Populist, Machiavellian, and autocratic leaders have learned to take advantage of our natural (evolved) biases against us. Goodman used the example of Andrew Tate in England to illustrate his point. I would use leaders with autocratic tendencies instead, like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. And of course, it seems to me, that the young people, being even more impressionable than the older people, seem to be most attracted to such strong man leaders. Perhaps they are more impressionable, or perhaps, even more likely, they are the most unhappy with themselves. In modern society, young people are starting to realize that their parent’s generation has screwed them by rigging the rules of society against them. It is no accident that this current generation, for the first time in history, is likely to live less well off than financially than their parents.
Strongmen, like Trump, are masters at using deceit and manipulation to create absurd trust in their abilities, against all evidence to the contrary, and then use that ability to propel themselves into positions of authority where they can use that authority to improve their own financial position at the expense of those who supported them. It’s a nasty trick if you can get away with it, and none is better at it than Donald Trump. Trump has done it many times and continues to do it as his supporters don’t seem to notice or don’t seem to care.
One of the techniques that strongmen in the past have used to gain influence over the populace include attacking science and knowledge. Hitler did it. Stalin did. And now Trump is doing it. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia they quickly attacked the scientific community with claims that they were merely, “bourgeois” scientists who were acting on behalf of their financial supporters and then replaced them with more compliant and ideologically pure scientists. This is precisely what Trump has done by attacking woke scientists.
We must be careful to avoid allowing this to happen. As Jonathan Goodman said in his Guardian article,
“Where we see brute power combined with ignorance, we can throw our support behind knowledge, peaceful protest and education.
And finally, when reigns of terror end – and eventually, they always do – it is critical to learn and absorb the lessons. That way, we inoculate ourselves afresh against our natural tendency to trust the untrustworthy, carrying that wisdom forward into the future so that we’re better able to stymie the autocrats who seek to close our minds.
The best tool we can muster to defend ourselves from such attacks is our ability to think critically. We must cherish and protect that skill, as it is our most powerful weapon of self-defence. This is always our most powerful tool. When we give it up we submit to arbitrary and ruthless authority. That is why autocrats are so quick to attack it because that makes us defenceless to their attacks.
