We, The Lemmings
Hard-wired to buy lies, technology gives people the freedom to never challenge their biases. At what cost to democracy and civilization itself?
Lemmings are small creatures with large reputations.
In the 17th century, scientists noticed that the arctic rodents seemed to appear out of nowhere and in large numbers. They studied the situation and, as 17th century scientists tended to do, they took a wild guess and concluded the animals spontaneously appear from the sky and fall to earth like rain. The truth is lemmings migrate in herds.
Still later, some people thought that lemmings had such a temper that they would explode when angry. While lemmings do get angry – they’re nasty little creatures – they don’t explode. But you can forgive the misperception: The half-eaten carcasses of lemmings left behind after a migration look like they were blown to bits.
There is one other myth about lemmings that is as tenacious as the rodents themselves. Surely, you’ve heard it: They commit mass suicide by jumping off seaside cliffs. As legend would have it, the rodents instinctively know when their population become unsustainably large and their solution is a death plunge.
Bullshit. Lemmings don’t commit suicide.
They do have large population booms every three or four years, and when the concentration of lemmings become too large in one area, a group will break off and try to find a new home. This migration frequently takes them to a river or lake and the lemmings will swim across. Inevitably, a few drown. You might call that a bad decision, but it’s hardly suicide.
“So why is the myth of lemming suicide so widely believed? For one, it provides an irresistible metaphor for human behavior. Someone who blindly follows a crowd – maybe even toward catastrophe – is called a lemming,” according to Britannica.com. “Over the past century, the myth has been invoked to express modern anxieties about how individuality could be submerged and destroyed by mass phenomena, such as political movements or consumer culture.”
For the 1958 Disney nature film “White Wilderness,” an overzealous filmmaker staged a mass suicide by pushing dozens of lemmings off a cliff. This act of human cruelty cemented in popular culture the notion that lemmings share a death wish.
So, in this way, the lemming’s reputation is a series of quaint myths wrapped in a big lie rooted in mankind’s gift for deception.
A perfect metaphor, indeed.
One “modern anxiety” fueled by a “mass phenomena” is the belief among many Donald Trump supporters that the U.S. border is dangerously porous and poses a direct threat to their lives and livelihoods. While this perspective is not completely without merit, too often we see Trump voters and MAGA leaders jump to false conclusions that fit their narrative. It happened just this week, as Brian Stelter documented for CNN:
An erroneous early Fox News report about the New Orleans terror attack is warping the political dialogue in the aftermath of the deadly rampage.
The false report from Fox, which was attributed to anonymous sources, confused the public – and evidently President-elect Donald Trump too. The misinformation is still circulating more than 24 hours later – serving as a cautionary tale about the news ecosystem as the new year begins.
During the 10 a.m. hour on Wednesday, Fox reported that the New Orleans suspect’s truck crossed the US border in Eagle Pass, Texas “two days ago.” Some of the right-wing network’s coverage explicitly said “the suspect” drove across the border, leaving viewers with the impression that a foreigner might be responsible for the deadly carnage.
In fact, the New Orleans attack suspect was a US citizen and Army veteran. But those facts weren’t publicly established at the time Fox aired the faulty information.
Eight minutes after the first Fox segment that mentioned the border, Trump issued a statement about “criminals coming in” from other countries. While Trump didn’t mention Fox directly, he is known to be an avid consumer of the cable network and has tapped several of its personalities for his incoming cabinet.
Some of Trump’s family members and political allies also immediately connected the attack to illegal immigration and cited Fox.
While FOX eventually corrected its reporting, the damage was done. References to Eagle Pass continued to spread across social media, Stelter said, and FOX continued to stream a clip on its website of the incorrect information. “Some Republicans continued to beat the border drum well after Fox News retracted its initial report,” The Daily Beast’s Josh Fiallo reported.
This post isn’t about Trump. At its core, this post is about the people who follow liars, the lemmings who fall in line and fall for leaders who lie to them – people who, for the empty promise of safety, economic security, and retribution against those who aggrieve them, swear allegiance to false Gods and their falsehoods.
In other words, this post is about you.
You and everybody you know – in fact, every human on earth – is instinctually wired to lie and to be lied to. From the moment the serpent deceived Eve about the apple, and Eve deceived Adam, two competing truths marked the DNA of humankind: We are liars. We are dupes.
This paradox informed the evolution of the human species. Small tribes living in caves, large herds of primitive hunters tracking prey, and later, tens of thousands of citizens packed into primordial cities all were led by people, mostly men, who practiced what I call “liarship” – wielding power through lies and with the blind fealty of their followers.
Life was hard and lifespans were short for most of human history. There was no time for negotiations or consensus building. Power was seized by the strongest man, inherited by the next royal in line or claimed in the name of a god, and with leadership came the ability to declare a community’s collective truths. The chiefs, kings and popes of antiquity were society’s first-generation Gatekeepers.
These liars and their dupes sacrificed virgins on stone altars, burnt heretics alive, drowned suspected witches, committed genocide, enslaved nations, constructed vanity monuments with slave labor, and waged wars, raping and pillaging for personal profit, power and glory.
Humanity checked its behavior with the Enlightenment, which advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state. The Enlightenment attacked the notion that universal truth was monopolized by monarchies and religious authorities, pushing power downward to the masses by elevating science and reason as the accepted sources of knowledge. This paved the way to the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, including the one that liberated the American colonies from England.
The United States of America was founded on the notion that a handful of a nation’s most learned white men could control political and social institutions for the benefit of the rest. The Founders didn’t trust the instincts of their fellow men (much less women). In Federalist 55, James Madison identified “a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.” As a check against human nature, and to keep people from “destroying and devouring one another,” Madison and his brothers installed a republic form of government in which the nation’s first leaders, many of them slaveholders, excluded the vast majority of the public from the political process and wrote the rules for social discourse.
It was a tragically flawed premise – the U.S. Constitutions disenfranchised women and Blacks – but there was an odious order to the process. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the leaders of government, commerce, religion, education, journalism and other social institutions served as second-generation truth minders. Gatekeepers, version 2.0.
They determined what Americans would know about the country’s activities and kept a tight rein on what actions people could take to effect change. Even in the three periods of intense polarization – the presidencies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the Civil War era, and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s – Gatekeepers 2.0 ensured that Americans at least had a common set of facts upon which to debate. They also had the power to bring those debates to a head.
Think of preachers-turned-abolitionists who declared slavery to be a sin, setting the nation on a course toward war and emancipation.
Think of the Senator Margaret Madeline Chase Smith, among the first to denounce McCarthyism in her 1950 speech, "Declaration of Conscience,” two years before Army lawyer Joseph Welch asked Sen. Joe McCarthy, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Think of Walter Cronkite declaring the Vietnam War lost.
Still, this was an exclusive club. I should know. As a White House reporter and Chief of Bureau for The Associated Press in Washington, the largest news division in the world’s oldest and largest news organization, I was a Gatekeeper of information about the nation’s capital from 1993-2010. For eight years after that, I was a political columnist for the National Journal and The Atlantic. On any given story, throughout Washington, there were maybe three dozen reporters and their editors who essentially decided what people should know about the federal government. The Washington press corps operated with a certain arrogance and responsibility: If we don’t write about it, you won’t hear about it.
It was an imperfect system – reporters are as flawed as any human beings and their editors overwhelmingly come in one flavor: white middle-aged men. But the system had the comfort of clarity. Until, with sudden and brutal technological disruption, it didn’t.
The internet changed everything. Powers exclusively held by an elite few since the beginning of civilization were atomized and amplified by the web, placed in the hands of anybody with a computer connection. The radical connectivity of modern technology is the ultimate democratization of information.
Now, anybody can publish news and opinions on platforms that are read and watched by millions of other people, a right reserved just a few years ago to “professionals” like me. Every American can be a journalist.
Now, anybody can turn their cause into a movement, using technology to inspire and connect people on a scale that would have seemed unfathomable to a prehistoric chief, a preindustrial king or even a 20th century president. In version 3.0, everybody thinks they’re a Gatekeeper, which means nobody is.
For decades, psychologists, philosophers, and social scientists have been performing experiments that show that people are not as rational as we’d like to believe. In the 1950s, Leon Festinger gave subjects a boring task and paid some of the group $1; others got $20. An interesting pattern emerged: Those paid $1 tended to say they enjoyed the task more than those paid $20. Festinger concluded that people who were paid the least felt uncomfortable with that truth – and so they mitigated their unease by reshaping reality, convincing themselves they were having good-paying fun.
In the mid-1950s, Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments in which he assembled seven to nine people, all but one of whom were plants who knew he was testing the impact of peer pressure on truth telling. Asch asked the group a series of questions and noted what happened when his confederates, as instructed, unanimously answered incorrectly. Despite knowing and initially offering correct answers, 37% of the blind-tested subjects eventually yielded to majority opinion.
In 1960, Peter Cathcart Wason gave 29 college students a three-number series and challenged them to declare the pattern through their own set of three numbers. For example, when given the series 2, 4, 6, the students responded with three sequentially even numbers of their own and were told, “Yes, this follows the rule.” Assuming the rule was “an even-numbered series,” most students tested their thesis by submitting another set of ascending even numbers. They did so again and again, and they got the same response from the proctor – “Yes, this follows the rule.” With their biases repeatedly confirmed, the students were shocked to discover the rule was actually “any three numbers in ascending order.” Once the students formed a bias toward an answer, Watson concluded, they were unwilling to test the accuracy of their hypothesized rule and instead proposed only numbers that would confirm it.
What do experiments like these tell us? Our minds are hard wired to avoid the psychic discomfort of facts or ideas that counter our biases. The human brain comes with a circuit breaker with three “off” switches, any one of which shuts down subjective thought and analysis at the first sign of intellectual jitters. The off switches are:
· Cognitive dissonance, which occurs when we hold contradictory beliefs, opinions or values, and deal with the friction by creating our own reality
· Social conformity, when we’re too lazy to create our own facts and adopt somebody else’s
· Confirmation bias, the tendency of humans to favor information that supports our existing beliefs rather than confront hard truths.
These mid-century psychological studies inform the work of today’s social scientists who worry that the human mind is not built to withstand the nefarious impulses and influences of a free-wheeling communication ecosystem like the internet. Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist, suggests in his 2016 book Weaponized Lies that the “evolutionary tendency toward gullibility” is a bigger threat to humanity now than at any time in history, because “misinformation has proliferated and lies can be weaponized to produce social and political ends we would otherwise choose to safeguard against.” Philosopher Lee McIntyre notes in his 2018 book Post-Truth that while cognitive bias is as old as humankind, “a perfect storm of a few other factors like extreme partisan bias and social media ‘silos’ that arose in the early 2000s” has created a devaluation of truth. “And in the meantime,” he adds, “further stunning evidence of cognitive bias continued to come to light.”
President Biden’s refusal to acknowledge his declining mental acuity — or even address the public’s alarm — is a classic case of confirmation bias. Democratic leaders and members of the media who ignored what millions of American voters could plainly see may not not be organizers of a mass conspiracy/coverup (as Republicans like to believe) but rather the weak-kneed victims of social conformity: They were too lazy to create their own facts and adopted somebody else’s.
This virulent marriage between lemmings and liars has no bounds. Police lie about shooting Black men. Priests lie about pedophilia. Corporate CEOs lie about racial and gender salary inequity. Athletes lie about performance enhancing drugs. Insurance agents lie about coverage. Pharmaceutical executives lie about drug trials. Doctors lie about patient outcomes. Neighbors lie to neighbors. Husbands lie to wives and wives lie to husbands. Modern communications enable their mendacity.
Scientists have long documented our inability to discriminate reliably between honest and dishonesty, and psychologists are just now coming to grips with how technology is hyper-charging humanity’s worst instincts. Algorithms have no soul, no conscience; they’re cold calculations that trigger the sociopathy buried within us all.
After a few centuries of post-Enlightenment progress, a technological revolution in the first two decades of the millennium allowed humanity to revert to form. The internet and its assorted social applications delivered unprecedented power to almost every living person on earth. Like a communion wafer at Sunday services, this gift was placed in the palms of our hands via mobile phones, and we’re using it to crucify reputations, institutions, and the truth.
Bromides won’t save us. The question isn’t – How do we teach people to know fact from fiction? The better question is this: How do we make people want to know the difference – to even care that they’re genetically addicted to bullshit? And if we can’t make people voluntarily honor the truth, how do we create a new norm structure that forces a society to adhere to a common set of facts?
NOTE: Don’t worry. I won’t always write this long. But I’ve been thinking about this topic for many years, and had even put together a brief book proposal from which this post is drawn.
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Colleen! So great to connect with you again. I’m glad the piece resonated. More to come!
Profound statement: "How do we make people want to know the difference – to even care that they’re genetically addicted to bullshit?"