Doublethink

You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.  There certianly exist societies that lay claim to their own set of facts, independent of proof and unverifiable, but they are toxic when they exist in a democracy.  This is the real danger of the ideologue.  When I hear the “debate” surrounding climate change, I can’t but think of this, from Orwell’s 1984:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

Science has the advantage of being true whether you believe in it or not.

via: