Groupthink and Ecclesial Falsification

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unfortunately necessary resurgence of study of the use of disinformation campaigns on the part of governments and officialdom in general. One book that has particularly gained fresh attention is Dr. Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies, which was written in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. The Communist regimes of the late Soviet era were infamous for their brazen disregard for the truth, and the use of intimidation to enforce, in the most crude behavioralism, adherence to the big lie. To borrow from George Orwell, with enough torture and starvation, anyone can be forced to confess that 2+2=5. Knowing at least a bit of what people endured in those times, it is easy to understand why people would purposefully adopt something which they know to be false, if only to save their own life, and the lives of those they love.

Outside of Communist or authoritarian regimes, it is more difficult to believe why people would willingly believe patent untruths, but Timur Kuran explains very well the tremendous power of social pressure for conformity. Social pressure is probably the strongest force of nature after gravity and magnetism. C.S. Lewis once warned that the social pressure to go along with the crowd is precisely what makes Saint Paul, Saint John, and Saint James’ warnings about resisting “the world” so poignant. In a sense, the temptations of the devil and of the flesh are somewhat easy to discern because they have a certain violence, and usually involve the abuse of an otherwise good thing. The temptation that comes from the world is so insidious because it strikes at another good part of our nature, which is our yearning to be in communion with others. We always want to “belong” somewhere. But some people sell their souls for the illusion of being “in”. Social acceptability is probably the hardest thing to overcome as an individual. This is one reason why all people of good will should unite, and form unions, business associations, institutions of higher learning, and yes, even good old fashioned friendships and fraternal venues to be able to keep the light of truth and independent thought alive against contrary forces.

Where do we see Preference Falsification today? A better question may be, where don’t we? What Orwell once called doublethink and also groupthink, once considered dystopian concepts relegated to fiction, are now here, and their corrupting influence is being felt in every field. Let’s start with the most obvious example of this: the COVID-19 Pandemic. When the pandemic started in early 2020, many people, myself included, were concerned, mostly because of what was unknown. We were exposed on the news to Chinese authorities welding sick people into their own apartments, mass graves in Iran, and the military trucks and makeshift morgues in Northern Italy, which could not cope with the amount of dead bodies. In those days, most people of good will seemed to want to comply with some degree of restriction because we thought, with all sincerity, that we were helping to stop the spread of a relatively unknown pathogen whose virulence was still also relatively unknown.

We all remember those days well. But then something started to smell fishy. Goals were made, like “15 Days to Stop the Spread”, which was obsolete even before it was over. Most people complied. Then came the mandates. Do not gather indoors, and if you do, only do so with a certain distance, and only with masks. Reports from doctors began to circulate that they were being incentivized to inflate deaths related to COVID which were not in fact caused by COVID, but by comorbidities that result in being immunocompromised, chief among those being obesity, which is a pandemic of a sort in itself. Certain writers on epidemiology, some of whom were very well qualified and enjoyed distinguished carriers, were deplatformed, calumniated and censored with a zeal that would make Torquemada blush. Quackery and disinformation has always existed, and will until Christ, The Truth, returns and all things which are dark are made light. But the right of free speech and free thought does allow people to think, reflect and research, and so arrive at extremely important conclusions with important consequences for the Public Good. First to be suppressed was the idea that COVID was probably made in a Chinese Lab. Now that seems all but certain. Then trying to tie the avuncular Dr. Fauci to gain of function research was considered besmirching his good name. The documents have been released, and the inquiries made, and it seems there is more truth to that then we realized. There are many more examples of this.

Several prominent epidemiologists wrote before the pandemic started that social isolation and cloth masks for a respiratory infection were exercises in futility. When the narrative changed to support the mandates, these well established facts from an at least five century old discipline were considered something akin to hate speech; if you believed them, you were not just committing thought crime, you were killing grandma.

As Dr. Kuran observed, social pressure can truly succeed in getting people to become compliant with imposed norms. However, because the norms are not based on reason, but on authority, many people come to loathe both the content of the norm and what it compels people to do. I remain convinced that so much of the social unrest we saw in the summer of 2020 could be partially explained by a subconscious rage toward arbitrary compulsion. But it was not permitted to say that the lockdowns caused people to have skyrocketing rates of suicide and substance abuse, or that children’s educations were being jeopardized by being out of school for long periods, or that virtual education was somehow desirable for them, in spite of the very real detriment to both academic achievement and psychosocial development.

Most distressing to me as a cleric was to see the Church carry so much water for the state in its march to ever greater restrictions on our freedoms, especially as subsequent variants were less virulent and less dangerous with each passing wave. In the beginning, again faced with the unknown, we were largely asked to close our Churches to the faithful, “to protect them.” Many of my colleagues, I am proud to say, got very creative in an attempt to continue to bring the Sacraments to people, especially during that first Lent. Quite a few Priests in pastoral ministry did this. But others faced draconian consequences from their Bishops for doing so. Perhaps even more absurd, some Priests were asked by their Bishops to submit their vaccination status to their Diocese, which is privileged medical information, as a sort of rite of passage. The clear objective was to impose Preference Falsification. Was refusing to get vaccinated based on conscientious objection a sin against charity? The note from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith clearly and authoritatively stated that it was not. Why then, did the Pope and many of the Bishops continue to force the narrative that the vaccine was not just morally good, but morally necessary? A lot of the answer lies in the phenomenon of Preference Falsification, where people, especially our elites, were conditioned to believe that vaccines and mandates were a clear moral imperative, even though their reasoning militated against immemorial principles of Moral Theology. The Church has never, in the history of pandemics, ever said that one medical treatment or another is morally necessary beyond what is necessary to sustain life: that is why we have always spoken about ordinary and extraordinary means of life extension. Another well settled principle is that no one may be morally culpable over that which they have no control. While it is morally wrong for an HIV positive person to knowingly have relations with someone, because transmission in that case is a real possibility and entails the agency of a person, respiratory infections are another beast. If we let this logic go to its logical conclusion, everyone is sinning every year for not getting their flu vaccine, because they are in theory contributing to the deaths of thousands every year. Especially when we know that many, if not all, of these vaccines against respiratory pathogens are, to use technical language, “non-sterilizing”, and so their efficacy is dubious in the real world, it is an absurd overreach, and patently illogical, to say that vaccines are a moral imperative. I can see that maybe with a non-trivial illness like polio or smallpox, which killed countless millions over the centuries. Vaccinating children seems to be a valid way of protecting the public at large from truly dangerous pathogens. But were they morally necessary? That is a harder question to address.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that Preference Falsification found such ready customers among the Catholic Hierarchy, because they have been using it in one form or another over the past fifty years. We have been told that the Vatican Council, without nuance, was a great moment of renewal for the Church, even maybe it was in some ways, but the numbers do not lie: we are at an all time low in terms of practice of the faith of the Church, and adherence to her dogmas. This is part of what drives the disgust and frustration so many young clergy feel about older clergy, because they will not give up the nostrum that Vatican II was, without qualification, the breath of the Holy Spirit moving over the Church. Even as more scholarship and memoirs have been published detailing the deceit and chicanery of many of the members of the Council, we must continue to hold the opinion, which is now almost terminally defunct, that the Council was in fact so good that if it did not happen, we would be so much worse off! But as we know, it is impossible to argue from a negative.

The Synod on Synodality, arguably one of the most solipsistic and theologically decadent exercise in non-relevance of the past sixty years, can be explained by Preference Falsification. All across the world, Priests and lay people tell me what a waste of time the “Diocesan Level” process is. Informed lay people are dismayed after so many crises precipitated by almost all the last few Synods. As we look at the German Church, which Pope Francis always seems keen to indulge, we see this again. As with most Preference Falsification, the most dangerous word is; “Why?” Why is this Synod necessary? What does it seek to achieve? What are the benefits to be gained? For a Pontificate which has been so adamant on listening to the wisdom of the lay faithful, why cannot they perceive the complete apathy on the part of the average Catholic? Now there are prelates and apologists for the Synod who say that its power and purpose lies not in what it is meant to produce, but in the ‘process’ itself. This Hegelian transformation of our Ecclesiology is becoming increasingly dangerous. As a Church, we have always been focused on ends, and on teleology. In other words, how does one initiative or another make us more faithful to Christ, more effective in our efforts to evangelize? This Synod, against all reason, is being marketed as good simply “because”. It is not hard to imagine why most people view it with suspicion and cynicism.

The most effective and powerful things in life are simple, because God is simple, and simple things which are true most approach the nature of God and how he has ordered reality. The more Church officialdom obfuscates that fact by endless programs and projects, the more we complicate what should be relatively clear. Preference Falsification is especially corrupting because of what it allows to occur in the ‘penumbra’ of its disingenuous narrative. It allows evil men and evil ideas to insert themselves in institutions where they should have absolutely no sway. A cunning person only has to parrot the untruth, in order to be inducted into ‘officialdom’. Meanwhile, they use that position to undermine the whole organization. Let’s think about how this has happened more than once: the so called Council of Cardinals today is defunct because it contained a quorum of men dedicated to the false narrative that they were reformers. Now we know that at least half of them were, and are, bad actors. The list of disposable Churchmen is long: there was Cardinal Kaspar, who was used and discarded as he tried to promote an untruth directly contrary to Our Lord’s own words, that adultery is a grave sin. Same for Cardinal Coccopalmerio, Rodriguez-Maradiaga, and now Becciu, in their turn. It reminds me of the same thing that Dr. Kuran saw in Soviet style governance: a man was used for a certain role, but as the role or position became untenable, they were removed, and practically erased from history. When lies are exposed, because they are fundamentally unrealities, its incredible how much they, and their adherents, vanish like smoke.

I cannot possibly list all the ways in which Preference Falsification affects even the most routine parts of our local Catholic life: the maintenance of Catholic Schools which are not Catholic in any recognizable way, the proliferation of programs which, in spite of the shameful waste of our resources upon them, have barely made any impact in reversing the decline in many parishes and dioceses. It should not be considered disloyal to simply ask “why” something a Church bureaucrat says we “must” do is any different from being told I “must” wear a mask while seated in a restaurant, in spite of the dubious benefits. It is discouraging in the extreme to see the Church treat her loyal sons and daughters in this way, especially when we know how much harm is being done continuing this danse macabre; as people figuratively drop all around us, we are scolded when we want to stop, to tend to the fallen.

Preference Falsification in Church affairs is perpetuating a noxious and corrupt environment, by promoting ambitious and morally ambiguous men and women to positions of influence, and so degrades even further our confidence in our institutions, which ought to stand for perennial values and truths which are part of our God given patrimony. As Dr. Kuran put it in his book, we are bound between Private Truth, and Public Lies. We can ill afford, as individuals or as groups, to let the charade continue. The longer we do, the weaker and more sclerotic will our moral witness become. Be bold in speaking the truth you know. Perhaps this is why Our Lord said that what he tells us in the dark, we must proclaim on the rooftops: not because the truth he has to share is dark, but because it is in fact incandescent, and it has the power to cleanse, and to save our souls and minds. Because the worst thing we can fall into at this point, as men and women who want to love the truth, is to surrender to cynicism and despair. Hope is the virtue based on the indefectibility of God, who can neither deceive, nor be deceived. If we refuse to be deceived, we can at last be truly free.