A friend of mine asked me this. He was referring how people we know are smart tend to fall for the same manipulations and be convinced to endorse things they know are flawed. It proved to be an interesting question and topic and was something that inspired me to write a post. In this case the question was inspired by the elections and how easy it is to convince people to pick one of the two parties and manipulate people with the lesser of two evils, or throwing your vote away ploys. I am not going to focus on the elections. I found the question itself very inspiring.

I had sent him a news article that spoke of how Government Workers now outnumber Manufacturing Workers by a huge amount. It had some interesting graphs like this one.

Friend: Those graphs are interesting. Government, growing in power every day.

Me: Yep exactly the type of jobs that don't need to be growing.

Friend: How is it... that smart people fall into this? I mean, I know some really smart people. Smarter than myself, and yet... they fall for the lure of government promises and the like. I mean, are you and I just totally wrong / that far off?

Me: Propaganda and psychology work on even the smartest of people.

Friend: Are we just over simplifying the problems of the world?

Smart is Subjective

We tend to refer to people as smart by them displaying certain skills which we categorize as being smart. It often involves when they do something that we cannot do or that we know is difficult to do. It is subjectively based around what us as an observer consider difficult and impressive. Creative people we don't tend to call them smart for making a masterful piece of music, or amazing work of art. We tend to say those people are talented, or skilled. There is a term that can overlap at times for both the creative, and the "smart". That term is genius. We will use that term to describe those who seem to be amazing at particular skills. It should be noted that intelligent will sometimes be used instead of the word smart, yet for purposes of this article those should be considered interchangeable.

Being skilled at certain skills that make people decide you are SMART does not mean you are skilled at other skills. You can be genius level in a number of things and a complete moron in others.

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Being skilled at things such as physics, psychology, mathematics, or anything else does not mean you are skilled at everything, and immune to the impacts of psychological forces such as propaganda and subliminal messaging.

In some cases you may be more vulnerable if you consider yourself smart.

Logic and Critical Thinking

We often use the terms "that is not logical", and say things such as "you need to use reason," or that is "irrational". Yet in reality unless you go out of your way to learn it they BARELY teach anything about logic and critical thinking in modern schooling. I am not speaking of the logic of math in terms of equals, not equal, less than, greater than, not, exclusive or, and the word AND. Those things are taught in school and some people that consider themselves logical may be very well versed in those terms. I happen to be such a person. I started programming A LOT in 1982 when I was 12 years old. Those logical operators are required to accomplish pretty much anything with computer programming. In terms of using those logical operators I am skilled. Many people that consider themselves versed in logic may consider those things the reason they view themselves that way as well.

Yet that barely scratches the surface. It also does not protect you from propaganda, manipulation, and some of the pitfalls of our own mind and thinking. To learn that you need to stumble upon it, or intentionally seek out learning on it.

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I was in my third year of college before I encountered anything of this nature. A Public Speaking and Critical Thinking class was required. There was one elderly professor everyone recommended avoiding because they said his class was incredibly difficult and some people struggled to complete their degrees due to his class. Most people would try to get other professors. I took that difficult professor. It truly was a challenging class and it ended up being one of the most valuable classes in my entire college experience due to that instruction and that instructor. That course was what college should be and goes beyond simply showing I paid money and put in time. It was DIFFICULT and CHALLENGING.

As you gave any speech in that class the instructor would outline your speech on a chalkboard. Then at the end he would proceed to logically eviscerate your speech. It was in this class I learned about Glittering Generalities, the fallacies with absolutes, and many other things. Yet, I was just dipping my toes into unfamiliar waters. This information had never before been taught to me.

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After that class some of the logical fallacies I learned about would start to send up alarm bells when I heard people using them. It began to be alarming how often I'd see them used. The nightly news was full of them, and it was not nearly as bad back then as it is now.

I would only later learn what I believe is one of the most common logical fallacies used by us, and against us. Yes, we use logical fallacies on other people as well. The one that I see abused on a frequent basis is the Appeal to Authority fallacy.

Simply put, because person A says B is true we believe B must be true. This is based off of the idea that person A has authority and knows what they are talking about. It often starts with "Experts agree...", "Scientists say...", "The consensus is...", "The government reports...", etc. These are all logical fallacies. Person A stating a thing true does not meet the burden of proof. It may be highly probable that it is true, yet that is the difference between an absolute and a probability. An absolute leaves no room for someone to be wrong. Yet, we find that we are wrong more often than we'd like to admit.

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To a certain degree we understand probabilities as we still spend money on lottery tickets, we still gamble, etc. The odds (aka probabilities) are against us winning, but we still instinctively know there is a chance. We understand this concept when we think of these things. For some reason we do not grasp this simple concept when it is applied to things we believe are true about the world and find to be uncomfortable to consider as being false. This ties into a psychological term known as cognitive dissonance[Youtube video showing the concept]. We will blindly defend our "truth" and ignore to the best of our ability any information that indicates that it is in fact not true. The smarter a person believes themselves to be then it can become even more likely they will have this issue.

Our Arrogance

As we believe ourselves to be right and others wrong we can become quite arrogant and prideful. This makes us often far more rigid in our own beliefs. If we encounter information that goes against a belief we may attack it outright, ignore it, and even belittle the source if we believe the source to be inferior in knowledge to ourselves. This is irrational. It is not using logic or critical thinking.

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This leaves these types of people perhaps more vulnerable to manipulation over a long term. If you can convince this population of a concept. They will become some of your best tools for spreading the new idea. Those that view them as smart will fall for the appeal to authority fallacy when these people speak, write, etc. They will accept it as truth because these people "know more than they do" and their pride (arrogance) convinces some that they indeed are an authority. They therefore do not question what they are told. It must be true because the smart people BELIEVE it is true.

People that are "smart" are usually good at some very specific things. These will often be things that most of the other population finds challenging. Guess what? An Idiot Savant can do amazing things with their minds. Often these things are well beyond what even "smart" or "genius" people can do. Yet, outside of that skill they are challenged in most aspects of life. Smart is a subjective term, and appeal to the idea of smart is used to silence people and keep them from asking questions, learning on their own, etc. If you do not consider yourself smart, I assure you that you know things I don't. Put any two people side by side and each of them WILL have knowledge about something that the other does not.

False nature of perfection

For me the concept of perfection is like infinity. I do not believe it is attainable, yet it is always a goal to strive towards. Basically, I operate from the idea we can always improve ourselves.

So we have the statements such as "practice makes perfect" which in reality it does not. It simply moves us further along the direction towards perfection.

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I told my friend I see three areas (though there are likely more) where we can monitor OURSELVES and become less susceptible to manipulation. This includes us manipulating ourselves and convincing ourselves of false ideas.

First you have to be willing to be wrong. Many people will say they are willing to be wrong. Yet, in practice their actions and how resistant to any idea they consider originating from a source "beneath them" would indicate otherwise. We all have issues here, myself included. I just try to practice noticing when I am resisting this way and stop it. With practice, I get better. I have begun to approach this as not being WILLING TO BE WRONG. I instead approach it as I am LIKELY to be wrong. Yet, it is important to note that if a concept has many parts you can be WRONG about part of something and RIGHT about other parts. You do not need to always throw the entire concept away because part of it is wrong. You simply need to adapt and replace what was WRONG with your new information. In some cases the entire thing may be wrong depending upon how critical the part was.

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Second you need to not believe anything simply because X Y Z said, or wrote it. You can consider it probable, but you should still use your own mind, consider probabilities, and if need be research it yourself. That does not mean you should not believe it. In some cases doing such could be dangerous to your life. You must simply keep in mind it may not be accurate and try to determine probabilities for yourself. You are likely to end up wrong about something (see the first step above).

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Third you need to only care about finding the truth. This should mean seeking the truth even when that truth is extremely uncomfortable. Truth does not change because you are uncomfortable. The truth will change based upon information. If information is concealed from you then your understanding of the truth will be shaped by the remaining information. Beware, if the information is intentionally being withheld then it can shape the truth in your mind to be based around something that is false simply by omission of critical information that would have shown you the truth. Consider this third section here in terms of censorship, banning, and freedom of speech.

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None of us can be perfect at these things. The battle for these three things happens within each of us. It is not something simply taught. You must work/practice at it yourself. You will fail often. With practice you hopefully will fail less, and recover more rapidly when you notice such failures.

Prussian Education System

The Prussian Education System is particularly interesting. It is the model that most of the modern education system is built upon. It is not the only form of education. It proved particularly effective at conditioning people. It was found it also was effective at instilling the ideas of the government and obedience to the government. In other words, it was really good at making us susceptible to Appeals to Authority which is a logical fallacy. This system is where the term "school" comes from. I am not stating this system is all bad. There are many good aspects. In the incarnation it is during this day and age it does not really focus on making you rational people who understand logic and critical thinking. Learning too many of those things makes it far to easy for you to call "bullshit" when you hear someone make a logical fallacy no matter how SMART they seem to be. (8 minute video - The Origins of the American Public Education System: Horace Mann & the Prussian Model of Obedience)

Highly recommend watching the above video - 8 minutes - but worth it.

Door to a Future

So we have a lot of "smart" people falling continually for the same manipulation ploys. We have the world in turmoil and the governments are all very corrupt. What is the solution? For me the solution ultimately is Anarchy. I do not mean the term that has been hijacked to mean chaos, violence, and disorder. I mean what it really means. NO RULERS. If you follow the non-aggression principle you should be able to do what you want as long as you are not harming another person. You should not be able to force other people to live a certain way, and they should not be able to force you. Having rulers and government is ultimately about forcing certain activities. It is hidden behind the screen of making you believe that ONE person forcing others is bad, but if A LOT of people want to force people then that is okay (aka Democracy). I do not agree with this.

However, I know if there was no government and rulership tomorrow or anytime soon then we would have chaos. This is not because Anarchism is flawed. It is because people have not learned how to be responsible for themselves and their actions. They have not learned how the Non-Aggression Principle works and how to incorporate it into their lives. They have not learned how they can do things without the government there. They panic. Panic leads to actions that are often bad.

Source: giphy.com

The answer to this and most future problems is education. We teach reading, math, and history (usually edited by whichever nation we are in, and whomever is in power there) to our children. I am a firm believer we should be teaching critical thinking, logic, logical fallacies, etc at the same early age right along with those things. This would make our population far less vulnerable to manipulation, and more rational. This would not work very well in favor of any form of governance. Most things are very flawed and begin to fall apart when truly scrutinized. It is only appeal to authority that allows them to exist unchallenged in the minds of the people.

Conclusion

In conclusion, SMART, INTELLIGENT, GENIUS, etc are very subjective terms. Yet statements made from such people should be viewed in terms of probabilities rather than as absolutes. We should still be willing to question, challenge, and learn. Much of this battle is fought within ourselves. In waging such wars we should gird ourselves in an ever increasing familiarity with critical thinking and logic. Unless you've taken specific courses odds are you were barely taught anything about it within the education system. Check some of these out and start a journey if you have interest. If you encounter things you already know then that is great. Yet keep looking as there is no perfection, there is only the journey towards perfection.

Logical Fallacy Flashcards - I revisit sites like this frequently as I have still not internalized some of these. I simply try to get better at recognizing them when I encounter them.
Cognitive Dissonance

(That one is made by our steemit user @corbettreport)

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