TRUMP’S LEGACY: BREEDING TRUTHS OUT OF LIES

by Promod Puri

When Trump moves out from his current presidency, perhaps from politics, he leaves behind the legacy of churning lies into beliefs. He has been quite successful in generating false truths in the minds of millions of his followers in the United States and worldwide.

He started his brand of lie-based politics that Obama was an offshore-born citizen seeking his disqualification from being the president of the USA. Many posited and still hold that view about Obama’s birth certification.

And more recently, Trump vehemently campaigned that the entire election process was a fraud. Again, thousands of his devotees were out on the streets to protest the alleged election hocus-pocus.

Although his lies did not survive in the system’s legalities, Trump did exploit the human psychological mind that enables people to continue to hold tight to beliefs even in the face of contradictory information.

Planting non-rational beliefs in the public’s minds is an escalating part of the political game plan, especially among the dictatorial regimes and democratically-elected neo-authoritarianism. In the absence of creditable media, which is often being corrupted or suppressed, false news and views are manufactured and distributed through social media.

There is a mass production of bogus and distorted information floating all over the globe. But people accept the words when these match well with their established views.

It is the mindset behaviour, one major cause of divided and extreme thinking among people based on their committed beliefs irrespective of what science or reality says.

Distorted, false, or unrealistic information twist our thinking. As of result, our perceptions are flawed.

Conceived opinions and judgments influence our mindset viewpoint. And most of the time, our actions and reactions are based on retrieving the intellect from the installed position.

Mindset means pre-set assumptions or beliefs ready to be applied without or with the least entry of new inference or reasoning to a situation or issue. It is a predisposed state of mind, a psychological construct that can be rigid or subject to change.

In principle, mindset is not a settled term. Instead, it is flexible. It can be allowed as a growth mechanism in our cognitive senses. Pope Francis is one example of a changing mindset towards a more rational and contemporary approach towards the Roman Catholic Church’s issues.