Blue Lies: A Selection from Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (2019)

“During the 2016 presidential campaign, many political observers were incredulous at opinions expressed by Trump supporters (and in many cases by Trump himself), such as that Hillary Clinton had multiple sclerosis and was concealing it with a body double, or that Barack Obama must have had a role in 9/11 because he was never in the Oval Office around that time (Obama, of course, was not the president in 2001).

As Amanda Marcotte put it, ‘These folks clearly are competent enough to dress themselves, read the address of the rally and show up on time, and somehow they continue to believe stuff that’s so crazy and so false that it’s impossible to believe anyone that isn’t barking mad could believe it. What’s going on?’ What’s going on is that these people are sharing blue lies.

A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group (originally, fellow police officers). While some of the conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose of performance rather than truth: they are trying to antagonize liberals and display solidarity with their blood brothers.

The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones. Anyone can say that rocks fall down rather than up, but only a person who is truly committed to the brethren has a reason to say that God is three persons but also one person, or that the Democratic Party ran a child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria.”—Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2019)