In recent years, the issue of gullibility in public life has gained a lot of attention. It’s possible that gullibility contributed to the election of politicians like Trump. His critics consider his fans to be naive for endorsing a young politician with an arrogant sense of his own skills and a claim to be an authority on nearly everything in the world. Meanwhile, Trump’s fans like his outspoken, mocking rejection of what they see as elite hypocrisy and see his critics as credulous for adopting “politically correct” beliefs and behaviors.
The decision by the United Kingdom to exit the European Union was another unexpected election result that was characterized by extreme credulity on both sides. Voters gladly accepted conflicting predictions of an imminent economic disaster or a smooth withdrawal. In other places, voters appear blithely willing to support and re-elect quasi-fascist nationalist leaders who are undermining their hard-won democratic systems (such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Russia, the Philippines, and Venezuela) or fall for false propaganda laced with antiquated nationalism and populism (such as Catalonia, Scotland, etc.).
People with gullibility can be found on all political sides. From Mussolini and Hitler to Erdogan, Putin, and Orban, fascist occupiers have disastrously profited from the gullibility of voters. It might be argued that the political left had a strong influence on the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini. The Nazi party, known as the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” was inspired by and imitated the American New Deal, while US progressives celebrated Mussolini.
How a closed, almost religious system of thought like Marxism could dominate the philosophical thinking of a large number of left-leaning Western academics for more than a century is particularly perplexing. This happened in spite of the fact that Marxism’s economic forecasts have continuously failed, its understanding of history as a class struggle has been misguided, and the social structures it gave rise to have proven to be among the most horrifying and murderous in recorded human history.
Part of the explanation is that totalitarian ideologies, such as Marxism, are designed to be unfalsifiable, as demonstrated by Karl Popper in 1947. As a result, “true believers” can always justify away the system’s lack of forecasting ability. The majority of religions have the same resistance to refutation. Marxism and Marxist intellectuals have, in the last few decades, sold a variety of social theories and movements to the credulous with the pretense of advancing social justice and equality. In actuality, however, they have been depending on the collectivist rhetoric of identity politics, group rights, and collective social class struggle as the only means of achieving social progress.
Radical feminism and multiculturalism are two examples of quasi-Marxist collectivist movements that are fundamentally at odds with the Enlightenment focus on individual rights. It may be argued that certain forms of radical feminism even borrow tropes from traditional conspiracy theories, implying the presence of a completely made-up plot against women based only on their gender. Sincere adherents of these ideologies are just as credulous as those who once supported equally exclusive schools of thought.
The introduction of Internet-based communication is one significant contemporary factor that encourages credulity. Until recently, the task of finding and disseminating truth belonged to the privileged class of specialists, truth-seekers, and truth-tellers who, as a result of the Enlightenment, were institutionally created in our social structures. They no longer own the monopoly on knowledge or privileged position, and it appears that the integrity of the truth is now under jeopardy in public life.
If the very scientific advancement and information technology that our “scientific age” helped to establish were to destroy the enormous success that it has had, it would be a really ironic and contradictory outcome. Considering the harm that populism, demagoguery, “fake news,” and the surge in identity politics and nationalism have caused to our public life, it is now widely acknowledged that a deeper comprehension of the social psychology of credulity is crucial. This is one of the book’s primary goals. But first, the objective of the next part is to examine why gullibility appears to be so common throughout hi