What's real will last

An important reminder in uncertain times

You can’t always pinpoint the origin of an idea, but for this one I can. It was in 2020, when the chaos of the Covid pandemic was in full swing. I was stress-watching YouTube one afternoon when I came across a clip of Bob Woodward on CNN.¹ The host asked Woodward what he thought of the latest misinformation being spread by Trump. “Eh,” Bob replied, looking like he was on the verge of shrugging, “the truth will out.”

I needed something more reassuring than that old-fashioned, Shakespearean saying. In the four years lead up to that, it felt like like the truth was constantly under attack. And these attacks ratcheted up to absurd levels in 2020. Every aspect of Covid was the subject of distortion and lies by Trump and his followers — how deadly the virus was, how long it would last, how to stop its spread, which treatments were effective, even how many people had died from it. The lies and spin felt endless, at a time when the stakes were literally life and death on an enormous scale.

And Covid wasn’t the only battleground in their war against reality. There were conspiracy theories that were absolutely mental, as well as cultural reckonings over gender and race where no facts were off limits from being attacked by the cult of Trump. The truth seemed to be losing ground across the board, so it was damned hard to believe the truth really would “out.”

This gnawed at me for a long time. Months, years. Eventually, a related idea came to me. One that felt more reassuring and more tailored to the moment. It was this simple, almost mantra-like phrase: what’s real will last.

I found these words reassuring because they’re undeniable, in literal terms. Anything that objectively exists will continue existing, no matter what people say or believe. As Philip K. Dick put it: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”²

Science and medicine are filled with examples of reality’s staying power. Like the story of Galileo, who was placed on house arrest because he wrote that the earth revolved around the sun. Or Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor in the 1800s who was ostracized from the medical establishment because he advocated for handwashing in hospitals. Semmelweis was committed to an insane asylum in the end. In both cases, their accurate views of reality were met with resistance for a long time. But eventually, their ideas became widely accepted, as the evidence grew and the counterarguments fell apart.

Real shit lasts. Bullshit doesn’t.

Here’s something that science-deniers and those who think they can rewrite reality miss: perceiving reality accurately almost guarantees that you’ll be on the winning team, eventually. It’s like that Biblical parable about the house built on sand and the house built on stone. A solid foundation ensures longevity. And reality is a vastly superior foundation than lies and distortions. To put it more bluntly: real shit lasts and bullshit doesn’t.

There are several matters today where this continues to play out in real time. Like all the Covid details mentioned above, or climate change, or evolution, or the ability of masks to stop the spread of airborne diseases (when the masks are high-quality and worn correctly). These topics are still depressingly controversial. But the evidence is strongly on the side of them being real, so I have faith that they’ll become undeniable in time.³

To borrow a phrase from Garry Shandling, the reality-deniers who think they’re winning in the short-term are looking at the wrong damn finish line. Lies may be fast, but reality lasts.

But it can take a long time for the truth to win out. For Galileo it took about 200 years. For Semmelweis it was about 100. (And there are still plenty of people who act like his idea of handwashing is radical.) You’ve got to take a long view - a very long view. But if you do, you’ll see that reality always gets the last word.

It’s not just objective facts that this mindset applies to, either. It also holds true for culture and community. A small example from my own life: I began attending a local social meetup for non-religious people over 15 years ago. Then I moved away for more than a decade. When I moved back to the area, I was pleasantly surprised to see the group was still going strong. I’ve seen other groups like this come go. Seeing this one last for so long made me realize, “Oh, we’ve really created something real here, haven’t we?” The organizers had managed to maintain a strong culture of honesty, thoughtfulness, and, well, being real with each other.

In politics, if you zoom out and look at movements and coalitions on the whole, there’s a massive difference in their realness, too. (That’s realness in both senses: honesty as well as being in touch with the facts.⁴) Thanks in part to Fox News and its agenda-setting, round-the-clock propaganda, America’s conservative coalition was seriously reality-challenged well before Trump. But under his leadership, the coalition has become largely detached from reality or anything resembling honesty. It seems like every day brings a new barrage of brazen attempts to deny what’s clearly real. (A recent example: claiming that captions overlaid on top of a photograph were actual tattoos on a man’s hand.)

This isn’t sustainable. Going to war with reality is a losing battle in the long run. That’s why dictatorships are so often self-defeating.

But I don’t think the progressive coalition is as real as it could be, either. The grassroots movement on the left still puts too much faith in politicians that are more interested in serving themselves than serving their country. And like so much in our culture, the grassroots movement relies far too much on the shallow trappings of social media.

One example: at a protest a few weeks back, I saw someone wearing a onesie that looked like a penguin. Their protest sign just said, “What the heck,” in playful craft letters. I was too checked out from the news and social media to understand the reference at the time. Later, I figured out that it had to do with Trump’s tariffs also applying to uninhabited islands. The tariffs are a serious issue, as we’re about to find out. And treating them with the silliness of a meme only trivializes the matter. That costume and sign feel to me like a symptom of social media culture, which is so often allergic to sincerity. Going forward, being sincere and genuine is going to be necessary if we really want to win anyone over and have a lasting impact.

Of course, I’ve been guilty of falling into the pitfalls of social media, too. I cringe when I think back to Trump’s first administration and how many political memes I shared, or how many debates I got into on Facebook. It’s obvious now how little that accomplished, and how crucial it is to take a very different approach this time.

Fortunately, I have seen signs of exactly this kind of sincerity in recent protests and town halls. An earnestness that’s born of deep moral conviction and a sober assessment of the danger we’re in. So there are glimmers of hope.

In my own small way, writing and sharing this is my attempt to do that — to get real, and to connect with other people who want to do the same. The task of actually building something lasting is still ahead of us, though. It’s a big task, but if we hold onto truth and sincerity as our north stars, then we’ll have a fighting chance. Because — say it with me this time — what’s real will last.

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Thanks for reading (and waiting). This took longer than expected to write. But I wanted to get it right — it’s a central idea to my outlook these days, and I want to be able to refer back to it in the future. (I also underestimated the amount of effort it would take, and the tenacity of my own perfectionism.)

For the next one, I’m thinking of switching it up and keeping the scope smaller. Stay tuned for that, coming soon in some unspecified number of weeks. In the meantime, stay strong out there and stay real.

1. At least I’m pretty sure it was CNN. It could’ve been a clip from a similar basic cable channel instead.

2. Source: https://philipdick.com/mirror/essays/How_to_Build_a_Universe.pdf

3. And this faith is important for me on a personal level — I’ve got a dysfunctional immune system thanks to long Covid, which means that masks are an ongoing source of stress and social discomfort for me.

4. These two flavors of realness tend to be highly correlated. It’s hard to maintain a clear sense of the truth in a culture of dishonesty.