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  • Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday. Last night I dreamt that there were two ligers walking through my backyard, a liger being the offspring of a

  • male lion and a female tiger. This struck me as pretty unusual and conceivably

  • impossible so I began to investigate the situation within my dream. I considered for instance that there is often wildlife in my backyard: deer, coyotes,

  • foxes, one time I saw a beaver. It did seem unlikely that there would be two ligers given their rarity, but I reassured myself that they

  • were probably brother and sister. Also ligers are not, uh, native to

  • Indianapolis, so they had probably escaped captivity, and if you were an escaped liger in central Indiana my

  • backyard is one of the places you might seek out because it is wooded and contains lots of potential food

  • mostly in the form of four million

  • chipmunks. All in all it seemed perfectly possible to me that sibling ligers had escaped their cages to dine in my backyard.

  • The problem, of course, is that my

  • investigation of the liger situation began with the conclusion: there are ligers in my backyard. And then I worked my way back

  • to the story of how they came to be there, rather than

  • pausing to consider that the ligers I thought I saw might have been, for instance, deer, or that I might have been, say,

  • dreaming. My friend Amy Cross Rosenthal once said correctly that nothing is less interesting than other people's dreams, and I apologize for

  • Introducing you to my subconscious, but I mention all of this because it seems to me that the liger

  • delusion is at the heart of a lot of contemporary discourse, especially around politics. You start with what you already know to be

  • incontrovertibly true: that

  • Republicans are crooks who only want to line the pockets of their wealthy donors or that Democrats are crooks who want the government to control

  • every aspect

  • of human life, and then you look

  • for the how and why. I mean these days it can be difficult to even know when you believe in a conspiracy theory, in part

  • because conspiracy theories are sometimes true, and in part because, no matter the subject, the closer you look, the

  • more you see. Put another way, the more you consider ligers might be roaming Indianapolis, the more

  • explanations you'll find for why.

  • Take for instance the following

  • conspiracy theory, which may of course prove to be true. Republican donor Elliot Broidy paid a woman over a million dollars not to discuss their

  • alleged affair that's known but the conspiracy theory holds that the actual affair was between that woman and Donald Trump and then Broidy stepped in

  • to cover up that affair and make

  • the payment. Now if you look for

  • explanations of why Broidy might have done this, you will find them. Broidy has profited tremendously from the Trump presidency.

  • He also has a history of covering up affairs for, his friends and no-

  • Stop because none of that means he covered up an affair for Trump. Of course the same happens on the right where conspiracy theories from

  • Benghazi

  • to pizza gate are presumed true by many but my worry is that many of us are falling into the trap of believing that we,

  • however we define that we, are the ones alive to the real reality while those who disagree with us are mere sheeple, a term that

  • literally

  • dehumanizes others. You see this all the time with people saying "wake up" or "keep

  • dreaming" as if only those we disagree with can fall prey to the liger

  • delusion. What I have found while looking for ligers is this: I am far more likely

  • to believe in allegation to be true or to be important if it confirms my pre-existing

  • worldview, and if it would challenge my worldview I am likely

  • to believe it to be false or else

  • irrelevant. Sometimes on tv news or political radio or

  • podcasts you'll hear the phrase, "we don't yet know all the facts, but" and then after the 'but' comes some

  • speculation or a statement of

  • implication. Like, we don't yet know all the facts but someone saw two ligers in the backyard, we know that. Hank I have to stop

  • beginning with the conclusion, I have to stop speculating

  • ahead of the story and instead wait for the facts to come out, and I have to stop saying 'but'

  • after 'we don't yet know all the facts'

  • But I don't know how. This is the part of the video where I turn it around and find reasons to be hopeful and make

  • a call to action

  • But I don't know how. I do think being aware of our conspiratorial

  • instincts can be helpful, but I don't know how to escape the liger delusion. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.

Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday. Last night I dreamt that there were two ligers walking through my backyard, a liger being the offspring of a

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