A. Lack of rational Education makes people gullible
Gullibility is not necessarily synonymous with stupidity; on the contrary, people are too imaginative to be the most gullible, because for them, anything is possible.
Whether people are gullible or not does not have much to do with the level of education, as long as the different expectations and desires of all kinds of people, laying their favorite bait, they can receive the effect of inviting the king into the jar.
No matter what the bait is, the internal cause of the effect is the brainless education people receive in school and the lack of reason in social Life.
Belle, the French Enlightenment philosopher and the most influential skeptic of the second half of the 17th century, pointed out that the lack of rational education makes people believe in “revelation”, that is, the kind of knowledge based on blind faith and lack of skepticism, and revelation and reason are incompatible.
The object of Beller’s philosophical skepticism was religious theology, which, he argued, was full of mysterious revelations and miracles, containing countless contradictions, supported by blind faith and persecution of paganism, as preached by preachers. A miracle is a miracle because it is absurd and incomprehensible. It actually cannot withstand the criticism of the reason that God has sown in the hearts of men.
In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the famous physicist Sergei Kapitza published an article exposing Soviet irrational science. “Irrational science” may sound like a paradoxical and impossible thing, but it was a microcosm of the mindset of many people in the Soviet Union.
The French historian and culturalist Vernand points out that irrational science, like Lysenko’s biology, existed in the Soviet Union for a particular reason: “What was practiced there was a system in which the whole of social life was controlled and the whole of intellectual, artistic, and spiritual activity was led.
He quoted a Soviet philosopher who said: “The real function of this system is to ‘hinder thought …… because everything is already pre-thought by it, including yourself. You don’t have to ask what you really are …… such that, by virtue of a system that is so, when ideas arise, it is running in directions that are actually quite irrational.”
Second, knowledge and thinking are simplistic and dogmatic
In a society where gullibility is no longer the occasional duping of individuals, but a widespread collective phenomenon that keeps recurring in different forms, there must already be some kind of perversion of thinking in that society.
Collective gullibility requires that many people share a number of ways of thinking, psychological stereotypes, moral biases, and mental weaknesses that are particularly easy for deceivers and demagogues to exploit.
These cognitive and psychological factors are the result of long-term brainless education, which is like plowing the ground, while deception and demagoguery are like sowing seeds that cannot be sown without first plowing the ground.
This mindless education has been going on continuously and quietly, making people unwittingly prey to the kind of almost total defenselessness that deception and compulsion require.
Such education always takes place in an environment where knowledge and thinking are simplistic and dogmatic, and it deprives many people of the ability to be skeptical and questioning.
Such a social environment rejects individual thinking efforts, critical attitudes, independent judgment, and spiritual self-awareness.
This environment has a stereotypical effect on people’s way of thinking, and those who are stereotyped will take certain very dry dogmas and false principles, which have no relation to reality, as “scientific truths,” “advanced science,” or even “cosmic truths. “, not only are they convinced, but also do not allow others to ask questions.
In such an environment, even scientists abdicate their responsibility as educators of social reason, which deepens the gap between real science and the science disseminated by the mass media.
As Wernand puts it, science as the public knows it is no longer science, and “the science disseminated through mass media (such as television) is something not very different from magic; when one sits on the couch and sees astronauts walking on the moon in space suits on television, or hears the Big Bang, there is nothing that separates this There is nothing to distinguish the results of this type of science from the stories that an astrologer or random pseudo-scientist can tell”.
The English philosopher Russell said, “Man is a gullible creature, and he must believe in something. When there is no good reason to believe, man is content to believe in bad reasons.” We cannot change human nature, but we can at least use reason to discern for ourselves what is a good reason to believe.
Third, the door of truth is always open to falsification
Why do people believe certain words as truth in the absence of their own empirical evidence, or in the absence of such empirical evidence at all? Psychologists often attribute this to “gullibility,” but sociologists believe it is due to “paranoia.
Both are valid and not mutually exclusive, because “gullibility” is to believe easily without sufficient evidence, while “paranoia” is once believed, it is difficult to change their minds.
The twentieth-century Austrian novelist Robert Muzile said ironically: “There is a suspicious undercurrent in the voice of truth.”
In other words, the door to truth is always open to falsification. But for the person who is both gullible and paranoid, that door is closed.
And the more people on the outside tell him to open the door, the more tightly he will close it.
The world-renowned sociologists Peter Berg and Anton Zeidewald, in their joint book “Ode to Doubt,” tell of a case where the more one is told to open the door, the tighter it closes.
It was an experiment done by social psychologist Milton Rokeach. There were three mentally ill people, each of whom believed he was Jesus Christ. Rokeach thought that if they were placed in the same mental institution and given the opportunity to discuss their beliefs with each other, they might be cured of their delusions.
The approach he devised was called “cognitive dissonance therapy,” in which the three psychiatric patients were given the opportunity to disprove each other, to induce cognitive dissonance in their unquestioning beliefs (that they were Jesus Christ), and to correct the dissonance.
However, to Roch’s complete surprise, after discussing the matter together for a while, the three psychiatric patients, instead of receiving the expected treatment, became more convinced that they were Jesus Christ, with the one Roch had thought to be the most lucid being the most paranoid.
That man said that, in his opinion, “the other two must have been completely insane to believe that they were Jesus Christ.” He also explained, “This is absurd, because obviously there can only be one person who is Jesus Christ.” Jesus Christ could not be the other two, so it must be himself.
Fourth, the lack of thinking makes the mind gradually “programmed”
In Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control, Oxford professor Catherine Taylor points out that most of man’s gullible and paranoid ideas are the result of external indoctrination and his own lack of thought.
This gullible and paranoid thinking is what Orwell described in 1984 as “shortcut thinking”: thinking that follows a well-trodden path and advances mechanically and automatically.
Ideological language tends to create “new” statements that sound stimulating and propulsive, and that seem particularly profound, high level or far-sighted, and level to people who are not normally used to thinking.
Since they can not understand exactly what such statements mean, what or who they are referring to, they can not doubt, and will not doubt.
These people are not accustomed to thinking and usually do not think, and as a result, they do not have no ideas, but are superstitious of whatever ideas others have prepared for them.
This is like a person who does not have faith, who does not believe in anything, but becomes able to believe in anything, and when he does, he is superstitious.
Words that give a strong impression are repeated over and over again, and by more and more people, and in this case they become in the minds of many people an “automatic idea” that resembles a conditioned reflex.
This is what psychology calls the “programmed” mind, which becomes rigid, stereotyped, and paranoid.
Paranoid thoughts are often accompanied by emotional factors such as discrimination, rejection, and fear. On the contrary, the more they are persuaded and reasoned with, the more paranoid they may become.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. a famous American Writer, known as one of the best American poets of the 19th century, said, “The bigoted mind is like the pupil of the human eye; the more you shine light on it, the smaller it shrinks.”
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