The unlimited power of nonsense

When we are born, we are a blank page with no clue about politics, religion or the latest trends on social media. Our first weeks are spent making sense of the most basic things: colours, shapes, sounds and what our parents look and sound like.

Learning in early childhood is very much a matter of repetition. Adults use "truth by repeated assertion" for more nefarious reasons: to swing elections and convince otherwise open-minded individuals that something untrue is actually the case. Say something often enough, and it seems like it's true. As a child, that's all you have until you develop reasoning as part of a more discerning approach to the world.

Very young humans have to "self-boot" into mature thinkers. Until you understand the way the world works (essentially, until you have an internal model of the world), then literally nothing makes sense. You can only respond to your internal feelings like hunger, thirst, pain, and pleasure. An internal world model puts a consistent and understandable framework around your experiences while you also develop a Theory of Mind: an acknowledgement and understanding of other people.

There is no objective model of reality for human beings. We can only operate in the world as it seems to us. Even when the people around us appear to agree with our own conclusions about the world, there's nothing absolute about it. Descartes famously said, "I think, therefore I am". What he meant was that if you're capable of having a thought, then you must exist. That's something inalienable and objective that can act as a foundation stone for the rest of our thinking.

No one should waste time arguing about whether a triangle has three sides, because it is a matter of definition. But anything that's not a mathematical or definitional certainty requires evidence. That's not a problem most of the time. If you're stood on a railway platform with a hundred people huddled under their umbrellas, you'd be foolish to claim that it isn't raining: the evidence would be firmly against you. But if you express an opinion to a group of economists that market forces will automatically lead to a better, fairer world, then you will find that some will agree with you while others, sometimes vehemently, won't.

Unless we're surrounded by clear evidence, what we believe to be true depends largely on what we're told. Children exposed to religious or doctrinal dogma can do little to defend themselves against untruths and myths. They have not yet developed what Richard Dawkins calls "a cognitive immune system".

Adults use lived experience's moderating effect to protect themselves from unquestioning acceptance, but social media has shown us that our beliefs are vulnerable to influence. Not everyone runs an inner loop of scepticism: it would be exhausting. So, we are all susceptible to false ideas that sound plausible, and even more so if we want them to be true. Social media algorithms amplify this propensity to believe what we want to believe, feeding it with more of the same, like a bountiful supply of your favourite food.

We are susceptible to influence from our friends, families, co-workers, and even people we meet accidentally. You might think that this should give us a moderate, balanced set of opinions, but the reality is that everyone is subject to the same set of influences. We all read newspapers (or their websites), and most of us spend hours per week on the internet. And never underestimate the persuasive power of the "bloke in the pub." Of course, our own views and opinions contribute to the discussion, but our beliefs' "centre of gravity" is always liable to shift.

In politics, the "Overton Window" concept illuminates how we come to accept or reject government policy. At any point, the window includes what we currently find acceptable. Across generations, and even between consecutive governments, it can move surprisingly far and astonishingly fast. Populist politicians know this and use their linguistic sleight of hand to lubricate the window guides. "Take Back Control" and "We should reward hard work" are prima facie obvious, but they typically mask a complex network of assumptions and cognitive sleights of hand. This is not a party political point: all shades of political affiliation use these techniques.

We're often warned about "they", as in "they want to take your (freedom, cars, meat, guns: insert where appropriate)", but we're never told explicitly who "they" are. It doesn't matter: fear is less analytical than curiosity. Never shy of using emotive words like "invade" and "swarm", it's almost ridiculously easy for populists to stir up anger when you can blame any unfortunate minority for everything from inflation to losing the Eurovision Song Contest. "We need laws against this (already illegal) thing," is the plaintive, short-sighted cry.

Populists never have detailed answers. Instead, they seek to oversimplify. There are no fine-grained policies, only broad-brush answers like "This has to stop" and "We can't go on like this," without specifying who "we" are or what "this" means.

Social media takes these messages and amplifies them while targeting thousands of unwitting recipients, noting previous online behaviour to maximise the anger. It's an incredibly potent method: orders of magnitude more power to spread untruths and do it instantly. This immediate dissemination of unverified, deliberately over-simplified nonsense is so powerful that it can cause seismic movements in societal attitudes. It's divisive: those who can see through it are immediately set up as polar opposites to the gullible ones, where, in reality, there is little or no need for division.

How do we change this? One way to start is to employ the slogan "Nuance, not Nonsense". It's not the catchiest political strapline, but it does shine a light on the vacuousness of the populist fallacy.