Reassuring lies and inconvenient truths

Told by Massimo Polidoro in his latest book.

We live in a society in which irrationality and fake news are rampant. In which the implausible, the improbable, the blatantly false have taken over. Are we falling into a world where truth is just one viewpoint among many? What are the neurological, psychological and social mechanisms behind these phenomena?

Massimo Polidoro, former Focus journalist and now our contributor, explains this in his latest book, The world upside down (Piemme). We asked him for a short presentation for Focus readers and permission to publish the preface. Enjoy watching... and good reading.https://www.youtube.com/embed/dfVxvaXfCdM

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Vaccines? They cause autism. Aircraft contrails? Climate-altering poison. The 9/11 attacks? A hoax by the Americans. The moon? We never went there. The Earth? It's flat.

What until yesterday was considered by all to be true and established is suddenly called into question, while in many areas of life facts are increasingly losing their value in favour of irrational beliefs, prejudices and conspiracy theories. Are we falling into a world where everything is upside down and truth is just one viewpoint among many? We have entered a phase where fabrications, now dubbed 'fake news', are the order of the day. False news spread to speculate on the needs and fears of the weakest, to attack one's political opponents, to feed one's own prejudices or to discredit those who are bearers of inconvenient truths make it increasingly difficult to distinguish the true from the false. Lies, hoaxes and propaganda are certainly nothing new, but today, thanks to the web, fake news tends to spread globally as never before, transcending traditional local borders and reaching ever wider strata of the population.The cover of Massimo Polidoro's latest issue, available both on Mondadori Books either on Amazon. |

This spread, and this is an important novelty compared to the past, is particularly rapid, which makes it more complex to stop it by means of a denial, which in any case arrives late and thus fails to counteract the false news with full effectiveness. But what is the real effect of this rampant disinformation? And is it really only the fault of the web and social media? Another important element to consider is the way our mind works, which under certain conditions inevitably contributes to making certain claims more credible. The search for confirmation of our beliefs, the need for reassurance and other cognitive errors tend to make us particularly susceptible to anything that is consistent with our way of thinking, even if it goes against all evidence.

Those who deny global warming, therefore, do not dispute the scientific evidence that proves it, but perhaps reject it because they fear possible tighter regulations on trade, industry and their lifestyle. Those who believe in creationism do not dispute evolution because of new scientific evidence, but probably do so because they feel their religious beliefs are being challenged.

However, the race towards irrational beliefs occupies more and more space in public discussions. There are, for example, those who think that the spread of fake news may have altered important electoral balances, such as those that led the United States to elect Donald Trump president or Great Britain to vote in favour of Brexit.

Terrorists, murderers and madmen justify attacks and massacres by invoking absurd conspiracy theories, fuelled by unscrupulous peddlers of non-existent threats. As we shall see, they are the same ones who, with their rantings, induce suggestible people to harass and even attack the families of the victims of such attacks in order to prove that these are just fabrications and that no one has actually died. Why? Because of the fear that some new law will reduce the possibility for citizens to own and use weapons.

Attacks on science are also multiplying, to the point where established facts are questioned such as the danger posed by global warming, a phenomenon on which there is a 97% consensus of scientific climate studies and no doubt that it is already causing devastating effects on our planet. Or there is the rejection of vaccines by those who are convinced, encouraged by a study that has been shown to be a fraud, that they are linked to the onset of autism: a rejection that in 2015 caused vaccination coverage in Italy to plummet to 85%, resulting in a measles epidemic that caused 5,000 cases and 4 deaths.

We see scientists being charged in court for not 'predicting earthquakes' (something that is impossible to do for the time being) or being blamed for creating epidemics for profit. Or again, we see researchers discredited by those with an interest in hiding discoveries considered deleterious to their own business and others forced to circulate with escorts because of death threats generated by falsehoods about them.

And yet, more and more people are approaching theories that until recently seemed confined to outlandish minorities: from those who believe that the earth is flat to those who think that cancer is the result of 'wrong thinking', from those who claim that mankind is the product of genetic experiments by extraterrestrial civilisations to those who are convinced that they can feed only on light, from those who imagine that the planet is ruled by a race of 'shape-shifting' extraterrestrial lizards to those who believe that all evil on Earth is the work of the Jewish billionaire George Soros, from those who are sure that extraterrestrials will come to save us to those who believe that the world we live in is just a fiction as in the film The Matrix.

Myths, beliefs, illusions, paranoia, lies for which there is not the slightest shred of evidence, but to which many cling in search of answers that not only science but even spirituality no longer seems able to offer.

Hence, in many areas, starting with politics, we prefer to reject facts that go against what we want to believe, and we accept obvious falsehoods, so as not to risk questioning our value system. We prefer reassuring lies and reject inconvenient truths. But why does this happen?

The journey we are about to embark on in the pages that follow will take us a little at a time down the rabbit hole, the entrance through which Alice passes in order to enter 'Wonderland', to plunge us deeper and deeper into the pit of the verisimilar, the improbable and the blatantly false, until we discover a world that seems to be turned upside down. We will make this journey armed with two indispensable tools: the first is the 'light of reason', the flame of rationality to be kept burning in the darkness generated by prejudice, ignorance, superstition and hatred, and the second is Occam's razor. Named after the 15th-century Franciscan monk William of Ockham, this principle states that when there are alternative explanations for the same event or phenomenon, it is best to start with the simplest, eliminating all hypotheses that are not strictly necessary, and then eventually refine it gradually, because in this way one can build knowledge based on well-founded ideas and not on speculation. Or, more briefly, it can be said that 'all factors being equal, the simplest explanation is preferred'.

It is only by keeping one's feet firmly on the ground and carefully verifying statements, to assess how close they come to the facts they describe, that one can hope to keep reason awake, preventing, as the Spanish painter Francisco Goya warned, its sleep from generating monsters.

We will thus try to understand why we allow ourselves to be seduced by unbelievable but captivating stories and why we are enchanted by barkers, charlatans and, in general, by anyone who promises simple explanations and solutions for extremely complex facts and problems. Some have called ours the age of post-truth, although as we shall see, post-truth was already alive and well two thousand years ago. Our journey may not give us definitive answers, but we will still try to find some fixed points to understand what is happening in the world today, whether madness really reigns supreme and what, however, leads so many intelligent people to believe the unbelievable.

At the end of our journey, we will look at a series of practical suggestions to try to recognise and unmask falsehoods, deceptions and hoaxes of all kinds, learning to reason like scientists but, above all, developing one's critical sense, a fundamental tool capable of providing perhaps the only true antidote to the spread of ignorance and prejudice.

The lawyer Padelli was present during the dissemination of the book.