From Opinions

This does not bode well for democracy or for society itself

As John Adams presciently observed over a quarter millennia ago (while defending British soldiers for the murder of his fellow patriots in the Boston Massacre):

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Fast-forward to the present-day madhouse of Trumpian “alternative facts” and wokeist “my truths” and it seems this commonsense distinction has been all but lost by the majority of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum. As a recent study out of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found when it asked participants to categorize various statements about current events as statements of fact or statements of opinion, “45.7% of respondents performed no better than a coin flip at the task.”

This is worrisome, to say the least. All of our laws and all of our institutions are predicated on the assumption that while people may disagree about the implications of facts, the facts themselves are beyond dispute. But this is no longer the case. As the study’s co-author laments:

If you can’t tell if somebody is proposing a statement of fact versus a statement of opinion, you’re doomed as an information consumer. It signals a fundamental breakdown in the possibility of meaningful communication between people and political elites, or between journalists and the public.

This is precisely what we’re seeing every day across a wide range of social and political interactions. Whether it’s thinking that immigrants are to blame for increased crime rates (statistically, they’re significantly far more law-abiding than native-born citizens) or thinking that wearing a flimsy surgical mask while driving alone somehow protects against COVID (it doesn’t), Americans are riddled with erroneous beliefs.

And again, it’s not confined to just “Jesus rode a dinosaur” evangelicals or climate change denying big pickup truck lovers — it’s a problem across the board. As the study noted:

As partisan political views grow more polarized, Democrats and Republicans both tend to construct an alternate reality in which they report that their side has marshalled the facts and the other side merely has opinions.

Not only does this make any kind of political compromise for the good of the nation or the passing of productive legislation nigh on impossible, it also severely hampers the fight against the evergrowing onslaught of online misinformation. As the study’s co-author points out:

What we’re showing here is that people have trouble distinguishing factual claims from opinion, and if we don’t have this shared sense of reality, then standard journalistic fact-checking—which is more curative than preventative—is not going to be a productive way of defanging misinformation. How can you have productive discourse about issues if you’re not only disagreeing on a basic set of facts, but you’re also disagreeing on the more fundamental nature of what a fact itself is?

America and humanity as a whole are at a critical juncture in history. Faced with the “omnicrisis” of climate change, overpopulation, ubiquitous microplastics and “forever chemicals” pollution, ongoing habitat and biodiversity loss, the steady diminishing of civil liberties, the eruption of numerous hot wars around the globe and a budding cold war between superpowers (among myriad other continually worsening catastrophes), having a shared basis of reality to face these problems rationally is more important than ever, yet it’s fast becoming an alternative reality of its own, “a pleasant fiction” of a species that actually deserves a continued existence.

The only silver lining to the study was the finding that critical thinking and informational assessment skills can be modestly improved by enhancing or bolstering the following: civics knowledge, current events knowledge, education, and cognitive ability. But therein lies the problem.

How does one improve their knowledge of civics or current events if they can’t trust the sources of their information, and even if they can, they’re incapable of distinguishing between news and editorials? How does education help when it faces precisely these same obstacles? And how can we expect cognitive ability to improve when IQ levels continue to fall with each passing decade (as a likely result of both environmental pollutants and Idiocracy-inducing demographic trends)?

It’s hard to imagine how we as a nation and a species are not completely, irredeemably fubared or how the future is going to be anything but bleak. And sadly, I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if that last statement is a fact or an opinion, or if it even matters which is which.

Colby Hess is a freelance writer and photographer from Seattle, and author of the freethinker children’s book The Stranger of Wigglesworth.

If you enjoy my writing and would like to receive stories by email whenever I publish, please click here.