Preposterous Ideas
by Joseph Rowlands
"That's so unbelievable, it must be the truth!"
You've probably heard that line before. Probably on television. TV shows like to create abnormal, unlikely stories, and then have one of the characters have to explain it to someone who didn't witness it. If the story sounds highly improbable, that often proves its validity.
This reason for this isn't very complicated. If someone intended to lie and get away with it, he would normally stick to a simple lie that didn't shout out for attention. He would look for a lie that was dull and commonplace, so nobody would think about questioning it. It wouldn't make sense to use a lie that attracted tons of attention, because lies don't hold up to close scrutiny. The reasoning then is since nobody could have a reason for telling that kind of lie, you can assume it isn't a lie.
The interesting point here is that the validity of the statement is based on the motivations of the speaker, instead of on the evidence for or against. This may have something to do with a common view of 'objectivity.'
When Objectivists speak of objectivity, we speak of referring to the facts of reality. A more common view is that objectivity comes from being unbiased or impartial. You're not objective if you are affected by whether something is true or false. So for instance, if you argue that the income tax is immoral, but you would benefit from its removal, then your statement isn't considered objective. You're just advocating whatever would improve your lot.
Of course, that's not really the case. Objectivity is an adherence to the truth, and to reality. You can be very emotionally motivated, and that does not prevent you from being objective. It may be true that some people let their emotions override their judgment, but that doesn't mean that everybody does.
So let's look at this excuse thing again. Given a view of objectivity where your motivations are the determining feature, it makes sense that people would assume the most outlandish statements to be true. Or to generalize it further, any idea that seems to harm the speaker instead of helping him is considered true.
Contrast this with a reality-oriented view of objectivity. If the statement is highly improbable, objectivity would require you to have serious reservations about it. The more outlandish the idea, the less likely you should be to believe it. You can see that given your view of what objectivity is, your outcome is going to vary significantly.
If this were just in the realm of excuses, it would be a minor point that's hardly worth mentioning. But this view that the more preposterous the idea, the more likely it is to be true, affects us in all kinds of ways. There are a lot of ideas that are given credence because they are so far-fetched.
In economics, there are all kinds of ideas that go against all common sense, and are thus accepted as true. Who would propose something so insane if it weren't the truth? So we have theories that wealth is created by spending, and destroyed by production. We're said to be poor because we produce too much, lowering profitability. But this just means the more material wealth there is, the poorer we are.
And there are theories that there just isn't enough demand for all the goods that are created. This assumes that people have everything they want and just don't want anything more. But if that were the case, why would they keep working? They work for money. But if they have everything they want, what do they need money for?
And economics isn't the only muddled field. In physics, complexity and strangeness are interpreted to support a theory, instead of invalidating it. In art, the "powerful," "deep" pieces are the unintelligible ones. In history, revisionism is accepted because it interprets things completely backwards from how they are generally promoted.
The basic problem with the view of objectivity as "unbiased" is that it promotes a kind of social standard for the truth. Instead of looking to reality, it emphasizes looking at the feelings or beliefs of the person speaking. Truth or falsehood is thus accepted based on what other people think or believe. The fact that these "truths" fly in the face of reality is a natural consequence. Once reality is rejected as the final arbiter of truth, there's no reason to expect a correlation between what's believed and what's real.
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