The World as a Chess Game. Is it Being Played by Masters or by Idiots?

 

An old movie showed the story of someone trying to impersonate a chess Grand Master. He succeeded to the point that he was invited to play a simultaneous series of games at a local chess association. He barely knew the rules of the game, but his haphazard moves surprised his opponents so much that several of them decided to declare defeat. Unfortunately for him, some of the opponents just played to win and easily defeated the pretended Grand Master. What we are seeing in the world nowadays looks like a giant chess game. Is it being played by masters or by idiots?

Let me start, by saying that I have no intention to join the ranks of the armchair strategists who are telling us exactly what's happening in Ukraine, and why. Evidently, they have a direct phone connection with the Kremlin, because they can say that "Putin thinks.... " and "Putin wants.....". Just allow me to note that, up to the day of the invasion, most pro-Russian sites were poking fun at those dumb Westerners who thought that Russia would invade Ukraine. Come on, they said, that would be just silly. What would Russia do with "Banderastan" after having conquered it? Then, after that the invasion started, suddenly these same sites were praising Putin's strategic savvy, explaining that the invasion of Ukraine was necessary, just, and unavoidable and that Putin had acted, as usual, as the chess master we all know he is. Maybe. 

It is not just a problem with the pro-Russian media. It is the same everywhere. Once a government takes a decision, it is not only enforced by law, but it goes through the state propaganda machine which seems to be able to hypnotize the majority of citizens into complete obeisance. They will believe what they are told and happily repeat it to each other. 

Especially during the past two years, governments have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with their citizens, forcing on them the most quixotic norms one could imagine: to lock themselves inside their homes all the time, to wear masks even in the open, to be injected with concoctions of uncertain safety, and much more. The government could have ordered people to balance a ball on their nose and they would have complied -- happily. In Canada, the government confiscated citizens' property simply because they had expressed their disagreement with the government's policies. To say nothing about confiscating the property of Russian citizens just because they are Russian. And they could do all that with complete impunity. It was typical, once, of Roman Emperors or other absolute rulers of the past.

There is some logic in this behavior. According to the historian Peter Turchin, modern societies compete with each other mainly in military terms. So, there is an evolutionary pressure that leads to the development of social structures where dissent can be eliminated when it is time to focus all resources on fighting. That can be probably best obtained by means of a pyramidal structure where the top levels can take all the decisions. And, of course, there is nothing wrong with having citizens willing to defend their country, even at the cost of their lives. But who decides that dying for one's country is necessary?  On which basis, and according to what principles?    

The problem is that the decisional mechanisms of most governments are nearly completely opaque to citizens. It doesn't seem to matter whether governments are democratically elected or not. Once a certain group of people is in power, they can take major decisions, such as starting a war, with just a veneer of authorization from parliaments, or even without that. In Italy, for instance, the government has been acting for two years on the basis of an emergency status that the government itself declared, and that it has the power to extend at will (recently, it was extended up to December 2022). 

Emergency powers are a recursive feature of governments: once a government has declared an emergency, the fact of being in an emergency allows the government to extend it. There are no mechanisms other than the government itself that can to revoke it. As an example, in 1926, Mussolini enacted "special laws" that were supposed to last for five years, but that were extended up to 1943. In practice, for 17 years, Mussolini could do whatever he wanted and make war on any country without having to ask permission to anyone -- until he was arrested and then hanged. And note that Mussolini was elected in elections that historians tend to judge as having been fair. 

It seems strange that in the age of the Internet, with information being so widely spread and available, the government decisional process remains the same as it was at the time of the Mayan Sun Kings. Yet, it is the way governance works almost everywhere in the world. So, we can only make hypotheses on what leads governments to do what they are doing. We could say that:

1.  The government is genuinely worried about a serious threat to society and is acting to counter it on the basis of the available knowledge.

2. The government is led by one or more psychopaths and/or narcissists who operate to aggrandize their personal power. They surround themselves with yes-men and the resulting "groupthink" leads to all sorts of disasters. 

3. The key members of the government have been corrupted by economic interest groups who push for wasteful and dangerous actions in order to obtain large profits. 

4. As in the previous case, the key members of the government have been corrupted, but in this case by an external power that uses them to ruin the country in military or economic terms, or both. 

5. The souls and the brains of the top-level people in the government have been eaten by Chthonic deities or other demonic entities. These entities use the human members of the government as avatars with the objective of destroying the country and killing as many innocent people as possible. 

Combinations of the above are always possible. The point is that, right now, it is impossible to say which condition has led to the current disaster in Ukraine (and I wouldn't discount the possibility #5, demonic entities). Whatever the case, we can only watch the drama as it unfolds. We'll know if our leaders are chess masters or impostors after the war is over, if that will ever occur. 

But we do know something about past cases, and we can say at least something about why some monumental mistakes were made, in some cases costing millions of lives. Just as one example, the 2003 war on Iraq was believed by the public to be a case of hypothesis  #1, (genuine worry). We now know that it was mostly a combination of cases #2 and #3 (and, again, I would not discount the role of demonic entities). You could also argue that in Italy we are seeing case #4 in action (with some help from Chthonic deities). You may have some fun reviewing past history in view of these lines: the record of most governments doesn't come out as brilliant. 

You may also be interested to review a case where major strategic blunders were created by the deadly combination of groupthink and a psychotic leader: Benito Mussolini. Below, I am reproducing a post previously published on "Cassandra's Legacy" about the decision mechanism of Mussolini's government. 

Basically, Mussolini was not mad, he had just lost track of reality. It may have been the result of having been in power for too long and of having won all the wars he had engaged Italy in, up to 1940. A good illustration of how successes don't teach you anything. Does this story apply to the current situation? Time will tell. 

Sunday, November 1, 2020- from "Cassandra's Legacy" (slightly revised)

The Mind of the Evil Ruler: What Goes on inside the Heads of the People who Govern the World?

The damage that bad rulers can do to people and things is gigantic, especially considering that they command military apparatuses of immense power. But what goes on inside their minds, exactly? Are some of them truly evil? Or just criminally incompetent? We'll probably never know for sure, but we have some hints for at least some of them. Here, I am exploring the case of Benito Mussolini, using the diary written by his son-in-law as a source of information.

There is a sentence attributed to Terry Pratchett that goes as, "the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters." Actually, I think Robert Heinlein said something similar first. In any case, the idea that collective intelligence goes down with the number of members of a group seems to have some logic in it, although it cannot be said to be scientifically proven.

If that's true, then we have a huge problem. How to manage states formed of tens or hundreds of millions, even billions, of people? A possible solution is to reduce the denominator of the formula to a single ruler who takes all the decisions. Indeed, it seems that human crowds, dumb as they may be, believe that all problems can be solved by someone who can "get things done." 

Unfortunately, history tells us that the idea of giving all the power to a single man doesn't work so well. Another quote by Robert Heinlein says "A well-run tyranny is almost as scarce as an efficient democracy." You may have read that Trump is a narcissist, Biden is affected by Alzheimer's, Putin by the Asperger syndrome, and that Assad is evil just because he is. And more.

The list of mad or evil rulers is long, but what do we know about these people? Very little because they live shielded by a barrier of lies in the form of propaganda and press releases. Even the people who know them well, relatives and close friends, may well be fooled by people who arrived at the top exactly by their capability of fooling everyone, even themselves.

Maybe, if we could have a diary written by one of these madmen, say, Adolf Hitler, we could know more. But the manuscript claimed to be Hitler's diary in 1983 was a hoax, and no dictator of note ever left us a personal diary. The closest thing to a personal diary of a dictator is the one kept by Galeazzo Ciano, foreign minister of the Mussolini government in Italy from 1937 to 1943. He was not only a close collaborator of the Duce but also a close relative: his son-in-law. You can find the complete diary in Italian at this link.

 

Note that Ciano was not an intellectual, nor had any professional expertise. He is best described as a high-rank playboy who had used the money and the prestige of his father, a war hero, to gain access to Mussolini's family and eventually to marry Mussolini's daughter. That, of course, opened a bright career for him at the top government levels. He was widely considered the most likely candidate to succeed the Duce as Italy's leader. During the period in which he was active as foreign minister, he often acted as the second-in-command in the government. 

Ciano wrote detailed notes of his everyday activities as foreign minister for the whole period of his appointment. Of course, we don't have to take these notes as completely truthful. Especially in the final pages, we clearly detect an attempt by Ciano to distance himself from his illustrious father-in-law and his egregious blunders. Later on, he was shot for treason on orders of Mussolini himself. But, overall, it is probable that many details of the daily written document do reflect real events.
 

One thing that's clear from Ciano's notes is how haphazardly Italy was run. A country of 45 million inhabitants was steered by people who seemed to carry on, day by day, without a specific direction. Mostly, the story sounds like a TV soap: the atmosphere in the high echelons of the government was a poisonous mix of gossip, treachery, incompetence, and abject deference to the great boss. The name of the game was a simple sentence: "Mussolini is always right." Anyone could be demoted to a powerless position if he happened to displease the commander in chief. In 1939, that happened also to Achille Starace, a longtime associate of Mussolini and secretary of the Fascist party. 

Even Mussolini himself didn't seem to have a clear idea of what he was doing. He seemed to be thinking that Italy needed to expand in new territories because it was a young nation that needed space for its growing population. That could be obtained at the expense of the evil and decadent plutocracies that were England and France. And that would result in the creation of an Italian Empire, recreating the power and the glory of the ancient Roman Empire.

If that was the plan, it wasn't a good plan. Mussolini, just like most politicians, couldn't reason quantitatively and had neither interest nor trust in data. He acted mainly on the basis of his intuition and he never understood how badly unprepared were the Italian armed forces, nor how weak the Italian economy was. Unfortunately for him, he was lucky enough that his initial military adventures were successful. Victories don't teach you anything.

Not that Mussolini was a fool. As a young man, he had been a smart politician and a brilliant journalist. We have his diary during the time when he was in the trenches during WWI and there we find nothing of the warlike rhetoric of his later years. He always kept his head low: no question for him to jump out of the trench and lead a bayonet assault. In 1917, he was lightly wounded by the accidental explosion of an Italian cannon and that was the end of the war for him. It was also a stroke of luck: not only he could gain a reputation as a war hero, but he avoided being caught in the rout of the Italian army after the disaster of the battle of Caporetto, a few months later. 

20 years later, we read in Ciano's diary how the smart politician had turned into a bumbling fool. Let me translate a few excerpts for you. 

 

Dec 19, 1937. The Duce said: "On my grave I want this epigraph: Here lies one of the most intelligent animals ever appeared on the face of the earth". The Duce is proud of his instinct which he considers, and has actually proved to be, infallible.

Sep 29-30 1938 (Criticizing Great Britain) "When animals are adored in a country to the point of making cemeteries, hospitals, homes for them; when bequests are made to parrots it is a sign that decadence is underway. Moreover, in addition to the many reasons, this also depends on the composition of the English people. 4 million more women. Four million sexually dissatisfied creatures, artificially creating a multitude of problems to arouse or artificially creating a multitude of problems to excite or appease their senses. Not being able to embrace a single man, they embrace humanity ".

June 3, 1939 "I," said the Duce, "am like a cat, cautious and prudent, but when I take a leap I am sure to land where I want.

Dec 24, 1940 – It's snowing. The Duce looks out of the window and is happy that it snows: "This snow and this cold are fine" he says "so the pipsqueaks die: and this mediocre Italian breed is improved. One of the main reasons why I wanted the reforestation of the Apennines it was to make Italy colder and snowier ".

You see what I mean, and there is much more in the same tune in Ciano's diary. We are reading of an old man who has lost track of reality. Yet, as I wrote in a previous post, a post-mortem examination showed that Mussolini's brain was still functional during the last years of his rule. By all means, it was the normal brain of a normal person. What Mussolini's brain had lost was not neurons, but the capability of empathy: understanding and caring for your fellow human beings. 

Empathy requires a certain effort, it is a tool that needs to be sharpened every day. But just as you get fat if you don't exercise your body, you get dumb if you don't exercise your mind. What happened with Mussolini and the Italian government was a self-reinforcing loop. The people around Mussolini soon found that they could keep their position if they never disagreed with the boss. Mussolini, in turn, found that he could easily get rid of those who disagreed with him. And the result was that he was even more surrounded by yes-men who always agreed with him. Eventually, he found he didn't need empathy: he could just order people to do what he wanted. 

It was not just Mussolini's mind that had degraded for lack of exercise. It was the whole chain of command of the Italian government that had degraded in a way that reminds the sentence by Terry Pratchett about the collective intelligence of a group. By the 1930s, the process had led to a situation that you could describe as "government by the whims of the boss."

It all became painfully clear when, in 1940, Mussolini ordered the invasion of Greece in winter, across the Epirus mountains, with woefully insufficient and poorly equipped troops. We have the minutes of the government reunions that preceded the attack on Greece: it is clear it was the Duce alone who decided to attack and the date of the attack. Nobody dared to oppose his decision. On the contrary, generals competed with each other to state that it could be done easily. A classic effect of groupthink. Disaster ensued, as it should have been expected. And Mussolini's lack of empathy was tragically clear when, on 16 January 1941, Ciano reports these words by Mussolini: ""Greece was a political masterpiece; we managed to isolate this country and make it fight it alone, against us. The one which has not performed well is the army." Not a word of regret for having sent the troops to fight without adequate winter equipment, without heavy weapons, without sufficient air support. Truly, when idiocy matches cruelty, these are the results. 

I think that the key to the whole story is the excerpt from Ciano's diary where he describes how Mussolini rejoiced at the thought of Italians freezing to death. This is not just incompetency or stupidity, it is one of the few moments in Ciano's diary where we see true evil appearing. You might want to picture in your head Mussolini standing near the window of his office, maybe close to a warm radiator, while he rubs his hands together and smiles in a Satanic smile like the character of a comic book. (you may add also the classic Satanic laughter that goes as Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!)

My impression is that, while losing empathy, Mussolini was also gradually losing the moral bonds that keep normal people from being truly evil. He had discovered that not only he could order to kill foreigners as he pleased, but that the more foreigners he caused to be killed, the more he became popular in Italy. So, he proceeded to expand this strategy until, unfortunately for him (and for many others), the idea backfired. Badly. After that a half million Italians had died because of Mussolini's mistakes, you know how he ended, hanged upside-down. Nobody should rejoice at the death of anyone, but it seems that the universe has ways to punish one's worst mistakes.

Mussolini's case is just one that's close enough to our times that we have abundant documentation about it. It is also sufficiently remote that we can discuss it from a reasonably objective viewpoint. The question is: why is it so easy for governments to be hijacked by evil/incompetent/dumb leaders? Unfortunately, that may occur much more often than we would like to think. Are some of our leaders rejoicing when large numbers of mere commoners die because of their actions, just as Mussolini did? I can think of at least one example of one of our prominent politicians rejoicing at the violent death of the leader of a foreign country, and you probably understand whom I mean. 

And what could be the effect on a president's mind of the capability of killing anyone, anywhere, by a drone strike without the need to provide a justification or fearing retaliation? Can you imagine that drone strikes are decided by people who rub their hands together while producing Satanic smiles? We won't know how evil these people really are until much after they are gone, if ever.

The Secret of Propaganda: Teaching Obedience

A classic example of modern propaganda. It dates from the 1940s and it shamelessly exploits the principle of authority. Note that there is no proof or evidence that a majority of doctors smoked Camels more than any other cigarettes. And there is no proof or evidence that, even if the claim were true, the doctors would be right. But the principle of authority works independently from data and truth and the campaign was a huge success. It is the great power of obedience.

Just a few days ago, I was a guest on a TV discussion on the usual subject* (practically, the only one being discussed nowadays).  At some moment, the discussion veered on propaganda, and the host** said something like, "but isn't it strange that Germany fell so easily for the Nazi propaganda despite the fact that it was the most cultured society in Europe at that time?" And it dawned on me:

It was not despite. It was because.

Exactly that. Propaganda and education go hand in hand: they are one the consequence of the other. In an instant, my whole career as a teacher flashed in my mind. What are we teaching to our students? Plenty of things, of course, but mostly it is about trusting the authority. Obedience, in one word. 

I experimented at times with the opposite approach, pushing my chemistry students to criticize their textbooks. Many of my students are smart fellows, some of them appreciated the idea, and sometimes they found errors that I hadn't noticed myself. But most of them found the exercise an annoying interlude in their studies. They were not stupid, either. They perfectly understood that learning how to criticize the authority gave them no useful "career points." They just wanted to go through their classes as fast as they could, hoping that the ordeal would soon be over. 

The problem is not just with chemistry. In all fields, students and teachers play a game together, as Simon Sheridan well described in a recent post. It is a game that aims at creating "the archetypal orphan," that is a person completely subjugated to a dominating figure that Sheridan identifies as "the devouring mother." You might also say "the dominating father," but it is a role that university professors assume by default. The technical details of what our students learn are obsolete or soon will be, but one thing of their training will remain for a long time: believing what they are told. Soon, the role of authority will not be fulfilled by their teachers anymore, they will be replaced by opinion leaders, politicians, and other figures. 

Look at how, in the 1940s, the tobacco industry had a huge success with a campaign aiming at convincing people that smoking Camels was a good idea because most doctors (a typical authoritative figure) smoked Camels. Look at how, nowadays, our governments used the same typical authoritative figures, doctors, to convince us to do things that might turn out to be more harmful for our health than cigarette smoking. 

Marty's Mac (see below) notes how (boldface mine)

.... it is remarkably easy to convince the educated classes of something. One only has to get the information printed in the right places. The educated can be made to believe that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or that cigarettes and canola oil are healthy (a typical claim in the midcentury), or that the high numbers of breakthrough COVID cases in countries with 90% vaccination rates are caused by the 10% of unvaccinated people. They can be made to believe anything, really.  

So, the more educated you are, the more sensible to propaganda you are. No wonder that many of the people most affected by propaganda are well learned ones, especially people who have comfortable government jobs. Among scientists, belief in the current propaganda campaign is especially visible with climate scientists, whose beliefs depend on an authority called "climate models." (I have no statistics to cite on this point, but I know the people who work in the field) Conversely, blue-collar people engaged with real-world problems are more cautious in believing what they are told by the government, as noted by Scott Latham. 

So no surprise that the highly cultured Germans of the 1930s fell in the hands of the rabid Nazi madness (in the hands of the God Wotan, as Jung noted). And the most likely ones to fall for the Nazi ideas were among the most educated. For instance, physicians joined the Nazi party in droves (nearly 50% by 1945), a much higher fraction than for any other profession. Then, no surprise that our highly educated society fell so easily into the current propaganda trap that makes us believe that our governments are doing what they are doing only in order to protect us from a terrible danger. 

But propaganda is not necessarily a bug, it is a feature of the system. There is nothing wrong with the principle of authority, as long as you see it in terms of trust in people who know more than you. In the complex society in which we live it is impossible to question every facet of reality and, without this kind of trust, it would be impossible to keep it working. The problem with trust is that when it becomes an automated reflex it can be easily hijacked by people who use it to their own advantage. Then, trust becomes obedience and propaganda becomes the truth. (***)

If there will be some good consequences of the disaster that befell us during the past two years, it will be to understand the dangers of propaganda. And maybe to remember how right Ivan Illich was about the need of "deschooling society." 

(*) Apologies for not writing explicitly the term for what we are discussing. I already lost a blog to censorship and I am sure that you understand anyway. 

(**) h/t Domenico Guarino

 

(***) after having published this post, I found a quote by Hannah Arendt that I think is in line with my considerations and those of Marty's Mac. 

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

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Below, I report in full the recent post by "Marty's Mac." I already cited him or her extensively in a post on religion and literacy. One of the smartest commenters I know, at present

How do you know… ?

by Marty's Mac -- Jan 10 2022

How do you know a variety of facts about the world? For instance, how do you know that matter is made up of atoms and electrons?

Presumably you learned about this in school. A teacher gave you a textbook that explained the experiments that established atomic theory. We knew already, before any electronic scanning microscope, that matter came in discrete units because the result of chemical reactions always yields perfect whole-number ratios. Subatomic particles were discovered with the cathode tube, Rutherford discovered the nucleus by shooting radiation at gold, Millikan discovered the charge of an electron with his famous oil drop experiment… the list of experiments in an introductory text goes on. An educated person who is not working in the hard sciences has, likely, already forgotten most of these. But they were in all likelihod presented to him, back in high school.

But none of these answers, even if you remember them, actually explain how you know about the atom. Unless you are in a very rarified group of chemistry and physics enthusiasts, you have not performed any of these experiments. So how do you actually know about atoms?

What happened, really, was that an authority figure gave you certain information, a significant amount of which you also read (in a text that is culturally authoritative), and you believed it. You believe stories like these because you have been raised to believe them and have not decided to radically doubt the authorities who passed this information on to you. Things like atomic theory seem to be widely believed, and people say it’s important for all sorts of technical applications, and these technologies seem to work very well. You believe about atoms, almost certainly, second-hand.

But it is not just atoms. How about the existence of Kazakhstan? It is on maps, people in the news talk about it as if it is real (and currently undergoing serious civil unrest), there are images of people in a place that is called Kazakhstan, and so on. This is also how you have any understanding of health and the body, the workings of your government, and so on. The educated mind has acquired most of its understanding through appeals to authority. The critical thinking that is so vaunted in education is mostly about judging whether or a certain authority is good (or, ultimately, approved), and in some cases whether it has internal inconsistencies that might discredit it.

I am saying this not to knock education as useless and only for the sheeple. There is not an alternative to appeals to authority. In any sufficiently complex technological or scientific society, the accumulated knowledge is too vast for an individual to replicate his ancestors’ discoveries for himself. This is already true in fairly technologically primitive societies: Which plant fibers are good for clothing and textiles, and which are useless? Which mushrooms are edible? What domesticated or semi-domesticated crops have been handed down to you? How does one hunt or make weapons for hunting? All of these are inherited knowledge or technology, and we are miles away from atomic theory. But the dependence on authority becomes much more acute for more highly technologically developed societies like our own. There is no viable alternative to an education in which appeals from authority are prominent. The only real alternative, completely erasing authority from the equation, is to drop back to some level below hunter-gatherer and hope to acquire enough knowledge over a single lifetime to manage bare subsistence.

Continuing Education

Education is, as they like to say now, a lifelong process. For the highly educated, all of whom adopt this model of trusting certain authorities for information about how the world works, and especially for those embedded in the “knowledge economy”, this kind of learning does not end (or does not largely end) with formal schooling about atoms and molecules. It continues into adult life. The teachers and textbooks are replaced by culturally authoritative figures like the newsman or public intellectuals (often academics or businessmen) and sources like The New York Times. And in the contemporary marketplace, if you don’t like these, other authorities are on offer.

The continuing education of the educated (most typically this education focuses on current affairs) has two consequences. The first is that it is remarkably easy to convince the educated classes of something. One only has to get the information printed in the right places. The educated can be made to believe that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or that cigarettes and canola oil are healthy (a typical claim in the midcentury), or that the high numbers of breakthrough COVID cases in countries with 90% vaccination rates are caused by the 10% of unvaccinated people. They can be made to believe anything, really. The same way the teacher explains about the electrons and the textbook backs her up, the newsman can go on Fox or print in Vox some story, and the educated and informed person will summarily believe it. Fairly recently the elites in America have suddenly noticed that this may not always work to their advantage, and Hillary Clinton coined the term “fake news” to explain her defeat (a term that was immediately taken up by Donald Trump and, like almost all of Hillary Clinton’s political moves, backfired spectacularly). However, this gullibility is not confined to conservatives (nor to liberals). It is a simple result of a large percentage of the population becoming lifelong learners.

The second consequence is that the cultural norms of society can change rapidly and over much less than a single lifetime. There have been a bevy of cultural norms that have been repealed or replaced over any adult person’s lifetime. The most obvious in the current moment is extreme fear of sickness, adoption of universal masking, and acceptance of ever-increasing government authority in the name of health. However, many other changes have occurred within a single lifetime: The widespread acceptance of gays and lesbians (currently this is happening with trans people at an even more breakneck pace), the non-acceptance of overt displays of (certain kinds of) racism, ignoring one’s dinner partner in favor of reading (once considered horribly rude with a book, now commonplace with a phone), ordering food instead of cooking, and if we go further back, the acceptance of left-handedness as a manner of writing (as late as the early sixties, this was disallowed in American schools). These are all changes that were normalized in less than the time it takes for an infant to become a legal adult. Despite this speed, they are often not noticed (many boomers lived through the acceptance of left-handedness and barely think about it), or thought of as so backwards that no one could possibly disagree (this was the case two years after the repeal of sodomy laws). A whole population can be freshly educated in the right way, whatever that right way happens to be today (and quite independent of whether it is good or bad for society), and tomorrow behave as though they grew up believing these things their whole life long.

This peculiarly modern form of changeability and indeed gullibility is not present in older, less literate societies. This is not to say illiterate or less literate societies don’t believe crazy things. Of course they do. But these crazy things are generally learned in childhood: how shamanistic magic can cure or curse, the presence of spirits all around us, the importance of smoking bodies before burial to reach the afterlife, and so on. The feudal serf may harbor a host of wacky superstitions, but they were acquired in his early education (not in a school so much as around the village) and became more or less fixed for his entire adulthood. Literacy and lifelong learning create opportunities for people to acquire new fundamental beliefs their whole life long. The gullibility of childhood can become permanent.

The sorts of rapid changes we have all experienced in the past two years in relation to COVID would not have been possible without a highly literate society. At the beginning of the pandemic, when news was first coming out of China, it was racist to be at all concerned about the virus. Then it became irresponsible and scientifically invalid to wear a mask. Then it became scientifically necessary to wear a mask (perhaps even two or three, simultaneously) and maintain social distancing. Then the science said it was okay to not practice social distancing if one attended the right kind of protests. Then it was necessary to get two vaccines, and that would end the pandemic. Then there was a booster one would get once a year, now down to every four months. At each stage, people have wholly bought into the new belief system which may have contradicted the belief system of last month or last week. Science changes, or rather the story that the cultural authority is telling changes, and so people’s fundamental beliefs can be updated more or less live. This is not because the whole population has actually properly learned something. They have just been informed of a change of plan.

Life in the age of propaganda

As I stated before, there is no solution that will keep us from having to learn by appealing to authority, because there is too much to know for any person to build up everything from scratch. Everyone has a matrix of beliefs which they have built up partially from direct experience (the minority) and partially from authorities they trust (the majority). But in an age of constant learning, it is much easier for baseless beliefs to infiltrate a belief matrix over time. When people worry about propaganda, I think this largely what they mean: That the set of new information being acquired will contain beliefs that, if one were to build them up from scratch (which most people cannot do, and no one can do with all the new information), would not hold up to scrutiny. This has been, for all of human history, an ever-present possibility in childhood, but children don’t have the mental capacity to worry about this.

This is not a place to “solve” the problem of propaganda. Such a solution (if it were possible) would be worthy of a lengthy book on epistemic philosophy or sociology. All I want to point out here is that propaganda, and easily-propagandized populations, are a result of education and cannot be fixed by simply educating people better. The very instruments for increasing knowledge in fact introduce the greatest possibility for the rapid adoption of false beliefs. If we want to live with the benefits of literacy (and we have no choice, this is the world as it is, unless we suffer a severe dark age), we must learn to live with and, if we are very lucky and work very hard to change society, mitigate the dark side of that social technology.