We live in the time of the hoax. Our lives are daily buffeted by lies great and small. Hoaxes blow through our lives like a windstorm.

Every morning at bootup, we are greeted by a blizzard of hoaxes: the cancellation of accounts we don’t have, nonexistent accounts placed on hold, nonexistent payments dishonored, announcements by computer antivirus services we do not employ warning that our computers are in grave peril, a price increase for an extended Vehicle Service Plan we don’t have, payments declined, invoices overdue, security alerts, etc. etc.—all fictitious.

There’s more. Our state just launched an insurance regulation that will reduce my insurance bill (if you don’t like that state, change your VPN). Top doctors are baffled, and Big Pharma is outraged. Someone I have never heard of sends me a “security code” to I don’t know what, and a scantily-clad, busty, gorgeous blond woman with two cute children says billionaires want to silence her message.

Image by Andrea Widburg

Harmless but no less annoying are the literary hoaxes. The bear, wolf, and bobcat had a very busy morning. The wolf walked into the hospital and made the nurse cry, then led her into the woods. The bear approached the girl at the bus stop and bid her to follow him into the woods. The bobcat met the little old lady in the middle of the street and led her into the woods also. Exactly what they all did in the woods is unknown as no one ever reached the end of the story (is there an end?). Maybe they joined the teddy bears at their picnic.

Much more serious are the political hoaxes. The Democrat party is an assembly of political hoax junkies who have hitched their wagon to a litany of hoaxes, including, but not limited to, hoaxes of transgenderism, DEI, EV, climatism, abortion on demand, toxic feminism, Covid-19, and more. It has been observed that to adhere to Democrat dogma is to descend into madness.

Transgenderism would seem to be the quintessential Democrat hoax, where proclaiming “non-binary” is a badge of deep thinking, notwithstanding the simple fact that so much of reality is binary. Consider a small sample:

(1) Propositional Logic is chiefly concerned with relations among declarative sentences, and every declarative sentence is either true or false. Truth is binary.

(2) Categorical logic is based on the fact that for every set and every entity, that entity either is or is not a member of the set. Set membership is binary.

(3) Computer science is based on the fact that electric circuitry is binary. Every electric circuit is either open or closed at any instant in time.

(4) Metaphysicians know that being is binary. Every being is either existentially contingent or existentially necessary. As it is impossible that every being is existentially contingent, so some being is existentially necessary, there can be only one such being, and the one necessary being is the creator of all the contingent being.

(5) Biologists know that human sexuality is binary.

The true believer hoax junkie cannot abide even a hint of cognitive dissonance and, therefore, cannot acknowledge a hint of evidence questioning the hoax.

One fine morning a few moons ago in organic chemistry class, the professor was filling our young minds with the received doctrine of stereo isomerism. It seems some molecules with identical chemical formulae have different properties because their identical constituents are arranged differently in 3-dimensional space. The two differing arrangements are mirror images of each other and hence are called “right-handed” and “left-handed”, denoted by “R” for the Latin “rectus” for “right,” and “S” for the Latin “sinister” for “left.”

A young classmate raised his hand and, upon being recognized, informed the professor that the letter “R” should be the letter “D”, as “rectus” is the Latin for right versus wrong, whereas “dexter” is the Latin for right versus left. The student was correct, but the organic chemists still use “R,” not “D,”.

Correction can be threatening.

For the hoax junkie, ignorance is an impenetrable castle, a sanctuary from the infidel, a citadel that protects the true believer from the world of fact. As computer scientists like to remind us: “There are only 10 kinds of people: Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”