Belief, Ego, and the Danger of the Easy Story
On Barbra Streisand, the Epstein Files, and the emotional power of what we want to believe
“You see, I like facts. I have great respect for facts, and the idea of just making something up really bothers me.”—Barbra Streisand, My Name is Barbra
I read the prologue of Barbra Streisand’s memoir this week, and one small story has stayed with me. A friend of Barbra’s told her about a medical doctor she knew—an educated man, someone trained in evidence—who had read an unflattering article about Streisand and believed it completely. The article painted her as “a bitch” and “impossible to work with.” Barbra’s friend pushed back, defended her, said the stories were false. She’s a wonderful person to work with and also very nice, he said, using those words: wonderful and very nice.
The doctor wouldn’t hear it.
He’d read it in a magazine, after all.
And Barbra, in the memoir, writes:
“He chose to believe some writer who had never met me, rather than the person who really knows me. That upsets me deeply. Why couldn’t he accept the truth?”
That line hit me hard—not because of Streisand specifically, but because it articulates something I’ve been circling all week as I read about the newly surfaced Epstein Files. {Full disclosure: I’m not obsessed with the topic, so my phrasing there, “read about” (as opposed to “read all”) is important.}
Beliefs, once formed, are stronger than facts.
Or, as Nietzsche said, “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
A fact is neutral. Impartial. It doesn’t care how you feel.
A belief, however—that’s emotional. It arrives with feeling, memory, identity, and ego. We don’t just hold beliefs. Beliefs hold us. They make us feel safe or righteous or confirmed.
Baldwin understood this intimately.
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”—James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
The doctor in Streisand’s story wasn’t protecting truth; he was protecting a worldview—an inherited narrative about celebrities, women, power, or maybe about Streisand herself.
“When a subject is highly controversial… one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”—Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One’s Own
And this is precisely what we are watching in real time with the Epstein revelations. The same set of documents is producing two completely different reactions:
For those who never trusted Trump (hand raised), the emails confirm what we felt in our bones. They reinforce what is already backed by public statements, praise of Epstein, the flight logs, the pattern.
For those who are invested in believing the best of him, the same emails are a “nothingburger,” an elaborate smear, or an attempt to “make something out of nothing.”
One truth. Two beliefs. Zero overlap.
“I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts…”—George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War
Belief is emotional. Truth is not.
And here’s the part most people never reach, because it requires a kind of stillness and self-awareness that our world actively discourages:
The person who is threatened by facts isn’t defending truth—they’re defending ego.
The ego says:
If this belief is wrong, then I am wrong.
If the narrative collapses, then I collapse.
If I admit uncertainty, I lose safety.
So the belief becomes sacred. Untouchable.
People cling to it the way one clings to a life raft.
Hannah Arendt said that the masses have to be won by propaganda rather than argument, that the “ideal subject of totalitarian rule” is the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists. What is propaganda but a story? It’s like a fairy tale made up by an authoritarian figure to coax people into a belief system. People who “drink the kool-aid,” so to speak, cling to the belief like religion. Arendt took it further to assert that a person who has completely absorbed the propaganda will become an enemy of the truth. That is to say, they will fight it like it is the devil.
Once someone identifies with a narrative, questioning the narrative feels like questioning their very existence.
And so we end up back at Streisand’s grief.
Not vanity. Not celebrity sensitivity.
Grief.
Grief that the truth loses to the story someone prefers.
Grief that a stranger’s belief—completely unfounded—carries more weight than lived reality.
Grief that people would rather feel validated than be free.
Because truth can set you free, yes.
But it can also unsettle you.
It can unmask you.
It can demand growth.
Belief requires none of that.
Belief is easy.
“Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief… and attached themselves to a creed.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance