© Roger M Tagg 2010-2011
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
This book is a very recent analysis of "serious" bullshit, showing how easy it is becoming (as Francis Wheen says) to fool most of the people most of the time. The author isn't so concerned with advertising, popular hype or person-to-person rhetoric, but in scams by governments, pressure groups and denialists - scams which sometimes cost hundreds (sometimes millions) of lives and livelihoods.
These highlights are arranged not by chapter, but 7 special 'lists' are displayed first and all the quotes (not separated by chapters) as List 8 afterwards.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| List 1 - Janis's | 102-3 | 1 - Illusions of invulnerability, leading to unjustified optimism and excessive risk taking - "she'll be right, because we are special" |
| 8 symptoms | 2 - Rationalization - explaining away any warnings that challenge the group's assumptions | |
| of Groupthink | 3 - Unquestioning belief in the group's morality - ignoring negative moral consequences of group decisions | |
| (Psychology | 4 - Stereotyping of those who oppose the group's views as weak, evil, impotent or stupid | |
| Today, Nov 1971) | 5 - Direct pressure being placed on any member who questions the group, implying disloyalty | |
| 6 - Self-censorship of ideas that stray from the apparent consensus | ||
| 7 - The illusion of unanimity among group members, with silence being viewed as agreement | ||
| 8 - Self-appointed "mindguards" within the group who screen out and suppress dissenting information | ||
| List 2 - Tactics | 210-5 | Fundamentalism: absolute, literal truth of certain beliefs and writings |
| for fooling most | Relativism: the fundamentalist view that one person's belief, culture, truth or morality is just as good as anyone else's | |
| of the people | Conspiracy theories: ignoring any inconvenient or contrary evidence, thinking that some group is conspiring to distort the truth | |
| most of the time | Pseudo-science: using logic, but also using distortion, omission, fabrication, obfuscation, fallacy, emotive rhetoric (and conspiracy theories) | |
| Pseudo-news: simple fraud or forgery, strong-armed by hired PR agencies or big advertisers, slanted by selection bias | ||
| Wishful thinking: succumbing to the need to believe in better prospects ahead | ||
| Over-idealization: naive faith in our groups' goodness in aims and actions | ||
| Demonizing perceived enemies | ||
| Moral exclusion of those demonized: we don't have to behave morally towards them | ||
| Groupthink: regarding the group's unanimity (RT: and its leaders' security) as more important than accuracy, truth or good judgment | ||
| (Denialism: building up an alternative story claiming that well-documented events didn't really happen - usually invoking a conspiracy theory) | ||
| (Hiding behind official secrecy, commercial in confidence, copyright, subpoena, threats of dismissal for disloyalty etc) | ||
| List 3 - Tests | 216 | The evidence is vague and generalized |
| for suspect | The evidence is uncorroborated by one or more reliable sources | |
| assertions | The assertion shows inconsistencies and/or incoherence | |
| Sources are not named, are unreliable, have vested interests, or have shaky qualifications | ||
| The evidence doesn't fully support the conclusions being proposed | ||
| The story looks as if it could have been fabricated | ||
| The argument hides behind technical or academic jargon | ||
| List 4 - Grade I scams | 25-9 | Nurse Nayirah - the fabricated story of atrocities in a Kuwait hospital, peddled by Hill & Knowlton to the US media, paid for by the Kuwaiti royal family to get the US public to support the Gulf War of 1990-1. |
| (thousands of deaths) | 31-41 | Cigarettes and Lung Cancer - the tobacco industry hired Hill & Knowlton to campaign against the scientific evidence; even some scientists were corrupted |
| 59-69 | The White Asbestos is Harmless campaign by Chistopher Booker, based on the word of one man with questionable scientific qualifications against many who had done continuing research. (RT: see later comment) | |
| 71-77 | Lysenkoism - pseudo agricultural science that fitted with the USSR's anti-West politics, leading to famines killing millions in USSR and China | |
| 83 | Stalin's purges, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Turkish genocide of Armenians, Bosnia, Rwanda | |
| 107-38 | South African AIDS denialism under President Thabo Mbeki: claimed pharmacy drugs were a Western conspiracy against the African, and that beetroot, garlic, olive oil, Virodene or just certain vitamins were better. This was partly supported by Peter Duesberg of U Cal Berkeley, who also claimed a reward for disproving the AIDS-HIV link offered by UK Magazine Continuum. Similar denialism also arose from some AIDS sufferers themselves | |
| 201-2 | Pol Pot's revolution in Cambodia | |
| (RT: could add sub-prime mortgages and general "out of control" de-regulated market opportunism, leading to the Global Financial Crisis starting in 2007 and still not finished) | ||
| List 5 - | 84, 90 | '9/11' Denialism consists mainly of conspiracy theories, e.g. those supported by David Shayler, who also claimed London's '7/7' tube bombings were carried out by the UK government. but later demonstrated that he had lost the plot. |
| Grade II scams | 93-5 | Bush, Blair and the dodgy dossier about Iraq WMDs - fabricated excuse for going to war |
| - major deceit | 99-100 | Challenger 1986 Space Launch disaster, Bay of Pigs fiasco: whistleblowers warned of problems, but their concerns did not get passed up the hierarchy |
| 114-5 | Spanish Inquisition, and RC church silencing of Galileo | |
| 147 | Alfred Wallace's anti-smallpox-vaccination campaign (ignored huge amounts of data) | |
| 153-6 | Enron, WorldCom - and a number of lesser but similar frauds | |
| 166 | Sale of indulgences by the mediaeval Rome-based church - "buy your way out of purgatory" | |
| 182-98 | US legitimizing torture of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan | |
| 202-3 | Thailand's war on drugs: sweeping powers led to indiscriminate killing of suspects and whole villages | |
| List 6 - | 3-5 | Cockney pig in a poke style auctions: "decide in haste", "play your luck", "have fun". |
| Grade III scams | 7-8 | Daily Mail 1930s support for Hitler and Mosley's Blackshirts |
| - just pathetic | 9 | Norman Mailer support for murderer/author Jack Abbott - after Abbott murdered again, Mailer admitted "false vanity" |
| 21-3 | The Hitler Diaries: Hugh Trevor-Roper was duped, the German journalist had a financial motive; T-R too had a stake in the UK's Sunday Times | |
| 24 | A Francophone Belgian newspaper announced Flemish secession - probably political mischief making | |
| 50-2 | Roger Scruton paid by Camel cigarettes to counter anti-tobacco reports | |
| 85 | Rainbow Warrior, RC church cover up of pederast priests, UK collusion with Northern Ireland paramilitaries | |
| 86-7 | Hmong secret war veterans (turned out to be true) | |
| 104 | Universities distorting exam results to meet management targets | |
| 140-5 | Paul Feyerabend's extreme cultural relativism | |
| 152-3 | The dot.com bubble, e.g. Boo.com - an online clothing web vendor (just an example of many) - but Amazon is still there! | |
| List 7 - | 10-12 | The Stanford Prison experiment: a third of the guards went sadistic |
| "Scamology" | 13-15 | The Milgram experiment: 60% overdid the electric shocks without question. It was done in the US, but was later repeated in Italy, Germany, South Africa and Australia |
| experiments | 97-99 | Space Cadets reality TV show - even the actors got caught up in the make-believe shuttle flight |
| List 8 - Quotes | 1 | "Our nation" is always #1 - politicians say this to get us to support them; advertisers to get you to buy. |
| 2a | The average person thinks they are "above average" - the Mohammed Ali effect ("I am the greatest") | |
| 2b | Confident people are actually more successful, and optimistic people live longer and have less illness | |
| 2c | Confidence and optimism are OK, as long as they don't clash with reality | |
| 6-7 | If we are #1, then others are dodgy; we are vulnerable to calls to "do them down", which leads to hubris and delusions of grandeur | |
| 15 | "From Khmer Rouge Cambodia to the Spanish Inquisition, humanity has a long and proud history of meekly engaging in depraved acts of inhumanity on the basis of ideas that, on closer examination, have turned out to be total gibberish." | |
| 17 | Sceptics "don't believe until they have evidence". Cynics "assume the worst of things and people". | |
| 17-18 | "It's all relative" opens the door to believing in anything and everything. But what basis do we have for valuing the testimony of an Auschwitz survivor no better than the assertions of a revisionist historian holocaust denier? (RT: surely, there are more survivors, and what is everyone's motivation anyhow?) | |
| 20 | Socrates and Plato rightly fought those Sophists who claimed "rhetoric is all you need" and "man is the measure of all things". | |
| 21 | Doubting Thomas (an early sceptic) got a bad rap from Christ, according to the Bible. | |
| 42 | The fallacy of "the truth is somewhere in the middle": it depends between what, and the two "extremes" could be chosen to suit the person making the argument | |
| 45-8 | Selection bias in news media: editors, proprietors and advertisers arrange to leave out the news that doesn't support their line | |
| 48-9 | Two journos were fired for refusing to falsify news. Courts accepted publishers' lawyers' argument that this wasn't technically illegal | |
| 50-2 | Several examples of journos being paid to slant news - probably inevitable, whether media are in private or government hands | |
| 52-8 | To get real news, we can use the web, get different views, but hope to find at least one corroborating mainstream source | |
| 65 | George W Bush: "I have to keep repeating the key message to catapult the propaganda". | |
| 66 | "No measurable risk to health" is not the same as "no significant risk to health". Measurement may just be difficult. | |
| 67 | Non-denial denial examples: Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, John Major "no plans to increase VAT", UK government "no passing of BSE to humans" (but it's just renamed CJD) | |
| 68 | "In the absence of expert knowledge of our own, it is easy to allow our political leanings (RT: and our own agenda) to determine who we take seriously and who we ignore." | |
| 76 | "Unless a society allows room for scepticism ... it can leave itself vulnerable to fraud and corruption, with catastrophic effects (e.g. Lysenkoism) | |
| 84 | The alternative explanations offered by denialists often seem ridiculous | |
| 85 | We need to get better at distinguishing imaginary conspiracy theories from ones that turn out to be real | |
| 95 | WMDs: "we could have done with a hefty dose of scepticism" (UK's head of MI6) | |
| 99 | "How easy it can be to be sucked in by a dominant idea that you know to be false, if for some reason you are prevented from standing up and challenging it." | |
| 101 | Groupthink: desire for unanimity overrides ability to make rational decisions (see list 1 above) | |
| 105 | "This comes from the top", "It's for the good of the organization", "No-one will ever find out", "Everyone is doing it", "This is the way we have always done it" are all slogans of Groupthink. | |
| 121 | AIDS denial might actually be the best policy for those living with it, if it brings optimism. | |
| 134 | AIDS "could be treated with beetroot, garlic and olive oil" (South African Health Minister, 2003) | |
| 140 | The belief that a contradiction can't be true and false at the same time seems like common sense - but it's hard to say why | |
| 146 | "There are few scientists whose last works are their greatest" (RT: maybe they try too hard to outdo themselves) | |
| 149 | If a scientific assertion isn't published in a peer-reviewed journal, it's probably questionable (RT: even if it is published, it may still be dodgy) | |
| 152 | "Throw the rule book out of the window" - a slogan of "new paradigm" (a great piece of bullshit) | |
| 156 | "The less we understand, the more we want to buy in". People "want to believe". | |
| 158 | "Claiming something is a "new paradigm" is a political act; opponents are then ridiculed as obsolete, doomed | |
| 163 | "The vacuum left by the decline of organized religion has been filled, not by atheism, but by 'mysticism lite'" | |
| 165 | Fundamentalism, literal truth etc are more common in the monotheistic religions. In the east, a wide spectrum of beliefs and practices is tolerated | |
| 169 | Richard Dawkins: "There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (including God) has a responsibility to give your life meaning" | |
| 170 | You don't have to be religious to be a fundamentalist | |
| 171 | Religion as "regulated wishful thinking" | |
| 172 | The evidence from psychology is that most of us rely on one fantasy or another to remain happy | |
| 174 | We don't fret about the fact that all the molecules in our bodies get replaced within 7 years - we assume that identity persists | |
| 175 | If all is going well, we can face Dawkins' "strong keen wind of understanding", but otherwise, we take on a set of beliefs that will cheer us up | |
| 176 | "Harmless delusion" is OK until it gets dogmatized and politicized | |
| 179 | "Every attempt to reshape human nature through massive social engineering has had disastrous results." | |
| 181a | Far from (RT: or, as well as) being uniquely enlightened, Western culture is uniquely cruel, violent and inhumane (RT: neither extreme is true) | |
| 181b | It's nice to think we could nurture ourselves out of this disorder, but in practice each one of us is a Jekyll and Hyde | |
| 182 | Denying the above and thinking that outsiders are inherently evil people, kills our capacity for compassion | |
| 187 | Schlesinger's diagnosis of the causes of US torture culture: Groupthink, dehumanization, "enemy image" and moral exclusion | |
| 195 | "All forms of 'ends and means morality' seem to rely on the assumption that it is possible to know in advance what the precise consequences of our actions is going to be" | |
| 200 | George Orwell: "Much of political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". Examples Wilson quotes are: 'collateral damage', 'ethnic cleansing', 'war on terror', 'crimes against the revolution' and claiming that our harsh actions are working. | |
| 203 | Torture-tainted evidence is notoriously unreliable | |
| 206 | It seems inevitable that the more broad, sweeping powers we give to our public officials, the more mistakes and abuses will creep in | |
| 208 | While politics attracts more than its fair share of egoists and megalomaniacs, most cases of corruption stem from failings that we all share. It's just that the politicians can do so much more damage. | |
| 209 | Human knowledge is like South Bermondsey station on London's rail lines - it looks solid enough when one is on the platform there, but looks very flimsy from afar | |
| 215 | Myth and misconception are normal features of everyday life | |
| 219 | "The allegation of an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory (including a conspiracy of silence) - or relativist socio-babble - to explain the failure of a scientific proposal at the peer review stage - is a giveaway sign of pseudo-science" | |
| 220 | Scaremongering and the politics of fear (RT: good for the military-industrial and medical-industrial complexes). "Anxiety sells newspapers" | |
| 221 | One of the best antidotes to fear is laughter. Mocking the fear-mongering political class helps make them more accountable, (RT: e.g. Private Eye etc) | |
| 223a | The ballot box - as the public's last resort - isn't much consolation; we don't get much real choice (RT: 2010 UK election placard: "Sod the lot of them") | |
| 223b | "Self-regulation" of politicians (RT: also police, health authorities, finance industry etc) is just another empty euphemism (for doing virtually nothing) |
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 17th January 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .