Searching for facts in 2024

If you find yourself dreading the next 12 months, you are not alone. In addition to the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the omnipresent threat from climate change, and the apocalyptic warnings about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence (AI), we have what pundits have been saying for years will be the most significant presidential election of our lifetime.

We have extraordinarily significant cases pending (or soon to be pending) before multiple state and federal courts involving former President Donald Trump, an increasingly untenable immigrant challenge on our southern border, deeply ingrained political polarization, and an ongoing mental health crisis devastating our young people. If each of us added our personal and professional worries to that litany of woes, we could easily be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed.

Negativity, however, is a waste of time and utterly counterproductive. We owe it to each other, to ourselves, and to our children to look for reasons to hope and to find tangible steps we can take to bring light to the darkness and carve a path forward together. And the biggest commitment we can make in 2024, one that we can model for everyone in our lives who matters, is to search for facts.

That may sound abstract, but in a world in which we have access to more information than ever before facts are, paradoxically, increasingly hard to find and agree on, particularly when it comes to politics.

In theory, facts can be proven and shared. They are not opinions and have no connection to feelings. We use them every day to make informed decisions involving everything from investments and purchases to where we eat lunch, and in many cases we can share them with each other without controversy.

Unfortunately, our attachment to facts has suffered considerably since the advent of the internet, cable television, talk radio, and social media. We now have so many choices when it comes to where and from whom we receive information that many of us choose to look for it only in places where we like the answer. In short, we choose our own facts and truths.

None of this would matter if we only disagreed over restaurants, movies, or sports teams. But when we disagree over the efficacy of vaccinations, we put public health at risk, when we disagree over whether elections were conducted fairly or not, we put out faith in institutions and democracy at risk, and when we decide that all facts are malleable and that only people from our own political party are privy to them we have abandoned the pretense of being able to think critically and made ourselves the cult-like followers of demagogues who can (and will) lie to us to gain power.

Consider, for example, the fact that most surveys indicate that the majority of Americans believe the economy is struggling, when in fact it is booming and has been for some time. Real income rose 2.7% in 2023, and the largest increases were in lower wage jobs. Gas prices are down to an average of $3.12 a gallon nationally (and way lower in Oklahoma) from $5.02 in June of 2022. More than 232,000 new jobs were created a month in 2023, and unemployment is down to a mere 3.7%. Our gross domestic product (GDP) grew by almost 3% over the last year, while the stock market exploded. The NASDAQ is up 43.4%, while the S&P 500 rose 24.2% and almost reached an all-time high. Wages are up for most workers, along with consumer spending, construction, travel, and private manufacturing construction investment, which reached the highest level since 1958. Those are all facts that can be checked and verified in a number of ways, and yet the survey results keep telling us voters are gloomy when it comes to the economy. Why?

One reason is that young people grew up in an era with virtually no inflation, and the price hikes of the COVID years really threw them for a loop. They do not have long enough memories to know that things have been hard before and then gotten better. Another is that prices for many items, especially in grocery stores, remain high. That is largely a function of corporate greed or supply chain issues in some cases, but it frustrates voters who are not likely to remember getting raises but will always wince when they checkout at Wal-Mart. Finally, and this is the most important factor, many politicized sources of information keep saying the economy is in a bad way, and if those are the only places some voters go for information, they are going to keep hearing the same falsehoods over and over and over and they are going to believe them.

Disinformation for political purposes is nothing new. But in the old days we had a limited number of sources for information and the majority were professional, meaning they were staffed by people who had been trained to at least try and be fair and feared lawsuits if they published or broadcast information that was inaccurate. Now, when people get their news from all manner of internet sites and phone applications, those days are over.

So what are we to do?

The first step is to get your facts only from sources that have professional staff, editors, and are big enough to fear being sued for slander or libel. Avoid getting news from all social media sites and take anything a politician or politically affiliated group says with a great deal of suspicion. They have no interest in or incentive to tell the truth. Everything they say is designed to get your money or your vote, so verify what they tell you before giving them either one.

The second is to be curious. Factual information is out there, but you must be willing to look for it. And you must be open to the notion that facts may lead you toward conclusions you may not like. Sometimes you might even find yourself changing your mind on certain issues, which is healthy and a sign that you are still a functioning citizen rather than a mindless politicized drone. So use search engines. Look at various news sites. Decide for yourself which sites are trustworthy and which ones are not.

You will find our country and our system of government are in much better shape than the fear-mongers would have you believe, which is something we all need to remember going into 2024.

Happy hunting!

Lance Janda holds a PhD in History from the University of Oklahoma and has more than 30 years of experience in higher education. He is the author of “Stronger Than Custom: West Point and the Admission of Women”, among other works.