The time of the sexy liar is nigh
Cross-published (in Swedish) at Talarforum.
Sex feels good! Sex feels pleasant. According to Richard Layard's Happiness: Lessons from a New Science,
sex is the one activity that most contributes to our sense of wellbeing (although we paradoxically spend the least time doing it compared to other activities). Isn't it remarkable that sex feels good and makes us happy? Imagine if sex was painful and that just thinking about it made us chronically depressed. It's a safe assumption that fewer people would have sex and the human species would slowly die out. Procreation hinges on the fact that sex feels good and makes us happy - nature takes care of the rest.
This intro isn't just a cheap trick to make you read the rest of the blog post. Sex and procreation is a parallel to how information spreads in society. Let me show you how. Can you recite Pi to six hundred decimals or even five? Most people can't. Why? Because Pi is just so damn boring to talk about so most people don't. What we do talk about, however, is Britney's latest rehab stint or Bradgelina's latest endeavors. Or we watch Youtube clips with furry little baby bunnies, sneezing panda's or laughing babies. In other words, we prefer lies, gossip and trivialities to the inaccessible, boring or hard-to-grasp. Sexy lies are more attractive than boring or inconvenient truths. This blog is about what kinds of sexy lies we see in society, why they appear and what we can do about them.
Simplifications
How many speeches haven't we seen or heard about India or China in the past year? All with the same predictable line of argumentation that goes something like this: China and India are two big countries and because they're big, they'll take over everything from Refrigerator manufacturing and The Nobel Prize. With marketing-like slogans ("The World is flat", anyone?), the audience is expected to tremble, work harder, think creatively and prepare for the imminent Chinese invasion. These kinds of peptalks use gross simplification as an efficient means to make themselves heard. In reality, China and India are two big countries that are currently enjoying high, if imbalanced, growth from a low base. But both countries lack a number of conditions that made Europe rich a century or so ago; independent institutions, a judicial system free from political involvement, a strong focus on a few sectors that were allowed to thrive, and so on. But this kind of critical analysis and in-depth descriptions of what actually makes an economy thrive aren't very efficient peptalk-ingredients. That China has 1,3 billion people willing to work for a tenth of your wages and in less than three years have built twenty seven skyscrapers in Shanghai, on the other hand, are terrific features of a funky keynote speech.
FeelGood
My grandfather, Harry Lindqvist, wrote a number of books about positive thinking with titles like - You're twice as good as you think. I have often thought about how hollow yet efficient a statement like "You're twice as good as you think" is. Hollow because it generalizes grossly - from a scientific standpoint, peoples' self-image is usually somewhat positively correlated to their achievements - and efficient because it promises effortless improvement; you can improve without doing anything at all. This kind of self-help therapy is high currency. It's nothing new. My grandfather's books are from the 1950's and only format differentiates the message from the 21st century's "You are what you eat"-programs and Oprah-like "I like you just the way you are". The genre is signified by quasi-scientific assumptions ("Drink a lot of water" or "People with a vision can accomplish more") mixed with tips so easy that even the laziest reader can do them ("Write down a positive thought every day" or "Eat more fruit"). All is characterized by a strong sense of feelgood; to live should be easy, comfortable, simple and feel good. Imagine if these kinds of self-help books started with four chapters containing complex biochemistry and the followed by a chronological walkthrough of all grave sacrifices and dogmatic stubbornness that often distinguish what we call success. The title "You probably don't have what it takes to make it" wouldn't attract many readers and both book sales and seminar attendance would drop and disappear quickly.
Scare tactics
The climate crisis and peculiarity of the weather has filled newspapers, magazines and newscasts throughout 2007-2008. Meteorologists have become celebrities. Ex-politicians have been given a second chance. There may indeed be a number of climate issues worth taking seriously but they are buried underneath doomsday scenarios about Tsunamis swallowing Europe, deserts in Denmark, Typhoons in Stockholm, and many more. When the scientific establishment was the primary driving force behind the climate crisis, the conclusions were more moderate and usually more correct but few people cared. We needed movies, powerpoint slides and articles with worst case scenarios to make anyone react. Opportunistic politicians connected the climate to agricultural protectionism and crisis management planning to make us "understand". The paradox is that the images and scenarios that have been drawn up often lie far from the scientific discourse about the earth's climate. But people love being scared and love scaring others and images of drowning polar bears are more efficient monsters than spreadsheets and statistics.
Don't shoot the messenger
A couple of years ago, Harvard Business Review wrote that people were more inclined to work with a friendly second-rater than with a brilliant asshole. Information is impossible to separate from the messenger. Who is saying something is as important as what they're saying. The slightly nerdy and boring scientist has few listeners but when the bald, leather-clad guru enters the stage, the audience is listening. Who cares if what he's saying is true when it sounds true?
What can we do?
The human brain loves stories and often can't resist telling them ("See those seven stars - they are really seven sisters who..."). In our urge to tell stories, it's sometimes easy to leave the truth behind. The inconvenient and boring is defeated by the simplistic and audience-friendly. Nick Davies, in his book Flat Earth News, has coined the expression "churnalism" - the kind of journalis that is only regurgitated without anyone checking facts. He claims that as little as 12% of all news are fact-checked. In other words, we should only trust about 12% of what we see, read and hear. James Surowiecki, author of The
Wisdom of Crowds, has highlighted the risks of the connected, blogging society we live in today by drawing a parallel to an ant colony. If an ant gets lost, he starts to follow the ant ahead with the impression that he should know the way back to the anthill. And so on. There have been kilometer-wide ant circles found in forests where ants have followed the ant ahead when in reality everyone was lost and the ant circle ultimately died of starvation. If we don't want to starve in today's information inferno of bloggers, media, speakers and so-called "experts", we should probably use the Roman "Cui Bono?" - who gains form this information? Who has something to gain from me passing it on?
