KOLUMNI
An inside view from Washington
America’s dangerous fascination
with misinformation
FINLAND has a long and respected tradition of honesty.
Finns prefer to tell it the way it is. They
base what they say on facts with minimal spin.
Telling the truth, of course, means that there is
some knowable truth to tell. It can sometimes be
difficult to define exactly what “the truth” is but
usually it’s what reasonable people agree on after
learning whatever objective facts are known at the
time. Scientists are a good source of information,
along with an orderly legal process to resolve disputes
when information is unclear or conflicting.
It’s often not perfect, but it’s the best way we have
to sort out the truth as much as possible.
Such honesty based on facts is valued in Finland
and admired by the rest of the world, including those
Americans who know anything about Finland or
Finnish culture. Americans, too, like to think that
they respect the truth and want to know accurate
facts. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
In the USA, misinformation is increasingly
more popular than the real thing
This isn’t new. Americans have long thought that
they live in the best, brightest and most technologically
advanced country on earth but, for many
measures of success, they do not and never have.
Finland and other nations fare much better in key
comparisons (education, healthcare, happiness and
freedom from corruption, to name just a few).
Countless popular and powerful Americans have
recently been debunked as frauds, or at least shown
to be terrible people in their private lives, but
only decades later. And America’s military actions
in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have later been
revealed to be based upon intelligence failures too
massive to have been mere errors. So why is the
truth so slow to come out, if it’s ever disclosed at all?
Something else is at work - misinformation
Unlike Finns, vast numbers of Americans prefer
misinformation over truth. Americans hear what
they want to hear, and they display an uncanny
ability to avoid any pesky truths that may conflict
with what they think they already know.
This is not a new phenomenon, but lately it’s
expanded to a new level. Millions of American’s
version of “truth” has moved far beyond any reality
supported by science or law or anything else. It’s
particularly evident in what many Americans hear
and think about the coronavirus pandemic, vaccinations
and masks. Several U.S. states’ governors
are actively working to prevent children from wearing
masks to school while elected members of the
U.S. Congress tour the country to warn citizens that
the U.S. government will soon deploy goon squads
to break into people’s homes to forcibly vaccinate
them and partisan news channels on TV report
that vaccines contain Microsoft chips and 5G magnetism,
whatever that is. You can’t make this stuff
up…that’s what they say.
The farther this stuff gets from proven truth,
the louder they insist that only they know the truth,
until the assertion that “this is the truth” means
it’s most likely…. not. Science and law have become
the enemy of so-called truths held by tens of
millions of Americans.
These people then vote, and make misinformed
choices based upon the inaccurate information fed
to them by news outlets and politicians who benefit
in increasingly bizarre ways from the crap they’ve
spread. The more off the wall their misinformation
Tom A. Lippo is a Finnish-speaking American lawyer. Educated at Yale, the University of Jyväskylä and Stanford Law School,
he is the founder of FACT LAW, an international law firm established in 1985. FACT is the first law firm with offices in both
Finland and the United States. Tom has been a lawyer in Washington, DC based on Capitol Hill for nearly 40 years.
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