- Garry Kasparov
We are inundated with an amazing torrent of misinformation. I had naïvely hoped that the global pandemic we face might have encouraged at least some of the purveyors to take a break, or tone it down a bit. But, to the contrary, they have ramped up the nonsense, and the sources have proliferated.
Manipulators easily find wedges, and offer easy answers to those confused by the complexity of the real problems we face. Otherwise intelligent people are overwhelmed by it all, and give up their filters. The timeless siren song of the deceiver, ‘You can’t trust anybody … so trust me!’ echoes throughout the canyons of our society, emerging from the depths of the dark web. And we products of the sixties and seventies, trained to be skeptical of authority, are easy prey for those who claim that their voices have been silenced by a cynical establishment.
There is an entire ecosystem of fraud. Much of it is not even internally consistent, but once somebody has been captured within its web, they no longer expend the effort to connect the dots; they just believe. And because distrust of outside influences is integral to the program, it is extremely difficult to correct the record from outside the bubble.
We who exist outside the bubble face the difficult decision to either listen dispassionately, as people repeat these paranoid fantasies, or offer corrections and clarification - tearing friendships apart, and promoting the very social discord and disunity the deceivers seek.
I, for one, am utterly exhausted, depressed, and totally pessimistic about the potential victory of truth over ‘alternative facts’; of serious peer-reviewed science over ‘maverick’ nut-cases; of evidence and statistics over well-coached gut feel, denial, and cognitive dissonance.
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