Marty Levine
August 6, 2025
More than ever, I am challenged by the lack of a shared reality as we try to confront a complicated and challenging world.
Whatever the issue, there seem to be multiple versions of what we supposedly know and what we believe to be true. When we cannot agree on the facts, we cannot begin to have the difficult but possibly productive conversations about our differences and our vision for making this a better world.
Just in the last week, I painfully saw how much we are seemingly living in a time and place with no reality. What follows are just three examples that present how challenging this lack of shared vision and reality impacts our lives and our world.
Example 1: Are there children starving to death in Gaza? This photograph, which was published as part of a New York Times story about the specific impact of Israel’s total blockade of Gaza on children, seemed to say yes.
Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, about 18 months old, is being held by his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, 31. They and his brother live in a tent on a Gaza beach. Mohammed’s father was killed last year when he went to seek food.
The NY Times report described Gaza as a place of rampant starvation.
Now, according to doctors in the territory, an increasing number of their patients are suffering — and dying — from starvation.
“There is no one in Gaza now outside the scope of famine, not even myself,” said Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, who leads the pediatric ward at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. “I am speaking to you as a health official, but I, too, am searching for flour to feed my family.”
Dr. al-Farra said the number of children dying of malnutrition had risen sharply in recent days. He described harrowing scenes of people too exhausted to walk. Many of the children he sees have no pre-existing medical conditions, he said, giving the example of Siwar Barbaq, who was born healthy and now, at 11 months old, should weigh about 20 pounds but is under nine pounds.
But to others, even those who are eyewitnesses and were directly affected, were liars, propagandists, and antisemites. As reported by JNS (Jewish News Service) the Israeli Government has a different set of facts.
“Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza. What a bold-faced lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated on Sunday. “We enable humanitarian aid throughout the duration of the war to enter Gaza. Otherwise, there would be no Gazans.”
Even the young child pictured by the Times is a subject for debate. Was he starving or “just” suffering from the effects of his Cerebral Palsy? Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, told Piers Morgan in a BBC interview that “the New York Times’ use of a Palestinian child on their cover was a ‘lie’ and a ‘blood libel’”.
If we cannot agree that a child can have both Cerebral palsy and be dying from starvation, is there any hope of confronting the starvation of an entire population?
Example 2: In the same week, Environmental Protection Agency Director Lee Zeldin announced “the agency’s proposal to rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding…” which, as described by the New York Times, “concluded that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. The Obama and Biden administrations used that determination to set strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other industrial sources of pollution.”
Here’s how the New Yorker described the scientific debate about what reality is:
The E.P.A., in its proposal to repeal the finding, which was released last Tuesday, relied heavily on a report made public the same day, that the Department of Energy had commissioned from a handful of scientists clearly chosen for their contrarian views. The hundred-and-forty-one-page assessment downplays the dangers from climate change, sometimes in ways that seem contradicted by the document’s own figures. And several climate scientists whose work is cited in the D.O.E. report have said that their conclusions are misrepresented. One, Zeke Hausfather, told Wired that the assessment seemed to him less like an official document than “a blog post—a somewhat scattershot collection of oft-debunked skeptic claims, studies taken out of context, or cherry-picked examples that are not representative of broader climate science research findings.” In a comment on the website realclimate.org, Christopher O’Dell, a senior research scientist at Colorado State University’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, noted that a paper attributed to him by the report was actually written by an entirely different set of authors, a mistake that suggests the document was composed with the aid of AI.
How can we make responsible decisions if we have no agreement on the facts?
We are seeing reality transformed into a personal construction that does not upset a status quo I like or supports changes I would like to see made.
Example 3: As last week ended, we received a report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that told us that “Total nonfarm payroll employment changed little in July (+73,000) and has shown little change since April.” In its normal process of revisions, as more data is received, the Bureau also modified its assessment of the previous two months to bring the average monthly growth for the last three months to just 35,000 new jobs per month.
If we accept this data as our best understanding of employment in our country, then we can have a reasonable conversation about economic policy, tariffs, the recent “Big, Beautiful” budget bill and more.
But rather than do that, we are now in a time of having the right to have our own reality.
President Donald Trump and one of his top economic advisors on Monday stoked baseless conspiracies about federal jobs data, suggesting without evidence that Friday’s weaker-than-expected employment report had been “rigged” by federal workers bent on sabotaging the president.
“All over the U.S. government, there have been people who have been resisting Trump everywhere they can,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Monday on CNBC.
Trump, meanwhile, claimed on social media that the report, which painted a dour picture of the economy, was “RIGGED” and the previous months’ revisions had been “CONCOCTED to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!!”
Day after day, when I look at Facebook (or other social media) I am faced with people posting truths that are not true. Just a few minutes ago I came across an unsourced chart telling the world that “that 81% of white murder victims are killed by Blacks. Data from the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice show on the contrary that more than 80% of white murder victims are killed by whites. Posts with the claim are visible here, here ,and here .”
A quick fact check led me to a Reuters story published five years ago, which stated at the time that this was simply untrue.
Yet, 5 years later, the wrong data lives on.
What motivates this denial of reality?
I think it is a difficulty in taking responsibility for our actions.
Denying that there is famine in Gaza and that children are starving to death means I do not need to accept responsibility. It means I do not have to own a policy that purposefully starves people in support of a political position.
Denying that human actions are contributing to climate change and endangering people in numerous ways avoids having to be responsible for those outcomes.
This kind of denial may make your life easier, may require less sacrifice, and not force you to struggle with a guilty conscience. But it will not avoid the consequences of our willful ignorance nor of being responsible in the end.
Let’s all agree that we cannot live in a world of our own making, that we cannot make up facts and knowledge that agree with us. If we disagree about the rights and wrongs of policies and actions, let’s get that conversation on. If you can live with the environmental damage or the impact on peoples lives that your preferred direction leads to then advocate for it. But don’t deny those realities. If you just don’t want to make a sacrifice for someone else’s benefit or give up some of your wealth and privilege, stand behind that and don’t hide behind made-up facts.
Real disagreements will benefit us all; phony arguments will only lead to disaster.
