How facts backfire - The Boston Globe

For all those desperate that their efforts at trying to inform the misinformed are not having any effect, a real kick in the balls:

How facts backfire - The Boston Globe


Update 07 August 2010:

These are some comments sent to me by Manuel Garcia, Jr., former physicist at Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laborator:

"Why we suffer, politically: How facts backfire - The Boston Globe

>From earlier MG writing:

"The social programming language of capitalist authoritarianism seeks to activate personal greed, intellectual insecurity and visceral racism as motivators of guided popular political reaction. The Pavlovian logic to this scheme of social manipulation is that all human beings are possessive, gullible and fearful." (from:'Decoding the Language of Social Control, Democracy is Communism and Must be Destroyed ...', 12 March 2010)

"The brain is a food-seeking antenna at the service of the stomach, the controlling organ of the body. To understand this is to be free of the delusion that we humans are rational beings who observe to gather data for analysis, analyze to formulate plans and arrive at decisions, and then employ our physical selves and our exosomatic mechanisms to enact these plans and decisions. Instead, we decide emotionally and largely unconsciously, generally on the basis of fear and prejudice, and we use our brains to fabricate post-facto rationalizations for our biases and predetermined actions. Some may feel this characterization of human motivation is unjustly insulting to human dignity, and severely dismissive of human intellect. I concede that it will not be universally applicable, but I think it sufficiently representative to help explain many social trends and popular attitudes." (from: 'On Voting, A Ritual of Justifying Biases',, 8 August 2008)

"Minds that remain largely unused because of ignorance, which is the child of laziness, will be found by mass media ("propaganda," in the old days), filled with easily swallowed psychic worms that are coated with syrupy sweet sex, glistening cherry-red violence, desire-fulfillment fantasy, voyeurism, and lowest-common-denominator semi-pornographic mass culture. Once embedded, the underlying psychic messages re-program the thought patterns of the consuming individual for ease of remote control by the social programming elite. If you don't think, someone will do it for you, but not for your benefit." (from 'The Imprisoned American Mind', 2 August 2004)

The psychological hurdle blocking human progress (the next challenge to human evolution?, the determining test of human survival?):
"Better that the world should end than my ideas should change."


All three articles are well worth the read...
Thanks Manuel!