A plague of fallacies has devoured the internet

I open Instagram stories and am instantly bombarded with snake-oil salespeople hawking life-changing tonics, none of which come in a bottle. I’m told my life is unfulfilled, and I believe it, as life inevitably is, and they’ve the solitary answer. And so, they arrive, following earlier errant clicks, the desire lines of my own self-betrayals. One pitch tells me I need to manifest my desires. Another to embrace moderation. A third that I need to protect my child from mobile phones. Another that I should confront my toxic masculinity. Magnesium will save me. Masturbation will steal my life-force. Today’s episode is brought to you by the letter “M”. Each is a rabbit hole of TED talks “Smart Thinking” replicants, Faustian apps and Kafkaesque subscriptions, which will relieve me of my time and debit card details. 

Every good liar knows the best lies are wrapped around a nugget of truth. If we combined and enacted all the advice of social media, then perhaps physical excellence, sound mental health, enlightenment, happiness, even, might well await. Yet professional liars know the greatest lure is the unattainable and immeasurable. It’s these seductive delusions, cascading on the infinite scroll of social media, that have collapsed the internet. How did this happen?

The answer lies in the constants of the medieval village, which our global village now mimics. Festivities are periodic. Tyrants come and go. The function of the town square is to sell, regardless. Post-Reformation, the market is all. The new faith. There are many fallacies in terms of sales (cost bias, appeal to closure, sales puff, Dunning–Kruger effect etc). These might be seen as positive, at least for the hucksters, but the real profit and damage is to be made in the shadow-side. Consider what constitutes the medieval village and our own version of it.

We still have the feudal lords — CEOs, politicians etc — along with the town criers and priests of the chattering class, in thrall to the establishment while feigning to critique it. Crucially, ambitions and dreams are not the only exploited fare. All our natural fears, neurosis, envy and malice, exacerbated by living in a time when everything feels like it’s in (mis)managed decline, can be directed not to their source or solution but to the promise of temporary catharsis. This is exacted upon whoever happens to be languishing in the stocks of the global village square at any given moment, for anything from a semantic to a sexual infraction. Whatever justice, retribution or cleansing this does or does not bring, it changes nothing in the larger scheme of things. It is designed to change nothing, other than venting very real pressures through successive social media moral panics and individualised punishments.

How could we be so sophisticated and yet so susceptible? Leon Trotsky wrote of Germany mutating into the Third Reich: “Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the 20th century the 13th.” I know this quote not directly but from its inclusion in one of the great overlooked prophetic texts of our time — Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (1995).

The book is a jeremiad for science and against ignorance. According to Sagan, rigorous enquiry is the best way to begin to understand existence and gain a foothold in our own destiny. Science, he argues, is too important to be left to scientists and that a population which abandons it will be doomed. Though he’s most scathing towards monetised pseudoscience and organised religion (“We can pray over the cholera victim, or we can give her 500 milligrams of tetracycline every 12 hours”), he also warns that science is never absolutely certain or settled, and to suggest so is unscientific. It’s not a series of sacred precepts but rather a constantly developing and self-critical way of seeing the world. Even Isaac Newton, sacrosanct for centuries, was proved inaccurate by Albert Einstein.