Settle only for the truth

As our politics has become ever more polarized over the past four years—drawing comparisons to the violent political and social conflicts of the 1960s—up till now we’ve been able to reassure ourselves that “at least the assassinations haven’t started.” Well, strike that. With a burst of bullets passing millimeters from former President Donald Trump’s skull, we seem to find ourselves back in the world of 1968, when Palestinian radical Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy for his support of Israel. Or are we perhaps in the world of 1981, when President Ronald Reagan survived a bullet from the gun of would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr., an infatuated madman simply hoping to impress actress Jodie Foster? No one knows for sure.

But that doesn’t stop us from speculating. Although America is no stranger to political assassination attempts, this is the first major one of the social media era—a volatile combination indeed. Within minutes of the story breaking, X was rife with rumors and theories. Some alleged that the shooter was an antifa member named Mark Violets, which turned out to be false; others speculated that Trump hadn’t been shot at all but had just faked the whole thing as a publicity stunt to boost his candidacy, a narrative that grew increasingly implausible as news emerged of the innocent bystanders shot. At least half of Saturday night’s hot takes were discredited by Sunday morning, and probably half of Sunday’s will be discredited by the time you read this.

Although at the time I write this we know the shooting was real and who did it (Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa.), but we have no idea why. We are tempted, of course, to connect the dots immediately to the media’s intemperate rhetoric—if Trump is Hitler, someone’s going to try to play Bonhoeffer. But a glance at the history of U.S. political assassinations muddies the picture. Nearly all were the result of mentally deranged individuals acting alone for idiosyncratic motives: Charles Guiteau killed President James Garfield in 1881 after being denied a diplomatic post in the new administration. John Schrank tried to kill President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 because he believed he’d been ordered to by a ghost. Arthur Bremer shot presidential candidate George Wallace just to become famous. Basic facts about the most notorious assassination of all, President John F. Kennedy’s in 1963, remain a mystery to this day.

All of this suggests that, in our desperate search for answers, we’re likely to be sorely disappointed. But that doesn’t stop us from rushing forward into the haze of uncertainty and trying to make sense of it all. Conspiracy theories are already proliferating—President Joe Biden’s campaign ordered the shooting, Trump’s campaign staged the shooting, the Secret Service intentionally ignored the shooter—and in our current environment of paralyzing distrust, it is hard to imagine any of them settling down any time soon. Perhaps we will get a “full independent inquiry”—but will most Americans believe its answers?

If it is true, as many have alleged, that our politics is descending into an existential war, we had better learn to beware of the fog of war. Wartime is the ultimate test of virtue because it forces us to face the highest stakes under conditions of maximal uncertainty. Many soldiers and commanders cannot bear the strain, leaping to conclusions based on fragments of intelligence and charging rashly into the fray. Few have the humility to admit how little they know or the patience to wait for the fog to clear. Ironically, those who seem most eager to rebrand our politics as warfare (on both the right and left) seem those most blind to the constraints of the fog of war and most brazenly confident in the grand narratives they spin.

The information age has brought us no nearer to knowledge or truth but leaves us tossing and turning in a whirlwind of uncertainty. The more we distrust all sources, the more feverishly we gulp down whatever information we can find, hoping that sheer quantity can somehow compensate for the lack of quality. As we digest the flood of conflicting information and speculation about Saturday night’s tragedy over the coming weeks, we will be sorely tempted to filter out inconvenient facts and latch onto those that confirm our biases. Best of all will be those bits of information that fuel our anger and give us more reason to distrust and hate our “enemies.”

Against this temptation, the only antidote is patience. In a culture of immediacy, patience can feel excruciating—but then, it is supposed to. It comes from the Latin word meaning “to suffer.” We live in a culture that has no time for suffering—pop a pill to dull the pain, scroll a feed to fill the void. The only thing we can be certain of these next few months is that we are in for more agonizing uncertainty. But if through this suffering we can learn patience, and model patience to a restless world, it will not be in vain.