Over the past week I have spent much time flipping in shock between Fox News and CNN trying to understand what is going on inside the United States. I have been doing the same with China and its decision to introduce a security law in Hong Kong. The experience is surreal. How can intelligent, well-educated people watch the same events, absorb the same information, and yet reach such radically opposite conclusions? How can one man’s crisis of police brutality and racial discrimination be another man’s law and order problem? How can one person claim a steady erosion of personal freedom in Hong Kong since 1997, and another speak with equal conviction about Beijing’s steadfast respect for the autonomy built into Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems”? When relevant evidence remains insufficient, how can so many confidently draw such firm conclusions? I am reminded of an exploration a couple of years ago by the Financial Times’ Tim Harford of the roots of bias, and how we seem hard-wired for it. Harford said at the time that all of us have a built-in belief that we are seeing the world as it truly is, without bias or error: “This is such a powerful illusion that whenever we meet someone whose views conflict with our own, we instinctively believe we’ve met someone who is deluded.” Anyone who agrees with us is thinking rationally and “paying attention to facts”, while those who disagree are ignoring important facts, being politically correct, or “seeking peer approval”. This reminds me of a statement by Bertrand Russell, who a friend pointed me to a couple of days ago: “Man is a rational animal – so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.” I suspect his complaint rings as true today as ever. I am reminded too of Daniel Kahneman, who concluded in his brilliant Thinking, Fast and Slow that “we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness”. What Trump can’t see: Beijing is not bent on suppressing Hong Kong freedoms How can Donald Trump with such routine vehemence attack the “fake news” pouring daily from the world’s media, while at the same time The Washington Post’s Fact Checker says the US president has made more than 19,000 false or misleading statements since being sworn into office – an average of around 15 a day? It seems our tendency towards bias is deeply hard-wired, and reinforced regularly by confirmation bias – the inclination to read not to be informed, but to gather anecdotes that support our prejudices and discard anything that sits uncomfortably with our beliefs – and the peer group pressure of agreeing with our tribe, right or wrong. That is as true of Trump’s core supporters as it is of the Hong Kong democracy movement , members of the National People’s Congress , or Liverpool football fans. Trump has been a master manipulator of bias, and he is as busy today as when I first explored the bias epidemic two years ago. Just look at his unremitting attack against postal voting, where he claims without evidence that there is massive postal-voting fraud, and that postal voters don’t vote for Republican Party candidates. The US claim that China wilfully misled the world about Covid-19 is also false, but who wants to plough through a long and careful tracing of events from December last year , when a simple “blame China” narrative has such strong political appeal? A simple untruth has more political power than a complex truth. Trump’s making China the bogeyman in an election year – sound familiar? Trump’s other device is, of course, entertaining distraction. He has been a true master of this art. At a moment when the nation is being gutted by street protests against police brutality and systemic racial bias, traumatised by poor management of the pandemic, and riven by arguments over how best to lift lockdowns, he has distracted the public with postal voting, Europe’s planned digital taxes, specious claims that a political opponent had murdered a staffer two decades ago – and, of course, Hong Kong’s security bill. The trail of distractions is prodigious: there are not just Twitter blizzards, but theatrics from the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trump-Kim summits to the immobilisation of the World Trade Organisation’s dispute-settlement process and the withdrawal from the World Health Organisation. While some may regard these as entertaining diversions – and they certainly seem effective in distracting attention from problems at home – it is easy to get depressed about the erosion of confidence in fact-based policymaking caused by this behaviour. And it is distressing that over Trump’s three years in office, no ready response has been mustered. Perhaps one worthwhile response should be to double down on multilateral discussions about the alarmingly long list of global challenges facing us today. In Trump’s bilateral bubble, it is easy for the US unilaterally to determine the issues, define what counts as success, and dominate the sound bites. In the multilateral world of information sharing, cooperation and compromise, inconvenient facts are less easily buried or brushed aside, and alternative perspectives less easily ignored. The bias epidemic is less likely to flourish in forums like the G20, the WTO, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. For this reason alone, we should be protecting and promoting such multi-country institutions and pushing back against the “America first” bilateralism that has proliferated over the past three years. Multilateral discussion and agreement on how to bring the global pandemic properly under control, and to reopen and rebuild afterwards, would be a good place to start. David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view