Why are so many people susceptible to group think and gullibility?

 

Marshall McLuhan

The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, said that education was the best form of civil defence against media fallout. We're all subjected to virtual and semi-realities being constantly flashed before our minds by partisan causes and agencies wishing to sell us something - a product, an idea, a policy, a lie.

The philosopher A.C. Grayling says that the "human propensity for belief and superstition, is readily understood in psychological terms as the desire for explanatory closure in the face of uncertainty."

But it's not just semi or uneducated people that are gullible or who are susceptible to group think. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was the rector of Freiberg University, famously said: "The Fuhrer himself, and he alone, is Germany's reality."

The communist dictator Joseph Stalin, killed astronomers for taking a non-Marxist line on sunspots and endorsed the bogus science of the agronomist Lysenko. The peasant slayer Stalin, created unpersons and expunged others from history. In Stalinist Russia, reality became plastic like Salvador Dali's clocks; dual consciousness and double-think flourished. The Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, said that universal mendacity was the only safe from of existence in Stalinist Russia.

Life in Britain is becoming quite extraordinary. It resembles that final scene in Peter Pan where the children are told that if they don't shout out loud that they believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell will die. The Labour Prime Minister, Sir Ker Starmer, wants us all to collude in a fiction when he tells us the 99.9 percent of women don't have a penis. Most of us think it's 100 percent. Some members of his government can't even define the difference between a man and a woman.

This kind of nonsense upon stilts is now both widespread and endemic in Britain. The political theorist Hannah Arendt, said that what the Nazi and Communist regimes valued most was not the dedicated Nazi or Communist party member, but those people for whom reality had become blurred and who couldn't distinguish fact from fiction. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: "To be effective propaganda must harp on a few simple slogans appealing to the primitive sentiments of the broad masses."