Belief Tank=Think Tank Without the Doubt

Gary Trudeau's Sunday Doonesbury has, once again, crystallized a social phenomenon into a simple, revealing phrase. Discussing the Bush Library's unprecedented budget, one Doonesbury character suggests that it will also be a "think tank", to which others respond that it will be a "belief tank", defined as a think-tank-without-the-doubt.

Goebbels' observation about the power of the "big lie" can, with modern technology, now trickle down even to small lies. For 30 years the radical rightwing has funded its own institutions, such as Heritage Foundation, supposedly to "investigate" social and political issues and to publish the results of those "investigations". They rigorously screen the views of potential hires to ensure they are ideologically pure (to be an intern at the Heritage Foundation, students had to pass a litmus test to ensure not a whisper of free thinking remained), and their results, curiously, always seem to support the economic interests of their funders.

Between $300 and $400 MILLION per YEAR is spent on these radical rightwing institutions. Their corporate sponsors are accustomed to getting returns-on-investment ("ROI" in the biz), and cutting funding from operations that do not produce good ROI.

Belief tanks deliver for them. Starting with a pre-ordained conclusion, the "investigation" focuses on finding those facts that can be woven into a supporting fabric. Contrary facts are ignored; if they are too powerful to be ignored, the integrity of their sources are impugned.

By contrast scientific (or other free-thinking) processes begin with an hypothesis (to organize the investigation), with the hypothesis rejected if facts do not support it. In the midst of the First World War, Einstein demonstrated this scientific temperament. He convinced the British government to fund a major project (with no military value) to measure a prediction from his Relativity Theory (there's that word "theory", which is the scientific term for an hypothesis that has been well-established by observation such as, say, the Theory of Gravity). "The prediction", said the Nobel Laureate, "if proven wrong by this observation, would disprove my theory". That is how a real think tank should operate.

By contrast the tobacco industry discovered decades ago how to deal with "inconvenient (to the bottom line)" truths. The link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer was, we were told for decades, "only statistical". That is because no one could figure out how to coax laboratory rats to inhale; they were not that stupid. To provide a reference point, the link between rubella (aka, "the German measles") in the first trimester of pregnancy and severe birth defects was also "only statistical". Thankfully, rubella has no commercial value.

The mainstream media has fallen, hook-line-and-sinker, for this subterfuge. Insulated by one-degree of separation from their corporate sponsors, Heritagers and their ilk appear not only on radical rightwing mass media, but also in the MSM without any identification except their institutional connection. Idealogues are given equal time and thus the imprimatur of legitimacy to peddle their pre-ordained beliefs as facts.

Frank Luntz, the rightwing linguistic guru, taught them the words to use to demean facts so that they were, at best, on a par with belief, but his main lesson was: language counts. I am no longer going to refer to groups like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Discovery Institute, Americans United for Life, as think tanks, but rather as "belief tanks".

Will you join me?

How about using the netroots, and the blogging community, to spread Gary Trudeau's brilliant insight? In my writings, I will refer to such institutions, and the people from them, like this: "John Smith, from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Belief Tank, said....". And, how about training those who appear in the MSM alongside people from the Belief Tanks to call out their institutions as "Belief Tanks", and to do so over-and-over-and-over-and-over again, so it becomes part of the background?