"One thing that's for certain, don't let it dominate you. Don't be afraid of it. You're going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment. We have the best medicines, all developed recently, and you're going to beat it. I went; I didn't feel so good. And two days ago, I could have left two days ago. Two days ago, I felt great. Like, better than I have in a long time. I said just recently, better than 20 years ago. Don't let it dominate. Don't let it take over your lives. Don't let that happen." President Trump (October 5, 2020)
The phrase "anecdotal evidence," to my mind, usually deserves quotes around it because "anecdotal evidence" is almost an oxymoron. There's a reason anecdotal evidence is not admissible in court. It's not really evidence. It's some standalone piece of data that gets introduced into conversation or debate without the benefit of statistical context. "Anecdotal evidence" is either some cherry-picked piece of information or information from a limited perspective. Without the benefit of statistics, the observations of one person are by definition limited, and usually fall under the "anecdotal evidence" aegis.
One of my problems with national media during this pandemic has been that, when conducting interviews or asking questions, they've often missed the forest for the trees. Interviews and press conferences have often failed to generate the most obvious, logical questions. Instead of responding to illogical proclamations with questions that attack a lack of reasoning or lack of data, lines of questioning have too often followed some pre-printed outline designed to elicit sound bites. Cogent follow-up questions have been rare. Interviews have become robotic exercises in leading questions being asked and answered.
When President Trump made the comments quoted above, I was somewhat taken aback by national media assigning absurdity to Trump's spiel based on his getting medical care far beyond the access of normal men. Expert moment-to-moment monitoring and multiple drugs unavailable to the masses are, to be sure, valid drawbacks to Trump's "If I can do it, you can do it" coachspeak. The more critical point to hammer home, however, was the sheer inappropriateness, the unbelievable statistical idiocy, of using one man's results as any kind of template for what hundreds of millions of people will experience.
Don't get me wrong. Trump's idiosyncratic treatments and position in society are valid means to debunk the significance of his results. At heart, however, his lack of representativeness really isn't the most damning argument. Simply put, one man's outcome means nothing in terms of predicting outcomes for millions. This is a basic problem with "anecdotal evidence." One man's results are almost meaningless.
The reality of this insignificance should be obvious, yet the statistical absurdity of the argument being made by Trump was not the spotlight criticism. Instead, the unrepresentativeness of his treatments became the media fulcrum for debunking the president's proclamations. Debunking the specifics of one case, however, was silly. The devil wasn't in the details of a single case; it was in the fact that it was a single case, period.
Personal Experience as Gold Standard
Moving on to the president himself, the first question is why would Trump make such an argument, namely that his own experience would forecast the experiences of millions? Why does someone assume, if indeed Trump actually believed what he was saying, that one man's outcome was a valid predictor for all men? How does "I" get conflated with "We?"
I refer back to the Norman Vincent Peale ministry on which President Trump was raised. What Peale "discovered," Peale argued, was applicable to all. This perspective requires a kind of magical symmetry between self and all others. It allows the person viewing the world to assume others' experiences mirror his, and that their outcomes, if they be worthy, should also mirror his own. This perspective is the height of presumptuous narcissism, and it allows the person holding the beliefs to assume his micro social environment is a kind of black box. Since he presumes what happens to self will happen to others, there's really no need to interpret others' actions on the others' terms. No need to exercise any empathy muscles. Everything is a reflection or projection of self. No need to venture beyond one's own black box. No requirement to even see beyond one's own black box. Since others are presumed to be a kind of statistical extension of one's self, there's no need to work to understand others.
This hall-of-mirrors inability to see beyond one's own life events horizon traps the individual in a narcissistic fun house. All evidence references the self. All evidence is, therefore, anecdotal and (unacknowledged by the self) of minimal value. Everywhere one turns is self, and self images fill and define not just evidence and decision-making, but every aspect of life. The president's take on the world is quite literally bounded by his funhouse mirrors. Not only is he unconcerned about what lies outside, but he may be unable to grasp that there is any landscape anywhere that doesn't contain his own reflection.
This is the quicksand of narcissism in the funhouse. The fact that Trump has lived a wholly transactional life, immersed in consumer culture as a kind of capitalist figurehead, adds locks and chains to the outside of the funhouse doors. He has been trapped, perhaps for his entire existence. Everything he sees, everything he does, is a reflection of him.
Bob Dietz
October 13, 2020
