Propaganda for the Smart
How to capture intellectually intelligent people
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
— George Orwell
Back in the day, wars were fought in the countryside with swords and victories could be counted by fatalities and square meters gained. Today, the battlefield is in the mind and victories are counted based on how many minds you have captured and taken on your side, holding a particular idea.
On the battlefield, you had to find a way to kill the ones that had a physical advantage over you — be it sword over fist or arrow over the sword. The same applies on the battlefield of ideas. Those with an intellectual advantage must be captured somehow. But instead of a weak point, their strongest trait is what is used against them. That is their own intellect.
If you are an unintelligent person, falling for certain rhetoric is easy. If you lack analytical skills and good judgment you have superficial and shallow criteria on what to believe and whom to trust. It is easy to end up shouting “just stop oil” without taking into account real-world consequences. Or you might find yourself standing on the sidewalk with a sign that says “the end is near”. Or post “science is racist”, or “air-conditioning is sexist” and so on.
Such statements require no real thinking. Even though the worldviews that produce such idea pathogens can get quite sophisticated(e.g. postmodernism, religion, wokeness, etc…), the end result catchphrase they offer is remarkably simplistic and contagious.
If you are riding this boat, your opinions can be easily assigned and the buttons that trigger a certain response from your part are easier to find. In other words, you are predictable.
But there is a problem.
How do you do that with intelligent people?
One way to capture intelligent people is to find and access the strings that override intellect and tune them to your will. These strings must have a much greater influence on the brain and phycology than reason does, like emotion. Emotion is super-powerful and effective for both unintelligent and intelligent people.
The other way is to keep their brain busy, let it run, and give them a playground where they are “free” to exercise their curiosity in any scale or direction. This way they have a sense of progress that keeps them imprisoned in a seemingly barless prison with their own intellect serving as bars.
You basically leverage either comfort or curiosity. If the brain asks for comfort, offer emotion. If the brain asks for curiosity, offer a race track.
Like having a dog that is problematically disobedient and you need to tame it down. You can either give it endless food so it becomes lethargic and sleeps all day or have a backyard with toys and let it run until it gets tired and falls asleep. If the dog is asleep the house is quiet. If the dog is curious it will make a big mess trying to find the cookies.
The new opium
Giving intelligent people the feeling that their brain is high functioning is a bespoke implicit compliment. Offering the sense that they are forming their own opinions using reason is heavenly pleasing. Having an opinion, feeling smart, and viewing oneself as a well-informed individual has become the new opium. It’s like you are given a fast car and you are allowed to run as fast as you like. You will most likely feel like a badass driver.
The more intelligent you are, the fancier the packaging has to be in order to reaffirm your intelligence. You don't want an easy serving. You want the hard stuff because you are smart enough to handle them and uncover the hidden truth.
Like a child that gets all excited when they receive a present, an intelligent adult will act in a similar way. The child will be dazzled by the colorful ribbons and fancy coloring of the package. It will tear the box apart from excitement, the thing that makes the whole experience even more fun. Similarly, an intelligent person will feel self-actualized in the presence of an interesting story. A story that intrigues their mind and sparks their curiosity will act like some sort of brain candy, ready to “tear apart” the story with research. Incredibly addictive.
The higher up you go, the more intellectually demanding it is and the more engaged you have to be. This narrows the scope of your perception, making you unable to see the bigger picture.
Take nutrition for example. If you are at level zero, you don't do any research whatsoever and consume snicker bars and sodas. Go up a level and you are watching health-related TV shows making you concerned about cholesterol, saturated fats, and salt intake. Go up a level and you follow nutrition blogs and might even have read a book or two about diet. Go up a level and you are reading top journals on nutrition while having a nutritionist write you meal plans. You learn about vitamin D and take supplements so you don't get B12 deficiency. Go up a level and now you are enlightened. You read academic papers about the latest findings on the importance of biotin for your system. Diligently count calories, measure salt intake with a weight scale, swallow a bunch of supplements daily, and can't help but wonder why you haven't been on a date for the past ten months.
But the higher you go, there is no guarantee that you won't meet conflicting views. Because you made all this research already, it gets harder to change your mind, even in the presence of opposing evidence. Gibson's law states that for every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD. You, as a non-PhD, can't really tell who is right or wrong. You most likely chose based on trust or what is convenient. One expert will cancel out the other expert to zero on any subject if heard in isolation.
If the arguments are persuasive enough, you will follow the logic wherever it might take you. You will feel you are making progress, where in fact you are cleverly sleepwalking your way into irrational rationality.
Let's say you are able to read scientific papers and long-winded essays with complex explanations. By doing so you have the unsatiated feeling you are getting smarter even if you happen to read a bunch of word salad nonsense. The sense of progress you get that you are connecting the dots overrides the ability to zoom out and turn your bullshit detector on. But the average person can’t read academic papers or scientific studies. They just think they are smart enough to do so and derive meaningful conclusions.
The chances that you chose all the right opinions, on your first try, are basically none. What you do, actually, is visit all the available playgrounds out there and exhaust your intellect until you can get yourself to sleep.
Intellectual playground #1
The best way to control how others think is to know what they think. And in order to do that, you must be the one who fills their brain with information.
In the past, the media had a business model of informing you. With the rise of the internet, they pivoted and got into the business of enraging you. Delivering truth is not their primary concern, but rather drilling a particular narrative into the heads of its readers, hopefully capturing all levels of intelligence. Mainstream media does a masterful job of this. So do the ones that call themselves alternative or indy media where they do the same thing but with a different veneer around them.
Usually, emotional triggers are the first gunshots that start the bloodbath. Whenever a tragedy occurs, the media and their journo-armies are quick to prepare an alternative branch of history to defend the side they serve.
This is the best time to attack since they know that when you are enraged or emotionally engaged with a story, all logic goes out the window. And even if that is not enough, they count on your brain’s logical fallacies.
A common fallacy, smart people fall for is Gell-Mann's amnesia.
(e.g. you are a physicist and are able to find many errors in a newspaper story regarding black holes. Flip the page and read something about politics and take everything said as fact)
The same confidence you have spotting inconsistencies in one story doesn’t apply to another story, but you go with it. The news knows that we as humans gravitate towards tribalism as part of our evolutionary heritage so will be kinder to our side(good) and more negatively biased toward the opposing side(evil).
Most of the time the “blaming the other side to look evil” tactic is not totally made up. They are usually a mix of facts slightly tweaked, designed to direct you to a certain conclusion. They are either stretched in order to make some irrelevant detail the central part of the story or minimized so any inconvenient fact can be pushed under the rug. And because they have some truth and logic to them, you follow the breadcrumbs. If they were obviously outrageous, logic could creep in and slowly unfold the skein of fallacies, making you more skeptical of what you read.
“The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.”
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Intellectual playground #2
Our second favorite thing to do besides talking about ourselves is to talk about our opinions, which is essentially the same thing.
Scrolling through Twitter, or any other social media platform, everyone seems to have an expert opinion on just about anything. A pandemic hits and everyone becomes a virologist. A bank goes bust and everyone becomes a financial advisor or risk management expert. But it seems like these platforms act as a playground, a natural habitat for smart people where they keep their minds occupied and worked up with current affairs.
Besides a substantial number of users that seem like they escaped from a mental house, you also come across quality accounts that offer real insight. Like visiting a zoo or an amusement park, you visit Twitter to take a look around, see various specimens in action while they argue with each other, visit their echo chamber, say “oh that is interesting” and then leave.
Echo chambers, for example, are a natural thing that happens online without much help from the outside.
Often echo chambers seem harmless or even funny when you have a bunch of ignorant people together repeating the same nonsense over and over again. They might believe that the earth is flat, that the moon is made out of cheese, or that birds are actually robots placed by the government. Whether they actually believe such stories or they are simply trolling, as a group they are relatively self-contained without much influence. The vast majority of their social media following is there for the giggles and not for insight.
What I fear more is when intelligent people group themselves together in their own shiny, expert, high-prestige echo chamber. This type of echo chamber is difficult to break and causes more damage than good and quite often hinders progress. They are hard to break precisely because they are cleverly rationalized and backed up, to the point that they can’t tell when they are wrong, without the help of heretics and “science rebels”. They enjoy great influence, are not self-contained, and are usually highly regarded. Once experts thought vaccines were some kind of quackery, the internet was just a passing fad, or that it would take a million years to fly a plane, only for outsiders to prove them wrong.
Intellectual playground #3
Another thriving place for this is ideology land. Once you are caught in some ideology you are unknowingly participating in ideological warfare, which inevitably leads to ideological slavery. Once you inhabit this space, you can easily turn from naturally curious to blind zealot. From a person that tries to find nuanced explanations, to believe that there is a grand conspiracy to make you eat bugs or hyper-sexualize your children.
Ideology is an intellectual sport, which is why you mostly see intelligent people engaging with it at a high level. It takes real effort to study an ideology in depth and become a virtuous ideologue that knows best what the world needs. A condition that in most cases one never fully recovers from.
(One could argue that this is the actual way ideas spread and become popular in many cases. Intelligent, allegedly bias-free individuals spread wrong ideas to their friends. Their friends have confidence that they thought it through and trust them because they generally read about such stuff)
Closing
So consuming news like an addict, arguing on social media, and embracing some ideology is a potential trap that captures intelligent people, and keeps them busy, thinking they are free.
The feeling of uniqueness, thinking you are ahead of your time, is hypnotizing. That other people are yet to understand what is now obvious to you and that you reached that point purely with research, critical thinking, and open-mindedness. Becoming more stupid in an intelligent way is unfortunately a trap that many well-meaning people fall for. Probably the longing to know is at the core of all this. To find some peace and some answers in this crazy existence we all share.
The machine that makes you believe false narratives has become so advanced, that smartness alone won't guard you against it. And it won’t help you find any shortcut toward truth either. The best thing to do, which will help you in the long run, is not to use your intellect for direct attack, but rather for defense. Instead of overloading your brain with information, build a more diversified array of tools to keep you from being fooled. If the solution or truth comes by, there are better chances you will be able to spot it. If your brain is exhausted and destroyed, you will likely miss it, looking for your next fix in the evening news instead.
The prison is so perfect you don't even know you are locked up. The game is so engaging that you think it's real. The solution is to play another game altogether and not try to win this one. But I guess you are smart enough to know this. Right?
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes