By Jason Lim

Mad cow, Obama, and Tablo share something very important in common. What could a neurodegenerative disease, the current President of the United States, and a Korean American rap star possibly have in common? After all, one of them isn’t even human.

But they do indeed share something profound in common that’s unique to the times that we live in today. They are all victims of falsehoods going viral and overwhelming whatever defenses that actual ``facts” struggle to put up.

Two-and-a-half years ago, just as President Lee Myung-bak was taking reins of the South Korean government, he was ambushed by a flurry of gripes on resuming imports of U.S. beef that quickly blossomed into the biggest street protest seen in the country since South Korea became a democracy.

The protests centered on the Lee government’s resumption of U.S. beef imports that would supposedly put the Korean public at great risk of contracting the mad cow disease. Claims that won wide credibility included a theory that the homogenous Korean race shared a gene that made it especially susceptible, and a warning that babies could catch the disease from wearing diapers made from infected cow parts.

To call these claims overblown would be a gross understatement. But they nevertheless tore through the Internet to become an onslaught of patently false ``truth” that the authorities, despite being armed with ``facts,” were helpless against. Eventually, President Lee was forced to apologize to the public as his approval rating barely scraped 20 percent.

President Obama can probably empathize. Even before his election, the so-called ``birthers” have accused him of being born outside of the U.S. and therefore not eligible to run as the President of the United States. And they are gaining traction. A recent CNN poll found that just 23 percent of the Republicans believe that Obama is a native-born American.

Even worse, a recent Pew Poll found that 20 percent of Americans believe that the President is a Muslim despite a mountain of facts to the contrary and testimonies of respected Christian ministers that the President is, indeed, a Christian.

Such victimization is not limited just to politicians. Eric Lee, better known as Tablo of the Korean hip-hop group, Epik High, had long been accused by netizens of falsely claiming that he graduated from Stanford University. Despite producing a diploma, letters from the University’s Registrar, and even classmates who vouched for him, Tablo couldn’t shake the rumor. As a last resort, he recently took a TV crew to the Stanford Campus as a part of his effort to clear his name.

Different pundits have different takes on this phenomenon. Bob Schieffer, the venerable host of CBS’s Face the Nation, believes that the absurd suggestion that Obama is a Muslim illustrate the Internet’s downside. ``… in the Internet age, ignorance travels as quickly as great ideas. Not only can great minds find one another and compare ― so too can the nuts and the perverts and those who are looking to validate their prejudices.”

Schieffer has a valid point. The Internet has certainly made it easier for falsehoods to race around the world and overpower facts until the truth is hopelessly obscured. However, false rumors have always existed and gained wide traction before there ever was the Internet. Remember these? Where was the second shooter in the JFK assassination? Did Neil Armstrong really walk on the Moon?

No, the real culprit is what I call Truth Autoimmune Deficiency Syndrome, TAIDS. Just as AIDS refers to a failure of our body’s immune system to protect us against invading germs, TAIDS refers to our mind’s failure to protect us against invading falsehoods.

Once infected with TAIDS, we lose our ability to discern truth based on facts, or even care about it. We become mentally obese and wallow is our own intellectual flabbiness, believing in what we believe because it’s what we, or others like us, want to believe. In short, we create ``truth” out of whatever information we find on the Internet, without questioning its factual basis, happily going along with our confirmation bias and picking out evidence that only supports our ingrained views, prejudices, and jealousies.

Is Obama a Muslim? Sure, since I don’t like his politics, I don’t like African Americans, or I believe that a real American shouldn’t have Hussein as his middle name. Oh, by the way, I believe all Muslims are terrorists.

Will American beef cause mad cow disease in Korea? Sure, others have died from the disease in horrible ways, and the Americans are always trying to dump their outdated stuff on Korea anyway. Oh, by the way, I hate President Lee’s education policy, too.

Is Pablo a diploma cheat? Why not, since other entertainers have done the same, and he is guilty until proven innocent. Oh, by the way, his being a Stanford graduate gave him a leg up when he was starting out and that just isn’t fair. He deserves some grief for the advantages he’s gotten.

TAIDS is insidious because it leaves us vulnerable to a demagogic appeal to our base nature to become inflexible and tribal with our beliefs, robbing of the capacity for independent and fair thinking. We allow truth based on facts to lose out to truth based on socialization.

Fortunately, there is a cure for TAIDS, but it’s very rare to find these days; it’s called intellectual integrity.

Jason Lim is a non-resident fellow at The Peace Foundation, a non-partisan think-tank researching policy options for peace on the Korean peninsula. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com. You can also follow him on Facebook.