True or False? You’re Just Going to Have to Trust Me

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”

Winston Smith wrote that in a secret diary, in a country where the Party had declared otherwise. He worked at the Ministry of Truth, which produced lies. He lived where the newspaper you read yesterday no longer said what you remembered it saying, where history was rewritten daily, where two plus two could equal five if the state required it.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Winston encountered this not as propaganda he could dismiss, but as the fundamental project of the regime — the demand that reality itself be subordinated to authority. The Party didn’t merely ask you to believe convenient things. It required you to un-know what you knew. To feel doubt about your own perceptions. To trust the voice coming from the telescreen more than the thoughts forming in your own mind. Winston resisted as long as he could, until he could no longer.

Orwell called this doublethink — trained submission, the systematic erosion of the self that knows, in favor of the self that obeys.

He wrote it in 1948. He was right.

Not Fiction, But a Prediction

We don’t have a Ministry of Truth. What we have is close enough.

The facts here are documented, not partisan. During the pandemic, people were told that following public health guidance was political submission rather than basic epidemiology — and hundreds of thousands of deaths have been attributed, in peer-reviewed research, to the vaccine hesitancy that followed. The 2020 election was certified by officials in states controlled by both parties, and courts dismissed fraud claims over sixty times — including courts with Trump-appointed judges. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turned green after a $14.2 million renovation; experts called it a predictable algae bloom; it was described to millions as Antifa sabotage. The current Iran deal, by most independent analyses, offers fewer restrictions and less verification than the multilateral Obama-era agreement it replaced — and has been presented as a historic triumph.

For years, it worked. It worked because of something deeper than politics. Something in us.

Not What We Believe, But Who We Believe

Here is something that should give everyone pause, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum: the strongest predictor of conspiracy belief is not intelligence.

Education, income, social class, media consumption — none of them predicted it. Researchers studying the psychology of conspiracy belief found the answer was overconfidence — specifically, the tendency to believe one knows more than one actually does, to feel more certain than the evidence warrants.

Smart people believe false things all the time. The real question is what produces unwarranted certainty — the kind that stays closed even when the evidence argues back. The answer turns out to be surprisingly unrelated to thinking. And that is where it gets interesting.

I want to introduce you to Robert Sapolsky.

Sapolsky is a neuroendocrinologist and primatologist at Stanford University — which is a fancy way of saying he has spent his career studying the biological machinery underneath human behavior. His book Determined makes a case that most people find deeply uncomfortable: that human behavior, including what we think of as our thoughts and choices and beliefs, is the output of prior causes stretching back before we were born. Genes. Prenatal environment. Childhood. Culture. The hormone levels in our blood this morning. The dream we had last night. The smell in the room.

He is not saying we are robots. He is saying the experience of deciding — the felt sense that we are reasoning our way to a conclusion — is, more often than not, a story we tell ourselves after the fact. The belief forms first. The reasoning follows. And yet we experience the reasoning as the cause.

Now I want to be transparent about something.

I just dressed that argument in credentials. I used his name, his title, his institution as a form of evidence. I am asking you to find his argument more credible because of who he is.

That is an appeal to authority. It is exactly the dynamic I am about to describe as one of the primary drivers of why we believe what we believe. I am using the tools I am critiquing. I am not doing this accidentally. I am doing it because I cannot escape it, and neither can you. The facts Sapolsky describes are also true. But if I had presented the same argument without attribution, it would land differently, probably less effectively.

So how do we actually come to believe things?

Not the way we think we do. Not primarily through reasoning, evidence, or logical evaluation of competing claims. Those things exist — they are real — but they are far downstream of something else. Something that has already done most of the work before reasoning gets a vote.

Start with environment. What surrounds you shapes what feels real — not metaphorically, but neurologically. The brain is a prediction machine, and it calibrates its predictions to the environment it lives in. If everyone around you believes something, that belief gains the feeling of reality simply through saturation. You don’t evaluate it. You absorb it. The fish does not analyze the water.

Layered on top of that is repetition. Psychologists call this the mere-exposure effect: familiarity breeds credibility. A claim heard once is a claim. A claim heard fifty times begins to feel true. This is not a flaw in human cognition — it was adaptive in an environment where repeated signals were usually reliable ones. It is exploited, systematically and deliberately, in an environment where repetition is cheap and truth is not the goal.

Then there is the body itself. Sapolsky is clear on this — the body is upstream of the mind far more than we acknowledge. Fear makes certain beliefs feel more necessary. Stress narrows cognition and increases the appeal of simple explanations. Belonging feels good. Doubt feels threatening. The emotional context in which we encounter an idea shapes whether it takes root — not its logical content.

And underneath all of it: trust. We are not equipped — neurologically, practically, temporally — to verify most of what we believe. We outsource belief to people we trust. This is not laziness. It is the only rational strategy for a social species navigating a world too large and complex for any individual to independently evaluate. You trust your doctor, your priest, your parents, your team, your tribe. And when a trusted voice tells you something — even something false, even something you might otherwise question — the trust does most of the work that evidence is supposed to do.

This is why Winston Smith eventually breaks. Not because the Party proves anything. Because they control everything else — the environment, the repetition, the social fabric, the people he trusts. They don’t win the argument. They win the conditions.

This is also why Trump’s supporters believe him. Not because the evidence supports them. Because he is the trusted voice inside a saturated environment, and the mere exposure effect has done its work. This is not an insult to their intelligence. It is a description of how belief actually forms. The same pattern works on all of us. We are all downstream of forces we did not choose.

If all of this is true — and the evidence strongly suggests it is — then a few things follow that are worth naming directly.

First, facts rarely change minds — they’re aimed at a process that isn’t primarily running the show. And lies work for exactly the same reason: confident delivery, repetition, a trusted source, a receptive context. There’s nothing in us that automatically sorts one from the other.

Second, we are all more susceptible than we think. The overconfidence research points here too. The people most certain they would not fall for it are, by that measure, the most at risk.

And third — the one I find hardest to hold — we lie to ourselves most fluently of all. Not through malice. Through the same machinery. We are embedded in our surroundings. We repeat our own stories to ourselves. We are our own most trusted narrator. And the beliefs we have formed about who we are, what we deserve, what is possible, what is true — many of those were not reasoned into place. They were absorbed. And we defend them with the reasoning that follows. Turns out, we trust ourselves the most — and so we are all prone to overconfidence.

Winston Smith, at the end of 1984, looks up at a portrait of Big Brother and feels something he hadn’t expected: love. Orwell doesn’t present this as defeat. He presents it as completion — the final, logical outcome of sustained environmental control, repetition, and the destruction of every alternative. We read this as dystopia. We should read it as documentation.

The gap between Winston and us isn’t freedom versus tyranny. It’s that his Ministry of Truth was visible, and ours mostly isn’t. The Party worked hard to manufacture the architecture of belief. So do the forces shaping ours — political, commercial, cultural, algorithmic.

Which raises the only question that matters: what do we do about it?

What I Haven’t Told You

I want to tell you something about myself. And I want you to notice what happens when I do.

I grew up going to church. Not casually — genuinely, deeply, invested in the community and the faith and the identity it gave me. And at some point in my adult life, I stopped believing in that version of God, and I definitely stopped being religious. Not overnight, not in a single moment of clarity. It happened slowly, over years, through a gradual accumulation of new environments, new relationships, new trusted voices, and a growing discomfort I couldn’t keep ignoring. The beliefs I held with the most certainty were the last to go. They had the most infrastructure around them — the most repetition, the most trusted sources, the most social reinforcement. Dismantling them was not merely an intellectual exercise.

I am telling you this for two reasons.

The first is the trust test. Notice what just happened in your body when you read that. Some of you moved me into your in-group — finally, someone who gets it. Some of you moved me out — he’s lost something essential, his moral framework is compromised. Neither of you reasoned your way there. It happened reflexively. That is the process at work. The same words carry different weight depending on who is saying them and whether that person feels like one of us. I have now changed that calculation for some of you. The argument didn’t change. The conditions did.

The second reason is the most important one. It is, finally, the answer.

Belief change is possible. I am evidence of that. But it does not happen the way we wish it would — through a good argument delivered at the right moment, through facts presented clearly enough, through a debate finally won. It happens slowly, at the level of environment and trust and accumulated discomfort. Through the eventual willingness to let a belief that once felt like identity become just a thing you used to think was true.

There’s a version of this I picked up from a U2 lyric long before I understood it – faith needs a doubt. In his memoir, Bono has said it more plainly. What bothers him about religion isn’t faithlessness, it’s “the pigheaded certainty of the devout without the doubt.” For me, it isn’t about doubting God’s existence. It’s doubt in whether I’ve understood God correctly, whether my version of events is the one that’s actually true. That kind of certainty is easier to organize, and a lot easier to evangelize than the alternative. Doubt, held honestly and long enough, is the discipline of staying answerable to what’s actually true instead of just what we’ve already decided is true. It is the only posture I know of that gets anyone closer to knowing better.

Not “I Was Wrong,” But “I Know Better Now”

Consider what scholars believed for most of recorded human history: that the sun revolved around the earth. This was a reasonable inference from reliable, repeatable observation — the conclusion was, given everything they had to work with, entirely logical. They weren’t wrong because they were gullible or lazy thinkers. They were incomplete.

Then came the telescope: new data that made doubt reasonable, not proof exactly, but an instrument that made previously invisible things visible — the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, the orientation of a solar system that suddenly made more sense arranged differently. The data expanded, and the picture changed along with it. The old observers weren’t foolish. They just had less to work with than we do now.

This is how belief change actually happens, and why it so rarely responds to argument alone. You cannot talk someone into a new picture of the world if they have not yet seen what the new picture is made of. The real work is expansion — of what we’ve seen, who we’ve known, what we’ve allowed ourselves to sit with long enough to feel. When the data set grows, the conclusions follow, almost automatically, because the old conclusion no longer fits everything the person can now see.

This reframing also offers something that the language of error and correction never does: grace. If you believed something that turned out to be incomplete, you were not failing. You were reasoning from what you had. The shift, when it comes, is not “I was wrong.” It is “I know better now.“ And even that leaves room — for humility, for continued revision, for the quiet acknowledgment that what seems complete today may look incomplete from somewhere further along. The person who trusted the wrong voices, who absorbed the wrong environment, who never encountered a perspective that challenged what they thought they knew — that person was doing exactly what human cognition is designed to do. They were working with their data. We all are. The question is never whether our current picture is complete. It isn’t. The question is whether we are willing to let it grow — and that willingness doesn’t usually announce itself. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Somewhere, two plus two is starting to look like it might actually be four. The cracks are showing even among true believers. Megyn Kelly — who endorsed and campaigned for Trump in 2024 — was recently heard saying she didn’t expect the corruption to be quite as widespread: the self-dealing, the family getting rich off the presidency. Also other media figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, manosphere podcasters like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, and even elected officials like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Where there used to be certainty, there is now doubt.

If you have read this far, something has already happened. You have spent time in a different environment, with a voice you may or may not have decided to trust, turning over ideas that may sit uncomfortably against things you already believed. That’s the mechanism doing its work, not an argument winning or a fact finally landing. Just a small expansion of what you have been willing to sit with — and a picture of the world that, in some way, no longer looks exactly as it did before you started reading.

My hope for you is that moving forward, you can say — I know better now.