information, now of personal bias and other vested interest (which does not help the original, logical flaws).
Combine our flawed logic with unrestrained self-interest, and a prowess in mass media and communication, and the result is a damning, pervasive slant to our aggregate information—not to mention distorted interpretation of that information, an important corollary problem. All in all, we are left with whole systems of skewed information, that which recognizes only one side of an argument, one interpretation of observed events, one set of possibilities and outcomes (and often the most convenient and profitable of these things, at that). In such a biased, restrictive hive of data, there’s simply no room for truth and reality, these being too broad and complex for our narrow, single-minded aims.
Yet, for all the danger posed by our information’s fallibility, the problem is largely invisible.
It’s a matter of awareness. In my experience, few enough people are aware of the problem that it easily goes unremarked upon. So inclusive is our unawareness of the bad-information epidemic, it is scarcely known within even educated circles, much less publically; therefore, the problem just doesn’t exist (or so it might appear). Because the information’s consumers often possess the same faulty mentality of the information’s authors, the flaws can go mutually unobserved, banished to the netherworld of that which exists beyond our precedents and possibilities, like brushstrokes made outside a painting’s canvas. When information is agreed upon by the masses and the experts alike, it is therefore cemented as “real” in the collective mind, flawed or not. And as for actual reality? It becomes “hidden in plain sight,” collectively unseen by the public and our authorities, however much it still exists.
Furthermore, the same quasi-invisibility applies to self-interest and its wealth of factual slants. These days, we are so commonly bombarded with selfishness and exploitation from birth (such as in the form of negative advertisements and abusive political campaigns), we are easily desensitized, often to the point where deception and manipulation are considered a given, as to be expected and inevitable, if not normal. So skewed is today’s general outlook, such predation is often viewed as something else entirely, as to appear to be fully acceptable behavior, due to a deep, subconscious confusion that is widely shared. After all, if everyone is lying, cheating, and misrepresenting for personal gain, then that makes it okay, right?
For a real-world example of questionable information and how psychology contributes to its spread, consider an average internet blogger and their posting habits. Named John Doe and located in a modern American city, our blogger is, as it so happens, a health enthusiast, an interest reflected in his blog, which promotes or decries various healthcare practices and related issues. When composing his blog posts, Mr. Doe does make sure to research his endorsements and their underlying claims—after all, what good would his information be if it wasn’t somehow verified? However, there’s a problem with Mr. Doe’s “research”: it is carried out entirely within the confines of our corrupted public knowledge.
As it were, John Doe’s fact-checking is performed almost solely online, and consists of skimming through popular health-information resources—except, these resources are themselves largely unresearched and unverified. Despite the appearance and reputation of these websites, which suggest validity and authority, many of them are authored by people no more informed than John Doe, without any deeper research than goes into his own blog posts. Yet, because there are so many such websites, and so many agree with one another, it creates an illusion of proof and truth—the “echo-chamber” effect. After all, how could so many good-looking, smart-sounding websites be wrong? Easily, that’s how, for if these resources are built on the same unproven premises and shallow thinking of John Doe’s blog, then their baseless claims could begin echoing one another in that deadly-but-convincing fashion, giving way to illusions of legitimacy.
For many of us today, a sufficiently loud echo is all that’s necessary to be persuaded.
Do not underestimate the power of repetition to make even the most preposterous claim appear true. So long as our faculty of logic and critical thinking is impaired, the echo chamber remains disturbingly effective. In a society so heavily swayed by appearances and peer pressure, if enough “authorities” present something as true, then that is equated with actual proof, whether at all substantial. Thanks to recent trends, proof is commonly calculated on even lesser grounds: a trustworthy headshot, or enough Facebook “likes,” or enough five-star reviews, or because a “fact” is repeated in the right newspapers and TV shows. In a world where this is the dominant metric of truth, what dangerous, distorted behavior could be expected? What we read daily in the papers, perhaps?
So, when blogger John Doe, a son of this illogical, appearance-oriented society, does the “fact-checking” for his latest post, little is actually checked. Instead, his conclusions become ensnared in that public web of illusionary proof, despite there being nothing of the sort—all going back to Mr. Doe’s mentality of taking things at face value and equating appearances and consensus with evidence. Though, to be fair, John was never taught critical, objective thinking in the course of his upbringing, nor were his peers—so how could he be blamed, however unhealthy and contagious his actions may be? Perhaps, at some point, it crosses his mind that maybe he’s omitting some facts, or not seeing certain angles or points of view, or maybe reasoning on assumptions—or that one or more of his sources might be wrong. But then again, how could they be wrong, being “expert” authorities, and so many in number? Experts are never wrong, after all (because, surely, they’ve done research and checked facts and done experiments, and the like). So John Doe sides with his jumped-to conclusions and ignores his doubts, and when publishing his writings, he does so in utmost confidence, reaching a conclusion within the post’s brief, incomprehensive treatment, based on tenuous facts “proven” only by their ubiquity.
In the end, John Doe’s theoretical blog would advocate its flawed healthcare claims with surety, promoting them as unquestionably true despite being based on resources which are just as suspect. Thus, our world’s flood of flawed information gains another drop—perhaps to give way to more, when the next freelance writer cites Mr. Doe’s blog as a reference for their article. And so on and so forth.
And what of the readers of this spurious blog and similar media? When it comes to discretion and objectivity, they are unlikely to be much better, suffering from the same lifelong exposure to flawed information. Because they are, generally, not accustomed to critical thinking, broad logic, or rejecting assumptions, Mr. Doe’s readers are apt to accept his information as readily as he had his “expert” resources. Rare is the reader who withholds conclusion and performs diligent, objective research, for such practice is foreign to a mentality of snap judgments and knee-jerk conclusions. In a culture of the thirty-second commercial and the five-minute news flash, our logic and reasoning have been equivalently narrowed, so that if something can’t be explained in minutes flat, it is likely to be ignored. And after all, if something is too complicated for one’s attention span, then that thing must not be worth understanding, anyway.
Here, I will once again frame my point in the Golden Rule: How would it feel if someone promoted flawed, unproven information about you?
Though of course simplified, the example of John Doe the blogger does, I believe, describe the bottom end of our situation. Thus, if we expand Mr. Doe’s irresponsible blogging to a worldwide, exponential scale, we begin to see the shape of the problem, and its incredible size (which eclipses most of the rulers used to gauge it). This problem has resulted from our collective shunning of sound thinking, when we as a people give little consideration to the consequences of our actions and the information we promote. It bears mentioning that these principles apply just as much to our general beliefs, policies, and interactions, as they too are vulnerable to flawed reasoning and the illusions forged by consensual agreement. These things, also, factor into the greater psychological problems
facing our civilization, for everything is connected.
And so it is, a raging storm of skewed thinking and pseudo-facts, swirling onward and outward on its own strength. The net effect is the birth of an informational juggernaut, constructed from a grand web of suspect data. Through an ever-pervasive tangle of mass media and word-of-mouth, this juggernaut grows bigger and louder by the day (or the hour, or the minute), self-replicating and self-reinforcing and self-sustaining, and wholly out of control. It makes a sound like ten thousand voices saying nothing, yet so many of us are seen to listen.
In such a grim scenario, which I believe to be precisely that facing us today, a solution is not forthcoming. It’s a case of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Due to the self-reinforcing nature of the problem, any direct, active means of combating that figurative juggernaut would, most likely, be ineffective. By my reckoning, the only real solution is a passive, indirect approach. Namely, we must establish a whole new psychological paradigm, one in which individual awareness and sober, conscientious thought and behavior are the