“To make matters worse, the more we see someone, the more familiar they become, and this makes them appear to be more trustworthy. A liar can become an ‘expert’; a lone voice begins to sound like a chorus, just through repeated exposure. These strategies have long been known to professional purveyors of misinformation. ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention,’ Adolf Hitler noted in Mein Kampf. ‘It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over…’”

The Intelligence Trap by Dave Robson

There’s a very interesting book called “The Intelligence Trap” by Dave Robson where he puts forward the idea that intelligent people often suffer from the fact that, because they often find themselves as one of the smartest people in the room, they may have a tendency to overestimate their actual understanding of what’s going on.

It’s a bit more complicated than that but, as psychologists have argued, rather than looking at all the evidence and coming to a sound conclusion based on a careful weighing of the pros and cons, humans have a tendency to rush to an emotive judgement and THEN USING THEIR INTELLIGENCE TO JUSTIFY THEIR POSITION.

Personally, I never do this. Just as I’m free from any biases, I also like to consider things from all angles before deciding that my gut feeling was right after all.

A recent example of this was when Greens leader, Adam Bandt, posted on X and used the phrase, “heatwaves like this”. As can be expected, his post attracted a large number of comments including several people who expressed the view that it’s summer so what do you expect? This would be a great example of people using their intellect and not responding emotionally where it not for the simple fact that Summer starts on December 1st, so it’s late Spring.

Do I have a legitimate point? Or is this me using my cognitive powers to justify my position to an emotional response to the knuckle-draggers who seem to want to deny climate change? And is the insult “knuckle-draggers” emotive when it would be more accurate to call them “mouth-breathers”? And will any of the people I’ve insulted respond with a reasoned thesis on why I’m wrong, or will they just resort to the sort of name-calling and abuse I’ve come to expect from anyone who disagrees with me…

Err, sorry, I seem to have been channelling Andrew Bolt there for a moment.

Moving on…

One of the problems with the modern world is that powerful people have realised that emotion is more powerful than reason and they keep their power by engaging people’s emotions rather than appealing to their intellect…

Ok, ok, I know what some of you are going to say: “How can you appeal to the intellect of someone who voted for Trump or Pauline Hanson?”, but there’s something that you’ve possibly overlooked here: It’s too late because they’ve most likely gone down the emotional path and when you try to appeal to facts and reason, they’ll accuse you of being one of those bookish types who has no experience of the real world. Trump, for example, had to deal with the difficulties of having bone spurs and finding ways to ensure that he wasted his father’s fortune on bad deals in order to make it back by good deals where he spruiked his ability as a businessman by ignoring the fact that if he’d just banked his inheritance he’d have ended up with more money thanks to compound interest.

So how do you counter someone who believes that illegal immigrants are both living off government benefits by being too lazy to work AND taking our jobs? Do you point out how lacking in skills the person must be if an immigrant who hasn’t bothered to learn English and has criminal tendencies is getting the job they want? This is likely to both engage the person arguing on both an intellectual and an emotional level, but I doubt that it will have a positive outcome for either of you.

How do you counter someone like Elon Musk who claims to be a free speech advocate while tweeting that anyone who posts certain things will have a permanent ban on X… On a side note, is the verb still “tweeting” or should it now be “ex-ing” or “Xing” or… oh, who cares, I’ll just go onto Bluesky where the verb can be “blueing” or “skying” or…

Perhaps the answer is to take Hitler’s advice on repetition. I mean, I know Hitler was one of the most evil men of the twentieth century but that doesn’t mean that he was wrong about everything. Both he and Jordan Peterson had views on making your bed, and both are prepared to lie in it. In Hitler’s case he was prepared to lie out of it, but I wouldn’t say that about Peterson because he’s still alive…

Anyway, the bit about repeating things until people accept them as true has certainly worked for a number of politicians over the years and the real danger is that nice people don’t want to spoil Christmas by disagreeing with Uncle Alf and so consequently he’s the one who gets to repeat over and over again his theory on exactly who is ruining the country… which, ironically, will never be him, even if he’s guilty of exactly the things he’s describing. “That’s the trouble with kids today… no respect for the law… in my day, if a kid did something wrong, the police would take him down to the station and beat the living daylights out of him and he’d be scared to do it again but these days, they don’t do that and look at how people have no respect for the law!!”

You could point out to Uncle Alf that it was illegal for police to “beat the living daylights” out of someone but it’ll just spoil Christmas… wait till Boxing Day!