I’ve been slowly working my way through Carl Sagan’s book ‘The Demon Haunted World’. It’s a great book and if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend it.
The chapter I’m reading concerns gullibility and specifically mentions a very revealing ruse involving an invented entity called “Carlos”. The ruse was devised by the Australian “60 minutes” program with the assistance of James Randi. It was intended to make a point about gullibility at all levels of society, and it succeeded spectacularly. Parts of the media were drawn in, as was a section of the public. Statements and literature were created and put out by Randi that made little sense, with glaring errors in them, and they passed without comment.
The part that interests me the most, is what happened when they admitted the deception; there was a small hardcore of people who still believed! The most interesting thing we can do here is wonder why. I mean it’s all been admitted, cards laid on the table plain as day, yet still a small number of people believed. Why?
I think that it comes down to the level of investment that we have as individuals in these things. A week or two ago, in my “Religion of Society” series I observed that people will defend their position automatically due to the level of emotional investment they have there. This is true of societies and religions as these are the things you grew up in, they helped shape who you are, and your answers to life’s questions are framed in their context. This would mean that a change in those areas could involve a lot of effort. But why should faith healers and other practitioners of pseudoscience merit this level of attachment?
Perhaps here we should consider the role of delusion, the pseudosciences can offer a comforting alternative world view to the conventional. Perhaps a faith healer’s miracle seems to affirm that God considers you worth healing, that your faith is strong enough? The Spiritualists and Clairvoyants offer other forms of comfort; against death, the pain of loss and the seeming randomness of life.
These things are comforting, for sure. But that doesn’t make them correct, in fact some of these things can (and do) prove fatal. This is all one more reason that I think critical thought should be firmly on the school curriculum.
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