When we affirm each other’s 'right' to believe things—even things that fly in the face of evidence—we essentially decouple critical thinking and belief revision. This damages the norm that keeps minds tethered to reality. A Canadian research team recently made an important discovery: when people lose the 'meta-belief' that beliefs should change in response to evidence, they become more susceptible to conspiracy theories, paranormal beliefs, science denial and extremism—mind viruses, if you will. This is a critical finding. I like to put it more simply: the idea that beliefs should yield to evidence is the linchpin of the mind’s immune system: remove it—or even chip away at it—and an Internet-connected mind will eventually be overrun by mind parasites. When this happens to enough minds, all hell breaks loose.
—Andy Norman
Yet more from Mencken (Mencken)
No one who has given any study to the development and propagation of political doctrine in the United States can have failed to notice how the belief in issues among politicians tends to run in exact ratio to the popularity of those issues. Let the populace begin suddenly to swallow a new panacea or to take fright at a new bugaboo, and almost instantly nine-tenths of the masterminds of politics begin to believe that the panacea is a sure-cure for all the malaises of the Republic, and the bugaboo an immediate and unbearable menace to all law, order and domestic tranquility.
H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
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