Sticky Belief Traps

In seeing what you are willing to believe, bad agents acquire the opportunity to know how easy it would be to get you to comply with their aims. For example, if they can get you to believe that a man is really a woman, or that there is an impending climate catastrophe, or that women are paid unfairly compared to men, then it sends out information signals that you are able to comply without being much of a friend of rigorous scrutiny. These information signals reveal to bad agents those who might be more easily influenced to be part of their in-group, and those who are likely to question them more rigorously, and reject their claims after a deeper analysis.

But there are also different types of uncritical belief that depend on external factors, which means in some cases if an individual is likely to fall for x, they are highly likely to fall for y, yet unlikely to fall for z – where x, y and z are things that people believe relatively unquestioningly. For example, if you are willing to accept that a male can become a female on the basis of subjective preference, you are probably also more likely to believe that there is a climate crisis, and that women are paid unfairly compared to men. If you believe that capitalism is a net force for ill, and that the rich are getting most of the spoils at the expense of the poor, then you are much more likely to stand in a pro-Palestine march than a pro-Israel march.

On the other hand, if you’re a young earth creationist, you’re more likely to side with Israel, but less likely to believe that a man can become a woman. Because young earth creationism is a conservative error, young earth creationists are also less likely, on average, to subscribe to climate alarmism, but more likely to believe that homosexual practice is sinful. This is because the information signals that exhibit what you are likely to comply with are also influenced by external factors, like whether you’re a liberal or a conservative, religious or not religious, educated or uneducated, a working taxpayer or not a working taxpayer, young or old, that sort of thing.

Of course, while this observation is about adults, and how their susceptibility to certain beliefs provides information signals that can be exploited by manipulative agents to determine how easily they might conform to certain ideological agendas – the other part of the disturbing picture is that many of the schools, universities and the majority of the media are already trying to get children under their thrall from as young an age as possible, with their parents often fully complicit in the cultural conditioning, as they’ve been through similar indoctrination processes or lack of critical engagement themselves.