Category Archives: Critical thinking

Autocratic Leaders take advantage of our weaknesses

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Critical thinking, Death of Democracy, Death of Truth, Fascism, Populism, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism

 

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.

 

Are we hard-wired for autocracy?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, American Fascism, Authoritarianism, Critical thinking, Death of Democracy, Fascism, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Jonathan R Goodman in an article in the Guaridan earlier this year asked this question “Are we hard-wired for autocracy? That is the big question.

 

Here is what he said,

A recent piece of research [in the UK] suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship… The way we evolved predisposes us to place trust in those who often deserve it least – in a sense, hardwiring us to support the most Machiavellian among us and to propel them into power. This seems like an intractable problem. But it’s what we do in the face of that knowledge that matters.

 

Yascha Mounk, Associate professor  at Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C. made similar claims about the US and backed it up with personal research. If both the US and UK are headed toward autocracy the world is in trouble. Sadly, there is a lot of evidence that this is the case.

 

Part of the problem is that humans have a strong liking to be led by strong men. Like our primate cousins. As Goodman wrote,

 

“Recent work in anthropology and primatology shows how this wiring evolved. Our ancient ancestors, like most primates today, lived in groups dominated by violent and aggressive alpha males. Yet over the course of our biological and cultural evolution, unlike our primate cousins, we learned to work together to counter those bullyboys, organising to diminish their influence.We learned that cooperation was more effective than bloody competition. We don’t have to be ruled by bullies, but it is natural so we must be careful, diligent and smart to resist the “natural” tendency. In fact, many now realized that it is through cooperation much more than individual initiative that humans have mastered the globe, where our primate cousins have fallen behind us in development.  As Goodman said, “Where we see brute power combined with ignorance, we can throw our support behind knowledge, peaceful protest and education.”

 

Our nearest evolutionary neighbours, chimpanzees,  also cooperate but not to the extent that we do. They are much more likely to be led by strong alpha males, though sadly and unwisely, in my view, we seem to be evolving towards their approach. Goodman put it this way in his article: “It’s human nature to trust strongmen, but we’ve also evolved the tools to resist them…”

 

The researchers  pointed out we have more recently evolved to cooperate more and compete less. That has come about from learning biases. In other words humans have evolved to believe what other people around us believe, particularly those we see as being successful. For example, in the US many people see Trump as successful. I don’t but they do. People evolved to believe the strong men in their group because that was where they could find protection. Scientists call these conformity or prestige biases.

 

There was an interesting scientific work by the  psychologist Solomon Asch that showed people would tend to believe what successful people around them believed, even when they were wrong. For example, he devised a test where people were asked a simple question. He asked them to compare 2 lines on a piece of paper that were actually the same length. But when they heard others around them say one was longer than the other, they tended to believe it as well.  This probably evolved with us when we lived in small hunting groups. However, those overly trusting beliefs can lead us into serious trouble. Autocratic leaders for example can exploit this natural tendency. Many of the autocrats  are very skillful at manipulating others. Goodman put it this way:

 

Some people call this trait proactive aggression, others, Machiavellian intelligence,  or the ability and inclination to dominate not with violence, but via social manoeuvring and deceit.

 

It is easy to see how this can apply to autocratic or wanna be autocratic leader, such as Victor Orbán in Hungary  or Trump. In other words they found that we can favor those among us who pretend to cooperate at least until they stop. Then they become rivals. We have to be smarter and think more critically.

 

These evolutionary traits can be helpful or dangerous.  When we realize we have these traits, as do most people around us, we have to be careful to look out for bad signs of trouble ahead. We can resist these tendencies, but too often don’t,

Brainwashing or Hyperbole?

 

In the film the Brain-washing of My Dad, when Jen Senko saw how her father turned from a kind and gentle bleeding-heart liberal into a vicious hateful conservative, she wanted to see how that could happen. Was this actually brain-washing? Wasn’t brainwashing what Communist governments did to their prisoners of war by bombarding them with images, lights, and sounds on a 24-hour basis?

 

Senko knew how her father and many others were swept up in a general movement to the right that was supported by new right-wing media. Would this amount to brain-washing? Or is that hyperbole?

 

As a result, she consulted with an expert on brain-washing Kathleen Taylor a neuroscientist from Oxford University in London. She has written a book on modern brain-washing. Taylor pointed out to Senko in her interview how there are two ways of looking at brain-washing. One of them was the traditional way that people were subjected to

 

“this forced psychological torture where people are put into situation where they are put through horrors and brow-beaten into believing or pretending to believe something new. That is brain-washing by force…Then there is brain-washing by stealth which is where they are not forced to believe stuff but all of the information that comes at them is pushing a line. So there is no alternative in terms of information. If you control the information that goes into a brain, you control to a great extent  what that brain will do and what that brain will believe.  You are not forcing them to believe anything, but you are making it difficult for them to think anything else because their horizons are narrowed.”

 

Reminding me of the German Philosopher Immanuel Kant,  George Lakoff told her, “You can only understand what the neuro-circuits of your brain allow you to understand. Any fact that does not fit that will be ignored or rejected…They don’t know their brains are being changed.”

 

Taylor added, “The information is familiar; you don’t have to think about it. If those beliefs are very passionately held, you may find that any belief that threatens these is rejected out of hand.’

Dr. Taylor said there are 5 factors in this kind of belief change:

 

  1. Isolation
  2. Control
  3. Uncertainty
  4. Control
  5. strong emotions

 

That is the matrix for effective brain-washing technique. If these are present, brain-washing works! How does that apply to right-wing media such as Fox News? That’s for my next post.

 

The Biggest Megaphone in the World:  Fox News

Critical thinking, Death of Truth, Extremism, Right-wing Extremism

 

After Right-wing talk radio the next big thing in Right-wing politics in the US was television. In particular Fox News.

 

As Jeff Cohen said, “One of the biggest steps “forward” in handing our whole media system over to a handful of corporations was the Telecommunications “Reform” Act of 1996. Before then it was completely bi-partisan…Consumer rights advocates were calling it the Time-Warner Enrichment Act…The few fat media companies got even fatter.” Cohen called this “bi-partisan corruption that explains why we have the media companies we now have.” And he suggested strongly that media companies had bought Clinton and the Republican Speaker of the House with large political donations in order to get this done. They bought both Democrats and Republicans.

 

This set the stage for something even bigger—the launching of Fox News by Rupert Murdoch. Fox quickly became the major cable news service in the US and the effect on other news organizations’ was “profound”, according to Jen Senko. He owned a lot of media organizations in TV, newspapers, magazines and books and as a result had a huge influence on news in the US

 

Rupert Murdoch owned Fox News but Roger Ailes built it. It was his brainchild. Without him Fox News would be much different.

 

Gabriel Sherman wrote an influential book that explained the mind of Roger Ailes. The book was called, The Loudest voice in the Room: How the Brilliant Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News and Divided a Country. His control over Fox News was pretty absolute. Bombast was the key.  American conservatives loved loud opinions. In 1988 Bill Clinton had an infamous affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky. Fox News covered it with what Sherman called “wall-to-wall” coverage.

In 2000 Fox News milked another issue for a good part of the year. That was the Bush Gore election and the Supreme Court.  Fox did not cover it as a dubious case that went to the Supreme Court for resolution. Fox, under Ailes direction, covered it as showing how the Democrats were sore losers and undemocratically tried to win in the Supreme Court when they had lost the election. Fox really treated it as Democrats trying to steal the election. They barely mentioned that the court’s decision was based on party lines in the court. This was not entirely different than the republicans in 2020 after Trump’s narrow defeat by Biden and the legal melee as a result of 61 law suits launched by the Trump campaign, all of which they lost except for one minor case that hardly had any bearing on the result at all.

 

In 2001 Ailes and Fox treated the disaster of 9/11 as a holy war of the US against the Muslim radicals in the Middle East with George W. Bush the heroic John Wayne figure who would lead America to victory in the desert.

 

Fox News became Ailes megaphone and it became the biggest megaphone in the world. All of these incidents helped Fox to explode in the ratings and become the biggest voice in news on the cable networks and that voice distinctly spoke with a strong right-wing accent. It was the voice of Roger Ailes who selected spokesmen and women who mirrored his right-wing views.

 

Ailes realized that what Fox needed to do was make the news simple and black and white. Subtlety and nuance were irrelevant. Banished for good. Good vs bad was always the issue. And America was good and its foes were either bad or frequently even evil. Its anchors or hosts wore American flags on their lapels and preached the exceptionalism of America that was beset by traitorous lefties and lily-livered liberals.

 

Ailes really made not just Fox News, but America go much further right-wing. And he did it smoothly with cunning. He convinced the audience that they were fair and balanced, as their motto asserted, but actually he was moving his audience and the country much further to the right. Ailes was very good at what he did. And he helped make the Murdochs immensely rich in the process. And, in time, he helped give birth to Donald Trump.

Trump was the child of Fox News.

 

Mennonite Mothers are to Blame

Conspiracy Theories, Critical thinking, Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Ethics, Health, Mennonites, Philosophy/Ideas, Rebel, religion, The Sleep of Reason, Trust and Distrust

 

Let’s get back to Mennonites.  We have noticed that in many places in North America the resurgence of measles on account of vaccine resistance has occurred in areas with a large number of Mennonites. Why is that? Is that a coincidence?

In my view, the problem is that many Mennonites live in a culture of belief. What I mean by that is that often Mennonites robustly indoctrinate their young. From a very early age, Mennonite mothers (and of course fathers) are careful to foster Christian faith in their offspring. They teach those children that they must have faith. Faith in God and the inerrant word of God evinced in the Christian Bible. I know that many religious groups do the same thing, but Mennonites definitely do and they do it thoroughly. Their children must believe what they believe without evidence.

 

Personally, I consider this a mistake. That is a very bad habit to get into. By doing that Mennonites (and others who do it too) shackle their children. If parents don’t give their children the opportunity to think for themselves their children will not learn to think for themselves in the real world. They won’t learn if they are not given the opportunity. That means they must be allowed to make their own mistakes. Even if we think they are wrong. We should give them evidence to encourage them to change their minds. Not indoctrination. Children must learn to think and think critically. This is true even when it comes to important matters such as choosing to believe or not to believe what their parents have taught them. In fact, this thinking skill is most important in the most important matters.

If children do not learn to think for themselves, they will be constant prey for charlatans, con-men, and hucksters.  That goes for religious hucksters as well. And there are legions of them. They are ubiquitous. It is much better for children to learn to think for themselves and make decisions based on evidence and logical arguments or inferences rather than faith inculcated by their parents. Thinking is a good habit to get into. Believing without evidence is a very bad habit to get into. I know when we are very young we need to believe our parents to keep us out of children or get hurt. But when we are old enough we must learn to think for ourselves or we will be in big trouble. And if enough children overly credulous when they get older society will be in trouble.

Those are skills that are worth much more than any belief. Such skills are literally invaluable.  That is what parents should teach their young charges.

To take away their right and obligation to think for themselves is to rob them of what they will most need after their parents are gone, namely, the ability to think and overcome challenges which they will inevitably meet. I know parents mean well when they try to inculcate their children, but they are misguided when they do it after their children are old enough to think for themselves. And to the extent they are old enough, they should be allowed to make decisions for themselves.

It is only by trying to think that we can learn to cultivate a spirit of questioning, of scrutinizing evidence, of weighing evidence and making rational decisions.  These are the skills children will need as they grow and have to make important decision such as whether or not to take vaccines. Robbing children of that skill could be considered child abuse, because it robs them of one of the most important skills they will ever need and they will otherwise be unable to learn.

Parents can guide such learning and offer help to them in learning these skills, but to take away their decision-making power is unfair to them.

Children must also learn to avoid the trap of wishful thinking. It is one of the easiest traps to fall into. The most difficult thing in the world is to disbelieve what you want to be true.  The easiest thing in the world is to believe what you want to be true.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said it was not important to have the courage of one’s convictions. It was much more important to have the courage to attack one’s convictions.”  That is what we have to learn to do. That is the basis of critical thinking. It is perhaps its  most important element.  Nietzsche also said, “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

He also said, “if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire”

Nietzsche realized he was radical in this respect. He showed thinking is fun. He said, “I am dynamite.” I think he meant to say that he was on this earth to break up encrusted ‘truths.’ He was here to attack them, to expose them.

I think many Mennonite mothers, but not all of them, and many Mennonite fathers, but again not all of them, have taught their children to believe what they have been indoctrinated to believe, and that is a dangerous thing as is shown by the fact that too many Mennonite children  have refused to believe measles vaccines are better for them than the alternatives, such as, in extreme cases, such as the woman in Ontario, eating wild flowers.

 

 

Credulity is Bad

Conspiracy Theories, Critical thinking, Epidemics/Pandemics, Morality, Philosophy/Ideas, reason, religion, Skeptical Philosophy, The Sleep of Reason, Trust and Distrust

 

 

The philosopher William Kingdon Clifford argued, that to believe anything because it comforts you, or makes you feel good, or sustains you in life, or makes life a little less intolerable, is not just epistemically wrong, not just intellectually wrong, but morally wrong. In fact, if the decision that needs to be made is serious enough, such as whether or not to send people to war, or whether or not to cut health benefits to millions of people to raise money to give tax breaks to wealthy people, or whether or not to encourage  vaccines to fight serious diseases or encourage eating wild flowers instead, the decision could amount to one of the worst crimes that you can commit. That’s a pretty drastic statement. According to Clifford  It is a travesty and has some horrible consequences.  We will get to those later. In any event, according to Clifford this is a morally wrong. I think it is hard to argue with that. Serious decisions must be made on the basis of serious evidence, analysis, and scrutiny before they are made and innocent people suffer.

 

Arthur Schafer, a wonderful philosopher and ethicist from the University of Manitoba, and the first philosopher I ever heard speak in person, is a fan of Clifford’s reasoning. According to Schafer, Clifford sees our reliance   on illusion on false pictures of the universe, as amounting to creating in us a walking time bomb. As Schafer said at talk to a talk given to the Winnipeg Humanists, Atheists, and Skeptics, Society,  “to put it a little less dramatically, when we believe things because they make us feel good, rather than because we have good evidence for them, as Clifford argues, we make ourselves credulous people.” That Clifford says is wicked. Schafer agrees with that conclusion. So do I.

 

Again, we are talking only about serious important issues here. We are not talking about a decision to pick a red jelly bean rather than a white jelly bean from a cup. For those decisions we are completely free to make them on the basis of a whim, or an inkling, or an instinct or even on a guess.  But we can’t justify decisions that seriously affect the health or welfare of other people on such a basis.

 

If we are credulous people we can easily believe, as the Mennonite woman interviewed by the CBC radio did, that eating wild flowers to combat measles is better than taking vaccines. If we have been conditioned by our parents to be credulous, they are partly responsible. Credulity can be dangerous—to ourselves and others. That is why Clifford and Schafer said encouraging credulity is dangerous for society. Not just for the believer, for society.

We can believe whatever we want but we should be careful about helping to create a credulous society. As we are now seeing everywhere, that can cause a lot of harm.

Vaccine Success Story

Critical thinking, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

 

I first heard about Robert F. Kennedy many years ago when he was a well-respected environmental lawyer. But that was then. This is now.

 

Now many people consider him an extremist on matters of health and the environment. They think he has gone over the top. Yet Donald Trump appointed him as Secretary of Health. Then things got crazy. As Trump himself, “I told him to go wild with health.” He seemed to some to a radical but good choice. Others have gone apoplectic in opposition. Where does the truth lie?

 

This past winter Christiane and I spent 2 months living on Vancouver Island.  My hiking companion, let’s call him Bob, was an enthusiast for health and was an iconoclast who greatly admired Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He was a little younger and a lot more fit than I was. We had a friendly argument on our way home after a marvelous hike in the local rain forest. In the end we agreed to disagree on friendly terms.  But I decided I should do a little more research on my own as my friend Bob had done.  I wanted my research which would be conducted on line to include only reliable sources such as internationally respected infectious disease specialists I knew about from my experiences listening to speakers on TV during the Covid-19 pandemics about whom some of them are.

 

One of those was Dr. Michael Osterholm who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. I had heard him many times and he was frequently consulted by many others. I decided I would respect his opinion.  Fortunately, he had recently been interviewed by PBS News Hour, another trusted source in my opinion.

 

On that television show I heard that

 

“More than 75 Nobel laureates [in December of 2024] signed a letter asking the U.S. Senate not to confirm health and human services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., citing his opposition to vaccines among their concerns.”

 

William Brangham, the PBS interviewer began by citing what I had always believed:

 

Vaccines are easily one of modern medicine’s most successful interventions. Over the past two centuries, they virtually eradicated diseases like smallpox, polio, measles, and many others that once regularly disfigured, disabled, and killed hundreds of millions of people around the world, many of them children.

 

 

Yet millions of Americans and Canadians, including people I know personally, believed that vaccines were dangerous, poorly studied, and promulgated by an anxious  government of whom we should be suspicious.

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm made this opening statement:

 

…the bottom line is, for every two days we have lived in the last century, we have gained a day of life expectancy. That’s incredible. And it’s because of these tools, notably vaccines, that that’s happened.

 

Vaccines have truly been a remarkable success. Some have said they might be the greatest medical achievement of the 20th century. We should not reject them out of hand unless we had good reasons for doing so.

As William Brangham, correctly pointed out:

 

That’s not to say there are no risks to them, including occasional allergic reactions, injuries, and, in rare cases, deaths. And public health experts like Osterholm say it is important to examine and continually monitor any adverse effects. But, on balance, those risks are far lower than those of the diseases they’re protecting against.

 

Dr. Michael Osterholm put this into graphic context so even a simple man like I could understand it:

 

If, today, I were in an automobile accident and I had my seat belt on, but somehow the seat belt jammed and I was unfortunately trapped in the car and the car caught on fire, this would be a horrible tragedy. Would anybody say, we’ve got to eliminate seat belts now? No, because, in fact, there have been many, many, many more lives saved because of seat belts as opposed to not.

 

Yet, we face a small but growing and very vocal minority of Americans and Canadians who have been rebelling against the scientific and medical orthodoxy.  These people, such as Bob and the real estate agent I met in Tempe Arizona, at the conference I mentioned in a previous post, as well as Christiane’s cousin have been refusing to accept the majority opinion about all kinds of vaccines. Over the past couple of decades, there has been a small, but growing vocal minority pushing back against vaccines because of what they have perceived to be substantial harms, including the widely debunked claim that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism. That was based on an article in a widely respected medical journal “The Lancet” published in England in the 1990s by a doctor Andrew Wakefield. I also learned that he had lost his medical license as a result of that scientific paper which the Lancet subsequently withdrew.

 

Since then, Robert F. Kennedy who was trained as an environmental lawyer became an important player in the anti-vax movement that followed the publication of the original paper, now withdrawn.

 

So where does the truth lie? I think it likely lies with science. We must look at science with a critical eye, but there really is no better source for good health information. Not even lawyers. Not Robert F. Kennedy. And not me either.

History is Important

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Critical thinking, Death of Truth, History, Indigenous People After Contact, Truth Seeking

 

 

I believe there is a lot to be learned from history.   And much history can be learned from travel. History teaches us the truth about the past. At least it always tries to find the truth. Sometimes that truth lies underneath decades or even centuries of obfuscations or outright propagandist lies. Those lies were designed to obscure uncomfortable truths.  I want to face those truths; not escape from them.

Barbara Huck’s book has helped to do that and it has enriched our journey.  Huck made some very interesting comments about our Canadian history. As she explained,

Today, on the cusp of a new millennium, North Americans have more tools than ever before for travelling through time. Thanks to new technologies and new perspectives, we are well equipped to imagine life five thousand or five million years ago. We can contemplate doing blood tests on the body of  an ancient trader found high on an Alpine pass or cloning a woolly mammoth in China. Yet for the most part, an appreciation of life here just 500 years ago eludes us.

 

I did not want to elude that story. I wanted to approach that history on this journey.  I think it is important.

History is important because the truth is important. Nowadays a lot of people don’t want old monuments to be taken down.  Some say that is erasing history. I disagree. Paying homage to old statues, or refusing to critique history is to erase history. Many people don’t want to look at our past history because it might make them uncomfortable.  They prefer self-satisfying illusions.  Personally, I would rather be disturbed in my comfortable pew than sit there in ignorance ignoring the truth. If the truth is not challenging its probably not the truth.