Thanks to one of my most loyal readers, attorney Arlene Kock, who emailed me a “word of the day.” It reads:
agnotology
noun
1. The study of deliberate, culturally produced ignorance or doubt.
2. The deliberate production or cultivation of ignorance or doubt.
From Greek agnosis (not knowing) + -logy (study). Earliest documented use: 1992.
Agnotology deals in phrases like more research is needed, experts disagree, and the jury is still out, long after the verdict is in. In agnotology, ignorance is not bliss, it’s strategy.
The word was coined by linguist Iain Boal at the request of historian Robert N. Proctor. A classic example is cigarette companies funding research designed to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer. One biased study is enough to declare that “The science is not yet settled” and keep uncertainty alive.
The same playbook has been used by fossil-fuel companies to delay action on climate change by anti-vaccine activists, and in many other arenas where doubt is cheaper than proof.
[This is me again, Steve] We might also add, to the list of agnotologists, the major media companies, who persist in publicizing he-said-she-said nonsense about Trump’s and MAGA’s deceptions. CNN, for instance, will have a clip of Trump or one of his pet monkeys insisting Alex Pretti set out to “massacre” ICE officers. Then they’ll have a Democrat demanding Trump apologize for smearing Alex’s name, and a Republican insisting that Alex was a domestic terrorist. There’s no one to point out that Trump and his monkeys are liars; this apparent moral equivalence makes it sound like both sides could be right. No wonder the American people get confused. Want a more recent example of Trump’s agnotologies? “She probably had herself sprayed” he remarked yesterday of the attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar, the progressive Minnesota Democrat. Trump may or may not believe that, but he knows that at least a portion of his followers will believe him, which means that his “deliberate production or cultivation of ignorance or doubt” will have worked.
This agnotology has got to stop, or at least called out for what it is: deliberate obfuscation of the facts.
We can apply the word “agnotology” to individual instances of a false statement (e.g, Alex was a domestic terrorist). Or we can use it to describe the nature of an entire political movement, in this case MAGA. MAGA is the deliberate production or cultivation of ignorance or doubt. Donald Trump long ago adopted the Hitler technique of the big lie, when Hitler observed in Mein Kampf that “the great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” In Hitler’s case, the big lie was put into daily practice by his propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels. In Trump’s case, the big lie is repeated by his chief propaganda outlets, Fox News and various Christian media outlets.
The Washington Post did a great job during Trump’s first term, publishing some 30,573 lies Trump told between 2016-2020. (Of course, the number today is vastly larger.) My favorite from the first term was when Trump claimed his inaugural crowd was “the biggest crowd size ever.” That was demonstrably ridiculous, as all the photos showed. As the great Steve Schmidt noted, “When [Trump] goes out and says, ‘This is the biggest crowd size ever,’ what he’s saying in essence is, ‘What’s true is what the leader says is true.’” Trump gets away with that stuff because his MAGA cultists are immune to facts. They’re terrified to question his truthfulness, because that will get them in trouble in MAGA land. And most of them believe in the literal truth of the Bible; they’ve murdered their critical thinking abilities and decided that, if facts get in the way of the Word of God, then the facts must be wrong. Of course, this means that the world was created 6,000 years ago and that little Cain and Abel played with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. That this is preposterous is clear to you and me. That it’s psychotic also is clear, at least to me. But if you’re an evangelical MAGA (and so many Republicans are), then you live in a red wacko-verse where everyone you know is as crazy as you are. Once you start believing in the literal truth of the Bible, it’s not hard for you to accept the premise [suggested by grifters like Franklin Graham] that Trump was hand-picked by God, and therefore everything he says is the Gospel Truth.
And that’s where the Trump agnotologists come in. They work hard for their money, using Hitlerian techniques, to convince the public that they don’t see what they plainly do see: that Trump is destroying America, perhaps by design because he may be a Russian asset. If you’re Lachlan Murdoch [net worth $3.2 billion], who isn’t even American but claims his primary allegiance is to Australia, you decided long ago that your family’s wealth would increase in proportion to your support of Trump. So what started out, ten years ago, as a somewhat silly joke on Fox News to whitewash Trump’s sickness has now metastasized into a vast, ongoing rightwing conspiracy. In for a dime, in for a dollar, as the saying goes: the more lies Trump tells, the more Fox News must repeat and amplify them. That’s as good an illustration of agnotology and malign intent as we can get.
Steve Heimoff