June 8, 2021
Humans are gullible. We can be fooled and amazed by subterfuge. The science of magic and illusions is alive and well. A sucker is born every day. The world is full of trickery and danger lurks with some bait to bring you in.
What am I writing about? I've written in the past about how we can be fooled by our biological makeup to see things that are not there, to not see things that are there, to remember things that we never experienced and forget things that we know very well. Do you need examples? Weapons of mass destruction, a gorilla costumed person walks in front of us while viewing a basketball game but we do not see him, Trump won the election, and testify to our relatives innocence when abused and raped repeatedly by him.
O.K. you may believe not you misled these ways. Ever buy a free range chicken for your dinner? There is no standard for free range, the vendor is the one making this up and trying to convince you that somehow the chicken is pecking peacefully in a more or less nature surroundings happy until the end! Natural food versus processed food is better for you. What's natural? Who developed the criteria? How is it verified? etc. Well succer, no governmental agency is involved.
Advertising involves superterfuge and misinformation with lying and misrepresentation coming to my mind. If you're on a dating app beware the person your communicating with may be a different sex and out to bamboozle and take advantage of you. Yes testimonials are available for your app reporting bliss and pleasure in the outcome of finding someone! O.K. this essential oil can do the trick. But don't do any research into the effects which may include gynecomastia for men. You didn't know that look it up. Coca-Cola was started with the coca leaf and kola nuts in 1891 the owner seeing a good thing retained these ingredients but reduced the amount of cocaine in the drink to retain his patent and only 1931 was cocaine eliminated due to prohibition. Well, in the 1800s the snake oil merchants peddled their products reporting its medicinal and other benefits. Most of the bottles did not contain any snake products. But they did sell! Then Cocaine was touted as a cure all. Freud used cocaine in his practice until he realized how dangerous this compound was (and how addicting). The vibrator was touted also as a cure for hysteria around that time. Then came heroin discovered by a chemist in the 1880s Bayer Pharmaceutical got ahold of it and sold it wildly as an elixir to cure your ailments. Though addiction and other adverse effects were reported it was not until 1913 that it was no longer manufactured by this company and 1924 that it was banned by the FDA. Walter Freeman popularized lobotomies as a treatment for mental illness and in its hay day outpatient lobotomies were performed through U.S.A. The procedure used an instrument similar to an ice pick where the "patient" is held down, no anesthesia, and the pick is punched through the skull above the bridge of the nose and the "surgeon" just moved the pick from side to side damaging the frontal lobes. For our Hawaii lovers, Freeman came to Kaneohe and performed some of these procedures there. He was a showman liking the popular media exposure but all this came to an end when a "patient" died of a brain hemorrhage due to this procedure in 1967. Then there is all the "treatments" for impotence and sexual problems. A lot of electricity was used to place various sites including inside the sexual orifices "Where a buck can be made off an insecure customer, then quack doctors and unsavory businessmen are sure to follow. By the late 1800s ads were running for “electropathic belts” or “electric belts” aimed at “weak men.” They claimed to help cure kidney pains, sciatic nerve issues, backaches, headaches, and nervous exhaustion—but the underlying message was they could cure men’s sexual problems."https://www.history.com/news/7-of-the-most-outrageous-medical-treatments-in-history
O.K. you get the point. We're gullible, easily misled, open for the scam, and ignorant of the risks. We're a mark ready for the manipulation so we an be robbed. But I realized today that the purveyors of the conspiracy theories, the politicians reporting fraud and pseudo-outrage at their opponents and the outside group including the racist seemingly righteous voices we hear in our media of choice are trying to hoodwink us! Why? Because they accrue money and power! An example, in a related subject may suffice for the moment. There are many sources of misinformation reporting that vaccines are harmful, not effective, and the advocates for vaccination are liars and evil. Instead many of the reported critics of vaccines want to sell you their books, articles, memberships, and even alternative products that are "natural" and do the job of curing you from your disease. There are many examples, in the news of people who started out with serious questions about vaccine science, read alternative literature, believed that the vaccines were harmful but then got attention, media exposure, and began to make money off their interests and sold products through their sites that were "natural" but no proven benefit so they are snake oil purveyors. Here's an example: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02989-9.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anti-vaccine-influencers_n_60be36b9e4b0ea8a1920d73f
Andrew Wakefield reported "the non-existent connection between autism and the MMR vaccine, used against measles, mumps and rubella". Notoriety, money, political power, prestige, manufactured charisma are some of the motivations behind these groups vying for your attention to bamboozle and steal from you. I no longer see these articles and pseudo-events manufactured for our fake news as misguided but I see them as conscious manipulations deserving our disdain.
Well, you're right in pointing out that the poor shlump who takes the bait and now is part of the chorus of bamboozled probably does not have these conscious ulterior motives. What to do? Well, I recommend being open to having a conversation with what may be the unkindly described as the deluded. Psychotherapy with a paranoid person is familiar territory for me as a retired psychiatrist. A conversation requires a listener and an explainer. You take turns if you want to understand each other. In my profession, the patient originally did not come to me for him/her to understand me but for a conversation to occur the patient must accept that I'm here with all my warts. If I can be here to listen and understand then the patient needs to understand what works for him/her needs to work for me. So with a person I meet not a patient who I think is bamboozled or deluded I need to take these prejudices aside and listen and then share and talk. Usually that works.
Leonard
Interesting - the simple explanation is that these "gullible" people don't want to think about & evaluate any of their opinions. If their "guru(s)" gives them some wild, unsupported, irrational justification for hating or mistrusting blacks or Hispanics or whites or vaccination or jews or...or...or...they accept it (maybe with thanks that someone else is doing the thinking for them) and never examine that justification to see if it makes sense. Real "sense" has no part in their mental lives, either by choice or by ability (IQ?) Maybe these are the "brutish" ones you mentioned last time?
ReplyDeleteMy reply
One way to think of it is to understand religious beliefs. Many rules, codes of conduct, and traditions are stated as logical and benefit you and your family in the afterlife and otherwise. You accept them with little questions and just follow the culture and rules. It’s human nature but the critic and questioner becomes the pariah . I’m just calling attention to the same processes that others learn to manipulate to con us.
Interesting - the simple explanation is that these "gullible" people don't want to think about & evaluate any of their opinions. If their "guru(s)" gives them some wild, unsupported, irrational justification for hating or mistrusting blacks or Hispanics or whites or vaccination or jews or...or...or...they accept it (maybe with thanks that someone else is doing the thinking for them) and never examine that justification to see if it makes sense. Real "sense" has no part in their mental lives, either by choice or by ability (IQ?) Maybe these are the "brutish" ones you mentioned last time?
ReplyDeleteMy reply
One way to think of it is to understand religious beliefs. Many rules, codes of conduct, and traditions are stated as logical and benefit you and your family in the afterlife and otherwise. You accept them with little questions and just follow the culture and rules. It’s human nature but the critic and questioner becomes the pariah . I’m just calling attention to the same processes that others learn to manipulate to con us.
From Stan
ReplyDeleteInteresting - i have thought that religious beliefs are brainwashed into kids/adults to "help" them follow/fit into the culture. Parents, schools, media, proselytizing religious groups do the washing. So trumpism is another religious belief? And white supremacy, anti-semitism, all those/that? Cult leaders? Demagogues? Yow. So how did we escape? And how about those who accept "escape" as another blind-following cult?
Wow - it's simply a battle between "think!" And "have faith!"
Maybe i should be grateful that my family let me grow up on my own, painful though it absolutely was! I was left to figure out "think", no matter how warped and semi-real!
Con or be conned - a sad choice.
My intention is to share how the “snake oil” purveyor has motivation to sell you on the product which includes political and social biases and other products to gain money and power. Some good can be realized from the sales pitch. It all depends on the product.
DeleteLeonard
Michael Modan shared this very interesting blog related to these issues from Frank Robinson. His blog is very powerful!
ReplyDeletehttps://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2021/05/21/the-power-imbalance-between-good-and-evil/
From Stan
ReplyDeleteDemocracy has always, IMHO, been a matter of: 1. Hold a vote: 2. The losers grumble, "We wuz robbed! Oh, Hell! - better luck next time!" 3. Everybody (more or less) gets on with Life.
Now we see: 1. Hold a vote. 2. The losers scream "We wuz robbed! We won, we won!" 3. Their leaders urge " Kill the umpire!! " 4. The losers set out to kill the umpire, lynch the Veep, bring down the house.
This is not Democracy, at best it's Civil War, in reality it's anarchy, i.e. "Loot to win!". If enough of our leaders/senators/whoever support this anarchy, refuse to reject it or even to examine what happened, then we've already lost Democracy. What good is 4 years of Biden if it's followed by 4 years (or more, maybe *much* more?) of Trumpola?
Thing is, democracy has it that every vote has winners and losers, that's the basic thread. The losers say "better luck next time!" and the country moves on.
Today it seems that there are no losers, the winners are winners and the losers scream that they didn't lose, they are the winners. So, the vote is not allowed to be the decision-maker, the basic thread of democracy is cut, the losers bully themselves into winners, and nothing moves forward. The horror is that this may well result in a vacuum of leadership, the head of the screaming losers (or some other wanna-be autocrat) may move in to take control of the system. Thus, then, Venezuela, our shining example, here we come!