4.1. The hope of the astrophysicist

On September 25th 2011, at France Inter, I was invited to discuss, with a renowned astrophysicist, the relationship between science and belief. My interlocutor was André Brahic, a researcher who discovered the Neptune rings, and was a member of the scientific teams in the Cassini and Voyager missions. A specialist of our solar system, he has, among other things, written splendid works about the planets that we are familiar with. We went over some of the strange beliefs that pervade our contemporary world and we had to inevitably ask ourselves the question: why? Why have beliefs not been weeded out from a world where science exists and knowledge never stops making progress? André Brahic had ideas about a lot of topics and he has one about this matter. In his opinion, there was an irrational part in the human spirit and that could undoubtedly be undermined due to education. People embrace questionable ideas because they do not have enough education. We did not debate too much this rather technical point, but undoubtedly this was the only disagreement during an otherwise friendly program.

Although I did not agree with him, it must be acknowledged that it is the first reasonable idea that comes to mind when we attest to the power of the empire of beliefs in our contemporary world. We must differentiate two things on this point: why beliefs last in general and why they enjoy a strong vitality today particularly. Here we deal only with the second question¹. I would like to recall some reasons which underline the counterintuitive fact that our contemporaneity encouraged the diffusion of beliefs.

This fact is first a consequence of the way in which the cognitive market has been structured historically: liberalization of supply and a huge increase in demand have brought about a whole chain of effects (increased competition, a decrease in incubation time for cognitive products, the Olson effect, the strong effect, cognitive greed, etc.).

Then, it is followed by grievances of the democratic triumvirate which relies technically in this revolution of the cognitive market (transparency, mutualization of knowledge, etc.).

At any rate, these two processes take place in an emergent way (that is to say, without being decided by anybody) as an expression of rationality’s dark faces that we can synthesize with the term democracy of the gullible.

However, it is not advisable to try to curb this historic phenomenon. In fact, wishing to make a clean slate of the cognitive market revolution or to silence the right to expression of our fellow citizens would be both impossible and troublesome from the standpoint of the values which are the foundation of the societies that we belong to. Moreover, the cure would undoubtedly be worse than the disease. Nevertheless, if the challenge is to devise a transition between the democracy of the gullible and the democracy of enlightenment, what can be done when the former comes from processes so globalized that they cannot be confined²?

From an analytical point of view, this question can be conveyed to the way in which individuals cope with information. Individuals have very strong reasons to process it inadequately and to adopt beliefs that methodical reason would repeal. So, why then it cannot be imagined that educating the masses is enough? If the level of education is improved, the level of overall knowledge increases and, likewise, the level of collective gullibility mechanically decreases. This was the idea of my interlocutor, the astrophysicist; an idea as old as philosophy since it can be traced back to pre-Socratic thinkers. It is rooted on the metaphor of communicating vessels; what knowledge gains, belief would lose (and conversely). Relayed all along the history of ideas, it can be found in the pen of Montaigne, Fontenelle and even in the Encyclopedists who make of ignorance the source of every belief. This interpretation allows to dream of a society free from the excesses of gullibility. We tend to think this belief persists only in so-called backward people, in the creases of our societies, where we can find the least-learned individuals (and we think then in the peasant world mainly), but the light of education can blow away this heavy shade that has been a ballast for human destiny. Certainly, for many, it was apparent that the progress of reason was capable of creating a society where every form of superstition, of false belief, would be banished. Paul Bert declared “with science there will be no more superstition nor belief in miracles, no more coups d’Etat or revolutions”. Edward Burnett Tylor, the first “institutional anthropologist” (appointed in 1896 as Chair of Anthropology in Oxford), also considered, and embodied very well the arguments upheld in those days, that history was accompanied by the development of a human spirit heading toward a growing complexity and rationality. For him, beliefs, myths and everything that separated thought from objective rationality were remnants of previous times, useful for the anthropologist who wanted to study past configurations of our cognition, but condemned to disappear from modern societies.

Therefore, proposals of this type are numerous; we can concede without discussing that the improvement of the education level, the massification of access to information and the development of science have contributed to eradicate all sorts of false ideas from public space. Thus, even if our representation of the birth of the universe is too metaphorical, it is easier for us to imagine it as the consequence of a Big Bang than as the separation of two colossal beings as told in the Babylonian Enouma Elish.

Nevertheless, a very superficial glance over our collective life shows the persistence and even the vitality of collective gullibility. But maybe this is a fact that applies to the less-educated categories of the population? In this case, Brahic and the enlightenment philosophers would be right. It would be enough to invest more in our education, especially for social categories with the lowest education level and that undoubtedly hold all types of beliefs, to continue a movement undertaken for several centuries now.

Despite all the admiration that we can hold for each other, this idea would seem questionable.

4.2. The bad education

On Monday August 25th 1835, the New York Sun published the first article of a series that would not go unnoticed and that was called “Great astronomical discoveries lately made by Sir John Herschel LLD, FRS & Coat the Cape of Good Hope”. Until August 31st, this New York journal published the extraordinary account of the first observations of life on the moon. An account made possible by the performance of a revolutionary telescope whose technical details and assembling are thoroughly described by the articles. In the same manner, as an ethnologist observes an exotic society, John Herschel first examines the moon’s vegetation. Among other things, he describes fields with red flowers resembling poppies and big needles of pale red amethyst. Soon, he is able to witness, with the help of his magnificent telescope, the existence of a fauna which is strange and familiar at the same time, herds of small-sized bisons, one-horned goats, and even better, winged men, clearly gifted with reasoning, that, according to the articles, scientists call Vespertilio-homo, that is “batmen”; soon, public opinion will call them “Selenites”, moon inhabitants.

When this long tale was published simultaneously in the United States and France, we could have expected that the public would take it for what it was: a prank. This journalistic event is widely known now as the moon hoax [LAG 03]. It is difficult to assess the proportion, but it seems that many readers took this tale literally. However, what really struck the chroniclers of that time, especially the famous author Edgar Allan Poe, was that those who believed in this moon prank were not uneducated, illiterate people. They were individuals with a fair knowledge of the astronomy matters of their times and were curious about those matters.

The fact that some people with a certain level of education are not immune against the strangest beliefs can seem surprising, but this has a very general range and goes well beyond the scope of the moon hoax. As a matter of fact, we do not always find a link between adherence to questionable beliefs and a lack of education. Often, it is the opposite that holds true. This is what the surveys of Boy and Michelat [BOY 86], two sociologists who studied the beliefs of the French in regard to parasciences, show: “According to evidence, it is necessary to abandon a linear model in which adherence to rationalism or to scientific thinking would go hand in hand with an increase in the education level”. Thus, a belief in paranormal issues or astrology first affects the non-scientific superior, then the secondary, then the superior primary and finally only the primary. Renard [REN 11] noted that middle and senior managers are statistically more faithful than workers or farmers (in regard to Unidentified Flying Object (UFOs), telepathy or even spiritism and table moving). By the same token, we can mention that those who accept more easily the myth of the Loch Ness³ monster are also graduates; ditto for the followers of homeopathy, as Bouchayer [BOU 86] points out.

Those who launched the program Public Understanding of Science (PUS) in the United Kingdom, based on the notion that the concerns of public opinion about technology and science stemmed from a lack of education, ran into the same problem: there is not a linear relationship between education and one’s trust in science. “Quite the contrary, resistance against technological evolution is more significant in societies with a high level of instruction. The critics of technology are far from being ignorant; they usually have a high education level” [SOL 15]. This is a fact that other inquiries have outlined. In 1979, a study, titled “The attitudes of the European public regarding scientific and technical development” [EC 79], implemented in the countries of the European Community, showed that the most educated categories are also the most critical as far as science is concerned.

There are many examples of how education does not necessarily favor a connection with scientific thought and does not make us immune against false or doubtful beliefs. Certain illustrious characters of history, reputed for their intellectual talents, were also known for their predisposition (at least relative) to bizarre beliefs. It is well known, for instance, that the president of the French Republic, François Mitterrand, considered to be an educated man with a sharp mind, used to regularly consult an astrologist. This kind of belief goes beyond political nuances; Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand’s predecessor, also reputed for his brilliant mind, confessed on September 15th, 2001, on the Histoire channel, that he gave credence to astrological signs and, not less surprisingly, that he wore a fetish given to him by a Senegalese witch doctor, when he won the presidential elections in 1974⁴.

All of these facts would seem intriguing because our spontaneous interpretation of such phenomena arises more or less explicitly from a postulate that links belief and lack of education. This enigma becomes even deeper when we examine the most radical belief phenomena, like those that play a role in sectarian, religious, mystical and/or political groups. Again, contrary to what we tend to believe, it is not a lack of education that leads individuals to become fanatics. Needless to say, you can find some lunatics among extremists, and one can admit without discussion that some join radical groups because they are psychologically vulnerable or easy to manipulate. However, this type of explanation does not fully clarify a solid fact attested by all researchers who have wanted to sketch the figure of the “standard extremist”. Stupple [STU 84] has shown that supporters of sectarian groups that he studied were properly integrated and balanced from a social, intellectual and moral standpoint. Likewise, Duval [DUV 02] observed, in regard to Aumism, a sect whose outrageous ideas were for a while the delight of the French Media, observed, with the support of statistical studies, that its members had not severed ties with outside society, as they read newspapers, enrolled their children in private and public schools, were members of associations, had an education level generally above the national average, etc. Sauvayre [SAU 12], in a beautiful study about individuals who decided to give up their radical beliefs, drew the same conclusions. The idea that links sectarian beliefs and a poor social and education level is plainly false. The same goes for the terrorist movements such as the IRA, the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Japanese Red Army. This idea is also false with regard to the perpetrators of terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. Mohammed Atta, the kamikaze who crashed Flight 11 of American Airlines into the first tower of World Trade Center, wrote a thesis, ironically, about the rehabilitation of historic districts. We can say the same about the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of London in July 2005, or about the islamist cell in Montpellier, dismantled in March 2006, and that was integrated by French students of Moroccan origin, coming from well-off backgrounds, sometimes of mixed parentage and pursuing engineering studies at the Université de Sciences et Techniques in Languedoc (Montpellier II). Generally speaking, we can see that most perpetrators of attacks had advanced degrees and came from well-off backgrounds, as Cohen points out [COH 02]. Studies of Islamic terrorism led toward the same diagnostic. In this way, Sageman [SAG 04] undertook a rigorous study about the general characteristics of Al-Qaïda terrorists and found that most do not come from the deprived or working class backgrounds. This was also observed by Khosrokhavar [KHO 06, p. 318]: “The myth of the community unified by the allegiance to Allah does not preclude the unity of the proletariat under the guidance of a self-proclaimed avant-garde that, as we know, was made up of middle-class individuals often with a high education, as with the contemporary islamist phenomenon”. This is corroborated by Etienne [ETI 05] in his study Les combattants suicidaires (Suicide Fighters), Krueger [KRU 07] in Ce qui fait unterroriste (What makes a terrorist), Crenshaw in his article “The causes of terrorism” or Ruby [RUB 02] in a text where he wonders “if terrorists are mentally deranged”.

4.3. When gullibility looks like intelligence

When Edgar Allan Poe became interested in the moon hoax, what surprised him the most was that “those who had doubts were not able to explain why. They were ignorant; they had no idea about astronomy, people who could not believe because those things were too new, too distant from common knowledge”. Even as surprised as he was, Poe gives us a very interesting initial clue to interpret this fact. Why were the most educated people the ones who bought this hoax more easily? Undoubtedly, he thought, it is because their education favored a certain mental disposition, a way of expanding their intellectual horizon. Those with an interest in astronomy were aware that other planets exist, knew that the Earth was not the center of the universe and that life had the potential to exist elsewhere. Victims of the moon hoax, therefore, had some reasons to believe in it (though they were not right to believe). This cognitive method is properly illustrated by the metaphor of Pascal’s sphere. If knowledge is a sphere, Pascal explains, its surface is in contact with what it does not contain, in other words, the unknown. Hence, when knowledge spreads, as does the surface of the sphere, the air in contact with ignorance does not stop spreading either. In fact, it is not ignorance that grows symmetrically with knowledge, but the awareness of that which is unknown, that is to say, the awareness of the lack of information that characterizes our grasp of certain matters. This awareness can be perfectly placed at the service of gullibility.

What better example than remembering the ambitions of spiritism, the belief that met a phenomenal success at the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries and that pretended to prove that it was possible to get in touch with the dead? Flammarion, a scientist by training and a big supporter of this doctrine, gave a speech of exemplary clarity during the funerals of Allan Kardec⁵, on April 2nd 1869: “Spiritism is not a religion, but a science, and we only know the ABC of this science”. The ambition that Flammarion had for spiritism was precisely based on the argument about the widening of science conceptions. He insisted on the incomplete nature of human knowledge, and he stressed that spiritual matters could be compared with electric phenomena, bright and caloric and still poorly understood. The latest scientific and technical findings, beginning with electromagnetic waves and the wireless telegraph that uses such waves, would demonstrate, in his view, that a remote action was possible, and, therefore, that certain dimensions of our universe eluded our senses: “The physical sciences teach us that we live in the middle of a world that is invisible to us, and that it is not impossible that some beings (equally invisible to us) live also on Earth, in an order of sensations that is absolutely different to ours; we don´t have the ability to perceive their presence, unless they manifest by events that emerge in our order of sensations” [FUE 02]. In other words, according to Flammarion, the concepts proclaimed by the spiritism doctrine are actually plausible in the light of scientific findings; and it is not inconceivable that our universe is also inhabited by beings that the ordinary man cannot perceive, on account of their immateriality. This argument clashed, in the cognitive market, against the position of those who maintained that metaphysical phenomena are impossible and, as a result, spiritual beliefs are false. Yet, since “rationalist” spirits can make a deduction of the type: A is impossible, therefore A is false, why, supporters of spiritism ask, one cannot respond: A is possible therefore A is true? Many did not see that the logical symmetry of this answer does not confer it the status of a solid argument at all, and they took it, therefore, as a good reason to believe in a metaphysical reality. This paralogism is what makes many beliefs compatible with our contemporaneity. Apparently, its seductive powers work better when aiming at spirits that have enjoyed some sort of intellectual training. This holds especially true when this learning is only superficial, like in the case of scientific disciplines in higher education courses of literature or human and social sciences. This reasoning can be helpful to better understand the results obtained by Boy and Michelat in their inquiry about the beliefs of the French with regard to parasciences. Being familiar with the history of sciences (and with “the non-scientific superior stage” more than “the secondary stage”) allows us to imagine that a scientific system is a grid, temporary most of the time, which is never totally in line with reality. These students are, therefore, familiar with the controversial side of science which is not necessarily apparent for an individual who only has elementary studies. However, for those who have reached the scientific superior stage, fidelity to certain beliefs becomes more difficult because this contradicts a system of representation inherited from the comprehensive study of the laws that rule exact sciences. This makes their belief in the paranormal remarkably similar to that of primary school students who have not received any significant scientific training. Likewise, the scientific superior clearly separates from the rest with regard to a belief in astrology: this one implies more than a planetary influence over individuals, it is deemed as some sort of divination; therefore, it is even more difficult, when compared with the paranormal, to reconcile this practice with a sharp knowledge in the field of exact sciences.

Studies should refine a critical spirit if we believe in the ambitions of diverse thinkers who have inspired the pedagogical programs of our college and high-school students. Many of the exercises that clutter our pedagogical path attempt to find the sense camouflaged behind appearances. What is the unfathomable meaning of this literary piece, of this poem? What intentions and issues are masked in this historic document? Our children are taught with all kinds of hermeneutical practices, and are encouraged to find the hidden meaning of things to express their intelligence. Soon, they will come across the thinking of Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, the great philosophers of suspicion, and, at university, Bourdieu, constructivism, culturalism, relativism, etc. Undoubtedly, these are very useful exercises for the formation of reason; however, as a hypothesis, I suppose that the scientific representation of the world can also pay a price. These exercises certainly bring up the idea that those things that we hold as true can, at best, compete with other ways of seeing, or, even worse, can be considered as illusions. As an example, what can we think of that which a manual of sociology of sciences proposes to students as an exercise and above all, what can we think of its vision statement⁶?

“To evaluate the extension of a scientific conviction, for instance, that according to which “U = R.I”. To wander through different social spaces and see where this belief spreads, and if it is the same everywhere: see also fundamentalist physicists, Engineers working for EDF, neighborhood electricians and students”.

It is clearly mentioned that they call it “belief”, and the term “fundamentalist” physicists says a lot about the way in which a certain discourse that considers itself critical thinking has been able to boost the democracy of the gullible. There is a huge jump between the perfectly acceptable idea that we must not consider that everything that science declares is written in stone, and to consider that scientific propositions are beliefs just like any other. This slippery logic of relativism⁷ is nothing fatal, and there are many minds that are opposed. However, there are many who let themselves be taken and find astrologic, paranormal and homeopathic hypotheses alluring, not only because of the services that they render to every mind who wants to feel reassured, but rather because they are based on false arguments, pseudo-evidence that we could consider at odds with scientific propositions, once we admit that the latter could not benefit from any argument of authority (which is more easily admitted by individuals with an education than by those without any). In the same way, the arguments of the precautionist militants are considered as legitimate (and much more accepted by the journalist and public opinion in many cases) than those held by orthodox science. It is ironic to see that one of the figure heads of contemporary relativism Bruno Latour seems to be changing his mind. In his book, Enquête sur les modes d’existence (Inquiry about Lifestyles), he shows concern about the fact that climate risks are not always taken seriously. After all, why should we rely on the benefits of science on this matter but not on that of the GMO or frequent low waves? Latour does not answer this embarrassing question, but, since he shows concern about climate, he finds his fight against the institution a lot less amusing. He confesses with a rather puzzling naivety: “At first, the fight against the institution did not seem dangerous; it was modernizing and liberating, even amusing. Just like asbestos, it had nothing but good qualities. Alas, just like asbestos, it had devastating consequences that nobody anticipated and that we were too slow to recognize”⁸.

Furthermore, these beliefs that we often talk about require a culture or subculture that is not within everyone’s reach. Arguments that support these beliefs are sometimes subtle and technical; which gives them an air of truth and ultimately of science, as we have seen; and can only exert their attraction on minds prepared to receive them. Frequently, it is more difficult to convince these citizens of the democracy of the gullible when they are persuaded that they are properly informed about a determined subject. Thus, we understand more clearly the results mentioned at the introduction of this book regarding the distrust of individuals about nuclear matters or GMO (58% declare that they do not trust scientists to tell the truth about GMO or nuclear matters), while they relatively trust them with regard to neurosciences (only 25% declare that they do not trust them). The aforementioned study⁹also shows that among those who answered the survey, 71% think that they do not have a clear understanding of neuroscience, while 63 and 67% believe they have a firm grasp on matters of GMO and nuclear issues. In other words, the more they think they know a subject, the more they question the scientist.

Again, the development of the Internet accompanies and prolongs this movement, as some people are persuaded that they can find the information that has been hidden from us online. Thus, those who obtained a high degree in France are the least likely to believe the information seen on television; however, they are the most likely to believe what appears on the Internet; 45% of those graduates find the Internet information perfectly reliable, as compared with only 11% of those who did not graduate¹⁰.

Moreover, as a token of the Internet culture, Wikipedia puts into practice a definition of truth that we could call polyphonical [CAR 10, p. 88]: when several interpretations of the same phenomenon are possible, the online encyclopedia shows all the different interpretations in a balanced manner. Many will find that this way of producing information is commendable, but it also leads to a form of relativism because it places all contributors on equal footing, regardless of their level of expertise. After all, is it not arguments that count the most, and not diplomas? The problem, as we have seen it throughout this book, is that every half-scholar can present a convincing argument about almost every single subject, with sources that would seem as honorable as any other. Wikipedia is a terrific tool (I must confess I use it quite often) but, at the same time, this democratic procedure of pooling information leads to abuses that favor the democracy of the gullible. The issue of medical knowledge is, for instance, a sensitive one, as we find some orthodox knowledge, as well as propositions arising from pseudo sciences, folk knowledge and other superstitions circumstantially named “unconventional medicine”. This effort to achieve equality by ignoring the skill levels of the various contributors is a feature that we will never find in a traditional encyclopedia since its intention is, precisely, anti-relativistic. The spirit of enlightenment seems to vanish in the horizon and the situation does bear some resemblance to certain parts of Plato’s Phaedrus: “Science is an illusion, not reality; when they actually be able to obtain, without learning, plenty of information, they will consider themselves well-versed in a variety of things when in fact most of them are incompetent, insufferable in their trade, because instead of being scholars, they will become illusion scholars!”

4.4. The sum of imperfections

It would be absurd to defend the idea that education is harmful for the diffusion of knowledge. What I have tried to emphasize is that in order to go from a democracy of the gullible to a democracy of enlightenment (on the understanding that these are typical forms and there is a continuum between them), the solution is not to increase the general education level of a population, for there is not a distinct correlation between level of education and an insightful view of the world¹¹.

Therefore, since we cannot nor should we want to limit the perverse effects of the cognitive market revolution by boxing it through a political voluntarism that could become dictatorial, the solution is to be found right at the center of our minds.

Let us start by stressing that every education effort that democratic societies have undertaken seems to have forgotten a key issue of knowledge: if critical thinking is exercised without a method, it will easily lead to gullibility. Doubt has heuristic virtues, that much is true, but it can lead, instead of mental autonomy, to cognitive nihilism.

Science comes precisely from the examination of that version of reality offered by our senses and our ordinary logic, but the essential of this procedure lies in the way it reconstructs a vision of the world: it does so with a method. For those who demand the right to doubt, such as the interlocutor I quoted in the introduction of this book, it responds: “Yes, but every right carries with it a duty”. I see then in our education system the honorable and omnipresent will to develop one form of intellectual autonomy throughout doubt, but I see very little of that which I think is the cornerstone of every pedagogy: the teaching of the method. What relativists do not seem to notice is that the methods used in science that took thousands of years to emerge, after some hesitations, mistakes and drastic selections, are a universal heritage. They are not a typically western thing, nor are they the expression of a classist culture even if history shows certain decisive instants of the definition of this method in appearing this or that place. We can easily demonstrate that a specific scientist played a role in a social area, that he held religious beliefs, that he had ideological obsessions, interests and that all those things possibly molded his hypothesis; furthermore, in the worst-case scenario, he could have discovered the truth with some very specific intentions that other scientists would not find commendable. To put the biography of every scientist under the “microscope” can generate a plethora of hypotheses with regard to the social nature of the theories they have created. This exercise could lead to missing the essential point, which is that the scholar’s proposition, his experiment protocol and his results will be evaluated by individuals who also carry their interests and beliefs, but not necessarily the same ones. Time will subject these propositions to the filter of the most demanding Darwinian selection that has been used in the history of human kind. This does not mean that this selection is enough to find nothing but the truth, yet, reason wants us to put our epistemic trust in this mode of selecting cognitive proposals rather than any other, claiming for democracy. What history has shown us is that scientific thinking can be seen, typically, as an effort made to surpass the universal limits of human rationality that keep us from being omniscient subjects and turn us mechanically into faithful subjects. As I see it, those limits are of three types¹².

First, our mind is dimensionally limited because our conscience is locked up in a restricted space and an everlasting present. Furthermore, it is culturally limited for it interprets every information in terms of preconceived representations. Finally, it is ballasted from a cognitive standpoint because our ability to process information is not infinite and the complexity of certain problems exceeds the potentiality of our common sense.

These three limits are probably insurmountable. Indeed, an individual in his natural state, assuming he is not a god, cannot know beyond time and space, or by ignoring the cultural and cognitive transfer of information. Nevertheless, he can expect to reduce the harming power of these limits of rationality and try to go beyond his egocentric perceptions of the world. This kind of effort characterizes the great milestones of human knowledge. We can try, as an exercise, to describe some important stages in the progress of knowledge as the result of a historic movement to wipe out these three flaws of our understanding. It is an exercise that I am not capable of undertaking, but I will propose some of the most popular examples drawn from the history of sciences in order to give some substance to this idea.

Let us go back to the first limit of rationality, the one linked to our dimensional condition. Our conception of space has significantly evolved. Gradually, we have given up the beliefs that the Earth (the space we share) is flat (Parmenides already advocated the idea of the spherical shape), that it is the center of the universe (Aristarchus of Samos proposed the hypothesis of Earth rotating around the sun, and not the opposite) and that it is motionless (Heraclides Ponticus suggested that the Earth rotated around itself).

All these conceptions that were offered in the cognitive market took a long time to impose. Thus, the heliocentric system was conceived, albeit in a less sophisticated version, 18 centuries before Copernicus. The fact that this system took longer to establish itself in human thinking than the geocentric system has many elaborate explanations, but no explanation can disqualify the idea that this late acceptance is mostly due to the fact that it is counterintuitive; to show its superiority, it had to overcome the feeling of immediate and deceiving evidence that is recognized by the spatial limits of our understanding. It is true; in fact, this ordinary observation leads us to believe that the sun rotates around the Earth, and not the other way around.

More generally, we also know that space is no longer a simple container as we are told by our senses and our experience, for physical facts like gravitation can alter it.

We know that time does not follow a straight line and that it can also be deformed; the way it deploys depends on the reference system considered.

In conclusion, we have learned to go beyond the notion that time and space as seen are the standard measure of nature’s phenomena; in other words, we have learned to mistrust the information that comes to us in the limit of our senses and therefore, to “decontextualize” the rationality of its dimensional environment.

Nevertheless, the whole of the knowledge is less than the sum of its parts. It is stunning to note that nowadays many people still believe that the sun rotates around the Earth and not the other way around. This distancing of the limits of our rationality is never a collective and definitive experience; it is an effort that common sense can accept, but it is more typical of the scientific approach.

Certain physical data are systematically comprised “chronologically” even if they take place simultaneously, which becomes difficult for our time-oriented reasoning; thus, as Viennot [VIE 96] stresses in his works about the way common sense perceives physics, the notorious ideal gas equation imposes a conception of simultaneity, with constant pressure, for variations of volume and temperature, which is a torment for ordinary reasoning.

What has just been briefly mentioned about the dimensional character of our self-centered thinking could be more telling with regard to the second category of limits for our rationality.

History of knowledge was rather late to take seriously the idea that our culture could subject reality to the bed of Procust. It is a fact that the people have a certain inclination to ethnocentrism, that is to say, to consider that their culture is an exact translation of reality and should, therefore, be above the rest. It was necessary to wait, in part, the anthropology of the 20th Century and a self-analysis of Western Culture to methodically undertake this detachment with the cultural limits of our thinking. The method “participant observation” defended and implemented by Bronislaw Malinowski, and Claude Lévi-Strauss manifest, Race and history, propose two typical examples of attempts to take a distance from cultural limits of rationality. This exercise can, in addition, lead to excesses; relativism is one illustration, for it inspires the hyperbolic idea that systems of representation, being cultural constructions, could not be easily distinguished from each other from a point of view of the real.

The notion that our culture guides our perception and our understanding is not new at all; tradition usually traces it back to Bacon and to the clear awareness he had of the need to overcome the sociocultural prism to achieve an objective mode of knowledge.

The third category of limits that undermine our rationality and that is fundamental for the triumph of the democracy of the gullible is the one related to the cognitive mistakes that we discussed with some examples throughout this book. It has also given rise to a heap of reflections that pervade the history of human thinking. We can find many who pioneered a great deal of the research about the cognitive limits of reality [BRO 07a]. In this, a special place should be reserved for John Stuart Mill and his A System of Logic, to Vilfredo Pareto … but, to tell the truth, all these contributions only anticipated the research led by two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemanlate, in the 20th Century. They prepared a cartography of reasoning errors based on experimental data that has yet to meet its match¹³.

If we take a quick look at the scientific methods in practical terms, i.e. epimediological approach, double-blind protocol required, etc., we will see attempts to “filter out ” the constraints of rationality, and due to that, they achieve their universal dimension. The scientist inherits, through his professional practice, a method to apprehend reality which is more efficient than that of others. There remains a man, however, he is not immune to the damaging effects of these rational limits, who carries within himself as a cognitive Scrooge waiting for his time to come, just as much as the man of interest, either economic or ideological; that is why the propositions that he will make in the cognitive market should always go through the inquisitive filter of his pairs, who give a collective dimension to this. When insisting in a deconstruction of scientific knowledge, critical and relativist thinking unweaves a piece of fabric and is then astonished when it only finds an empty space. With this approach, it misses the possibility of understanding that the sum of imperfections can lead to principles of universal scope. However, such principles will never find more trouble than when going against the natural propensities of our minds; yet, this is the place when they are most useful.

For a long time, this reality was not obnoxious insofar as the expertise clarified the political decision, detached somehow from ordinary logic. However, deregulation of the cognitive market helped ordinary logic to invite itself to the table of discussions. I find that this situation is an important moment in the history of democracies and irreversible as well. Yet, our education systems and certain relativist ideology have prepared us better to undo knowledge rather than to redo it; more participation in the debate could help to amplify the phenomenon of mistake mutualization that can already be observed.

4.5. Toward cognitive demagogy

For demagogy, the classical dictionary definition is: “A policy, through which one cajoles, excites, exploits the passions of the masses” (Dictionary Le Robert). The discourse defined in this way seeks to flatter the natural propensities of the interlocutor’s mind. Most of the time, those who invoke this term insist on the emotional tone (anger, jingoism and hatred of the other) of the discourse. However, it is a form of demagogy that leans on hollow arguments (which can be complementary to an expression of emotion rather than to some irrepressible affective reflexes)¹⁴.

Let us take the renowned example of propaganda, such as the slogan of Nazi ideologues: “Three million unemployed, three million Jews”. This parallelism of numbers must always accompany a simplistic explanation that tries to grab the attention of certain public; yet, it also arises from the fact that this explanation tries to tamper with (deliberately) the confusion between correlation and causality. Political ideologies (especially the extremist) love to take advantage of the penchant which we have to believe that a co-occurrence is forcefully the sign, even the proof, of a causal relationship.

Again, we cannot say that this argument is objectively rational, but we miss the heart of the matter if we do not see that it pulls its strength from an inferential process, certainly wrong, but which is the expression of some kind of limited rationality.

It turns out that certain silly and/or heinous ideas will triumph, prevail and sometimes be more successful than other more reasonable and balanced ideas, because they will capitalize on this inferential process, questionable but appealing to the mind. Thus, this situation has become even more dangerous now that we witness this deregulation of the cognitive market made tangible by the increased competition between conventional media and, especially, by the emergence of the Internet. Formerly, those whom the theory of communication called gate keepers (journalists, expert commentators, etc.) made sure, for better or worse, that certain ideas could not easily be spread. Today, these have seriously weakened … again, for better or worse.

Better, we all know, are the terrific collaborating work exercises proposed by the Internet. For instance, the game Foldit asks the Internet users to attempt molecular combinations to get a better understanding of the way proteins can deploy in space: the point is to remove fragments here, to add them there or even to destroy some bonds. This collective game of construction has led to the publication of three articles, one of them in the renowned magazine Nature.

Worse still is the propagation of a variety of cognitive demagoguery that wants to impose, little by little, the intuitive points of view, sometimes mistaken, in all kinds of subjects, regardless of whether this is about perception of technological risks or conspiracy theories.

If we take the example of technological risks, at a time when health and environment alerts have become overwhelming, we must remember that the functioning of the human mind favors the diffusion of fears and worries, even if they are not always well founded. It turns out that we are poorly equipped to rationally assess this kind of situation. For instance, we perceive low probabilities as being much more likely to happen than they actually are.

Public debates focus on high-voltage antennas, relay antennas, nuclear energy, GMOs, etc.; we admit that risks are unlikely. However, we never do it without exposing the scenarios where the unlikely takes place and, hence, without eliciting a disposition shared by many minds to overvalue low probabilities. Televised or radio debates give a pretty good idea of the way debates entrench on these presumed low possibilities (they are rarely backed up with real figures, but we assume they are not zero). Yet, for many decades now, psychology has shown that we tend to misrepresent probabilities when they are low. These results have been confirmed and refined, especially by Prelec [PRE 98]. When these probabilities are low (1 in 10,000 and less) on average, they are perceived 10–15 times higher by the common man. In the same way, high probabilities (0.98–0.99) tend to be considerably underestimated.

This subjective representation of probabilities gave rise to advanced formulations that led to establish the following curve.

This graph presents objective probabilities (v) on the x-axis and probabilities as perceived by ordinary logic (w) on the y-axis. If individuals had a perfect representation of probabilities, the relation between v and w would be described by a proportional line. This is not the case, as we can see, the closeness to value 0 (that is to say, low probabilities) creates a brief but dramatic distortion. This cognitive bias of human reason can bear important implications in a deregulated market. As a matter of fact, the information supplier who attaches himself more or less blindly to the demand will progressively lean toward a demagogical representation of risk. Moreover, we should add many other mental illusions that weigh on our minds: we give more consideration to the costs than to the benefits of a given situation; we easily give up to an appetite for zero risk and prefer to avoid choices before uncertainty. We always give more consideration to the costs than to the benefits. The Nobel Economy Award winner, Daniel Kahneman [TVE 86], highlighted in his works that to psychologically compensate a cost of 1 euro, a profit of 2.50 euros is needed. We can also remember that we are more afraid of the consequences brought about by our actions than those brought about by our inaction. All these considerations show why the Internet, because it flirts with cognitive demagogy, promotes the diffusion of collective fears which can turn into a demand for a moratorium on the diffusion of such and such technological innovation.

Everything that is part of the oldest ways of thinking will enjoy a new visibility and legitimacy due to this deregulation of the information market.

4.6. How to keep the illusion scholar inside us in check

Since reversing the cognitive limits of rationality is an essential requisite to conceive a transition toward a democracy of enlightenment, at this moment of the book, I have two pieces of news, one good and one bad.

Let us start with the bad news.

The philosopher Jonathan Cohen [COH 81] from Oxford University wondered whether it would be possible to bring to zero the existence of those systematic and predictable reasoning mistakes. In his opinion, they arose from education deficiencies more than cognitive deficiencies. The problem is that, in an article prior to the text of Cohen (since it dates back to 1971), Tversky and Kahneman had already demonstrated that statistical experts could make cognitive blunders just like those made by the common man. They recount an experience they had while attending a colloquy sponsored by the group of mathematical psychology and the American Association of Psychology. They asked 84 individuals who attended this meeting to answer the following question: “If you know that a set of twenty subjects has confirmed your theory, what is the likelihood, in your opinion, that an additional group of ten persons confirm your story separately?” Only nine people gave answers ranging between 0.4 and 0.6. Most gave estimations close to 0.85. The first answer is of course more reasonable, which suggests that familiarity with formal logic and the theory of probabilities do not prevent mistaken intuitions.

Another example, more spectacular and with potentially severe consequences, was told by Casscells et al. [CAS 78] who posed a question to 60 students and professors from Harvard’s School of Medicine; it went like this:

A disease that affects one person out of a thousand can be detected by a test. This test has a rate of positive errors of 5%; that is to say, the rate of false positives is 5%. One individual undergoes the test. The result is positive. What are the probabilities it is right?

We would not expect that medics be totally unfamiliar with this kind of problem; yet, they were massively mistaken on this subject. Thus, the majority answered: 95% (the average of all answers was 56%). In fact, only 18% of medics and medical trainees gave the right answer: 2%.

As a matter of fact, “5% of false positives” means that out of 100 healthy individuals, 5 individuals test positive. Therefore, the reasoning goes as follows: out of 100,000, 99,900 are healthy and 4,995 are false positives. Meanwhile, only 100 were actually sick.

Thus,

In this case, if even statisticians and medics, used to dealing with probabilistic questions, make significant mistakes, what can be expected non-trained from individuals? The problem brought up by these mental illusions is not really a matter of education level, but actually of cognition. However, I do not think that the question made by Cohen is useless. Indeed, if the level of education is not a definitive protection against cognitive mistakes, is it possible, by means of any given intellectual formation, to tame them?

And this is the good news: yes, it is possible to weaken the power of attraction that this strange reasoning exerts on our minds.

If we go back to the issue of the medical test, it can be shown that posing the same question in a different manner, the error rate literally plummets:

Among 1,000 individuals, one finds that, on average, one is affected by disease X. For every thousand healthy Americans, one finds 50 persons, on average, that test positive. Imagine that we choose 1,000 Americans randomly, how many, among those who tested positive, have actually contracted the disease?

In this form, 76% of individuals got the right answer (as compared with 18% with the previous wording)¹⁵. The fearful confirmation bias that Wason implemented experimentally (see section 1.3.1) could also be inhibited in a spectacular manner, as developmental psychologist Olivier Houdé and his team showed it [HOU 00].

Even if this is an alluring subject, I will put aside the question of knowing where those biases come from: are they a biological legacy of our distant past, or, on the contrary, do we acquire them when our brain is developing¹⁶? In any event, these biases, in most cases, are not so uprooted in us that it becomes impossible to reduce their damaging power on our mental life or on the resulting collective processes. This, in the end, gives rise to certain optimism, and anticipates a vast undertaking that I just reviewed here. I think this undertaking could take at least three forms: the first form affects our education system, the second form, a type of communication engineering, notably scientific, which takes into account the dark side of our rationality to allow a better communication; and the third form calls for the emergence of a new form of militancy.

4.7. Declaration of mental independence

Suppose that you are a juror in an especially sensitive trial. Three months ago, a man died, run over accidentally by a hit-and-run taxi. In this city, there are only blue taxis and green taxis (85% of green taxis and 15% of blue taxis). In the course of the trial, a witness shows up. The event took place at night and we can suspect that the witness, who allegedly saw a blue cab, could be wrong. Some visual tests are prepared to assess his statement. It is found that in the night condition, he was able to recognize a blue taxi in 80% of the instances. This testimony is paramount, for, if he properly identified the color of the taxi, then the individual under investigation is guilty. In your opinion, what is the percentage chance that this driver, who has a blue taxi, is responsible for this accident?

When the question is asked, most individuals questioned were wrong when answering 80%. Doesn’t this remind you of something? This problem bears some resemblance to the one we just saw in the previous section about the medical test. As a matter of fact, it hides the same cognitive structure¹⁷: just like the medical test, where we tended to overlook the structure of the population, sick or healthy, we simply act as if the answer was independent of the rate of blue and green taxis. Maybe, you did not find the right answer which is 41% (it is not at all the same thing as 80% when we place a guilty bet involving the fate of a man), but surely you had a déjà vu feeling that made you distrust this statement. You were on guard. That is reassuring.

By contrast, if you had been asked about the taxi problem 1 month after the question of the medical tests, surely you would have made the same mistake without any kind of mistrust: this is discouraging. A trace of cognitive bias remains. To fight against this persistence, it is not enough to imagine, once and for all, the problem and its solution, especially since cognitive biases, as those two problems show, have many shapes, especially when they emerge in a social context. To foresee one of its forms does not guarantee that we can resist them permanently. It is important to rethink the way in which our education system could help young minds to break free, better than we were able to, from this bias that hampers a fair perception of things.

This is how, despite the generalized increase in the level of education and scientific culture of the population in democratic societies, many perception errors remain in our representation of the world. Several surveys show that 30% of Europeans think that it is the Sun that turns around the Earth and not the other way around¹⁸. Morel [MOR 02, p. 121] also noted that educated people, with advanced degrees, believe that the moon phases are the result of the shadow that Earth projects over its natural satellite. Yet, these persons learned very well at school that the Earth does revolve around the Sun and not the other way around, but since the perception of our senses easily displaces those teachings, some fall prey to this false impression. Things would be very different if the lesson they received would have taken into account how difficult would it be to remember this in the future. In other words, if this astronomy lesson was accompanied by a guiding light over the cognitive hurdles that hamper its good reception. Education cannot make the deceiving suggestion of our eyes disappear, but it can sharpen a reflex of impatience. We will always feel this mental temptation to perceive the world in an egocentric manner, but our education can help us to fight it with a more methodical vision. The latter is more expensive (in terms of time and mental energy). We cannot, therefore, make use of it for every purpose at all times (cognitive greed, as we have seen, is necessary for life in society and for our individual survival). By contrast, it is possible to conceive a way of learning that helps us recognize the cognitive situations where we must suspend our judgment and our sometimes deceiving intuitions.

In this respect, a fine study by Shtulman and Valcarcel [SHT 12] shows that certain propositions are less well accepted than others. Their project consisted of asking individuals 200 questions that spanned six different scientific subjects (astronomy, genetics, thermodynamics, etc.); they had to respond “true” or “false” to statements like: “The moon generates light”; “1/13 is bigger than 1/30”; “Atoms are essentially void”. The participants had known at one time or another of their intellectual journey, the answers to those questions and should have known rather than believed. The results of the study show that the mistake is never bigger than when there is a conflict between our intuitions of the world and the propositions of science. Even when respondents are not wrong, they take more time to answer. Time in this case is a good indication of what costs to us, in terms of mental energy, the struggle against the fundamental limits of rationality. To continue our reflection, we can notice that an early acquaintance with scientific culture does not totally preclude deceiving intuitions but can inhibit them remarkably.

It turns out that we begin to know the map of our systematic errors very well. It is, no doubt, still incomplete, but it would permit us to improve our ways of learning without giving up the quality of the content. Some will say that is like reinventing the wheel and that some things are set in stone. All those who, like me, know the statistics, know very well that a moment must be reserved to explain to students that there should be no confusion between correlation and causality (it is not because two events take place at the same time, that one is the result of the other). But, they also know that students do not begin to develop a reflex of mistrust unless they engage in repeated exercises. Those that can compete against this mistake will pave the way in human thinking. These mental illusions can emerge in every field of knowledge: physics, biology, mathematics, economic and social sciences, history, philosophy, etc. In fact, pedagogical programs are full of it; pedagogues have not noticed or taken it seriously. I, for instance, led an investigation [BRO 07b] to assess the way individuals (all Baccalaureate holders) understood the theory of evolution. The result was undisputed; for the vast majority defended the finalist theories¹⁹ rather than the Darwinian thesis. It was not because of ideological or religious reasons (many believed that the solution they proposed had Darwinian bases) as can be seen in the United States, but simply because mechanisms described by the theory of evolution clash with cognitive obstacles that make it counterintuitive²⁰. The only way of effectively teaching this theory, so paramount to our understanding of the world (and to prevent certain religious interpretations of the kind: God does things the right way or, a more current variation, Nature does things the right way), is to insist through a series of repeated exercises, on the mechanisms that control it. Even worse, I rescheduled the experiment²¹, under the same conditions, but this time with 56 professors of natural and life sciences, from middle school and high school. It turns out that one of two evoked finalist theses and found them credible. The interviews with these professors are often fascinating for they show that they obviously know the theory of evolution (they begin usually by giving a lesson about the subject so that the sociologist “stays in his place”), but when the time comes to apply it in a concrete case, they do not resist the temptation represented by the finalist thesis.

The issue is not only about understanding Darwin’s theory, but also about breaking free from mental temptations that take part in many expressions of collective gullibility. Indeed, the cognitive processes involved here demonstrate our common difficulty to understand the processes, sometimes lengthy, of reciprocal selection and adjustment that arise from natural or social phenomena. When dealing with natural phenomena, the beliefs involved are finalist and often, in an implicit or explicit manner, religious. When it comes to social phenomena, we assume that some hidden intentions exist behind complex events or aggregations of actions by individuals who have no idea whatsoever of the results they are going to produce; we have to wonder in this case; who benefits from the crime? Thus, we get very close to going from a critical thinking to a conspirational thinking. This is how they make up domination theories that are shamelessly defended by those who could poke fun at this kind of explanation with regard to natural phenomena, but they find these theories ingenious when it comes to social phenomena; gullibility that poses as intelligence. If those cognitive biases can easily contaminate some minds that otherwise can be brilliant, it is because they allow their concept of the good to contaminate their conception of the truth (for having a metaphysical or ideological interpretation of the world), as well as because they have not learned to recognize the expression of those biases in different problem structures. They are rationalist here and gullible there.

What I will call the real critical mind, that is to say, that which is going to help us to counter the alienation that is sometimes represented by the suggestions of our intuition, can only be acquired through constant exercises. For this reason, the work discussed in this book is essential to create a democracy of enlightenment that can only be done by insisting throughout the education phase, in all subjects, as soon as is reasonably possible. It is important to emphasize methodical thinking to encourage individuals to be critical of their own intuitions, to identify the situations where one’s own judgment must be put on hold, to invest energy and time instead of accepting a solution that seems acceptable; in one word, to control the cognitive Scrooge that lives inside all of us. To teach anything one must be effective and take into account and the characteristics of the receiver of the message. These characteristics may be common and invariant, but they cannot be overlooked by learning. If the process of democratization of democracy is well underway, and since it would be difficult to disagree, the demands of the democratic triumvirate are going to become increasingly pressing. I find it less utopian than necessary to get ready for this pedagogical revolution, the one that will lead us to pronounce our mental declaration of independence.

4.8. The fourth power

This effort for the formation of the minds must be particularly conceived for those whose profession is to disseminate information. We think especially of journalists; we have already seen that they can play an important role in the democracy of the gullible. These are individuals just like the rest of us and can easily indulge on mental illusions and on their ideological prisms, as they face the urgent need to submit information. I do not think it is outrageous to ask, however, if they could be a little bit above the rest of men, because of their paramount role in democracies.

As we have seen, journalists are often trapped in a situation called the prisoner’s dilemma. However, if in journalism schools, and likewise in all the places where they educate those who are going to comment on information, students were made aware of those cognitive biases, of what we know of social stereotypes or if they could get a good grasp of urban legends, the future professionals could develop the mistrust reflex so necessary in situations where they are competing for the information. This mistrust, I remind you, is aimed at one’s self and at the performance of one’s own reasoning: to be able, against the evidence of one’s intuition, to generate inside the laboratory of the conscience, methodical, alternative hypotheses.

Thus, a story about some unpleasant officials in a provincial town, who organize satanic and pedophile networks, should elicit mistrust in those who are initiated to the typical material of urban legends. The same goes for the apparition of a spider or a small snake in the fruit and vegetable section of a department store. We could also think that a series of practical exercises with examples taken precisely from conventional media with regard to miscalculation of sample size, the Fort effect or the overestimation of low probabilities would create a breed of journalists able to resist the predictable traps when engaged in the rush for broadcasting information.

It is not too late to conceive ongoing training on this kind of subject for editorial boards that are already installed and experienced. Every professional who sees their environment change suddenly understands the need to train constantly; medics, researchers, technicians of all kinds, etc. Yet, their professional context pits journalists head on against the revolution of the cognitive market. It is a sign of weakness for them to conceive the need for ongoing training in order to be above ordinary logic.

Furthermore, if mechanisms of the cognitive market are hard to regulate from an authoritarian perspective, we can undoubtedly reduce the perverse effects of an unbridled information deregulation. It is in this sense that we must understand the initiative of the society Pro Publica headed by Paul Steiger, who was chief editor of the Wall Street Journal, to finance extensive investigations whose results are made available for traditional media. When realizing that market conditions no longer permitted the media to do research for long periods, this society began to render some kind of public service, made possible because billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler acted as patrons. As Poulet points out [POU 11, pp. 264–265]: “Public subventions for journals have perverse effects, it is known. By contrast, public financement and, why not, partially private financing, of public information could, if shared on a grand scale, be one of the ways to produce the information required for democratic life”.

Finally, since some consider mass media as the fourth power, we can be astonished by the virtual anarchy that characterizes its modes of expression. This is probably quite unpleasant, but every power in democracy must be analyzed and defined. If we put aside the different hierarchies in the editorial rooms, where authority is not always exerted in terms of deontological criteria, the limits of media power become blurry.

This book is teeming with examples of mistakes made by conventional media without the application of any kind of sanction. One of the ways of undermining the democracy of the gullible would be to undertake a deep meditation about how to deal with the fourth power. It is neither feasible nor desirable to think in a political tutelage; that would be a huge democratic setback. By contrast, the possibility of being sanctioned by your own peers, as is the case in other professions where they have accepted the idea of self-regulation of power. Sportsmen, for instance, who often are much maligned, belong to a more deontologically organized group not that of journalists (has cyclist Lance Armstrong that paid the price?). As everyone can understand, the aim is to preserve everyone’s freedom by restraining a power that has shown several times that it can become dictatorial.

Everybody makes mistakes, but when those mistakes perpetuate, they are expressed in accordance to predictable schemes and can have serious consequences for people or for economic interests, and then those mistakes become faults. It should be possible to peacefully discuss the way of limiting the probabilities that those faults appear in our public space.

Even if journalists are individuals just like the rest, their responsibility ranks above the average.

4.9. A new form of scientific communication

Just as every Saturday, you go out to do some shopping in your supermarket of choice; you are on the lookout for a good deal. You need to buy some coffee; one brand proposes a 33% reduction, while the other (that you like just as much) proposes an additional 50% of coffee. Which offer do you like the most?

According to an experimental study [CHE 12], it seems that most of us are persuaded that the second offer is more interesting, when they are strictly equivalent. In these conditions, 73% of buyers chose the second offer over the first offer. All the merchants of the world will know how to take advantage of this information. They will try to benefit from the banal and flawed state of our minds. We could call this technique cognitive marketing because it involves inciting an idea that will make a product more appealing for ordinary logic. Surely, there are more noble ambitions to conceive for these communication techniques that reckon with the natural propensities of our minds. We can convene them as a tool for defending methodical thinking on the cognitive market.

In many radio or television debates that talk about risk issues, paranormal phenomena, astrology or other adulterated products, we often have the impression that the experts are led to argumentative impasses from which they can no longer escape. These impasses may come from the perception of low probabilities, amazing coincidences, misunderstood proportionality ratios etc. the experts often come only with their expertise, thinking that will be enough. In a perfect world where arguments would be naturally assessed with regard to their relevance, that would certainly be enough. This is not the case, even less so in the current conditions of the cognitive market. If the bogus sometimes defeats the truth in the public space, it is because in certain situations with structures, certainly specific but rather frequent, it can count on the support of our mind’s normal function. The mental illusions that come with it, and which we surrender to, can, as we have seen, disappear according to the way we change their mode of exposure.

I think that under current circumstances, those who define the characteristics of the democracy of the gullible justify the need for this cognitive marketing to give the public an expression of science as a tool that helps ordinary logic to recognize the quality of its argumentation and, therefore, to take a distance from deceptive reasoning. This does not call for lying and manipulation to convince, but only for realistically judging the way in which debates happen today in public space, and allow for open debate, even when faced with the natural propensities of our mind. How can we introduce neutral arguments and data that in public debate are almost systematically distorted by cognitive biases, used consciously or not for a militant purpose?

The aim is to create a foundation for a new way of communication; it would be necessary, if it is to be done right, to dedicate a whole book to the subject. I only want to suggest here that it is a feasible way of action with the virtue, in contrast with the required pedagogic adjustments that I mentioned in section 4.7, of having an immediate effect.

It is necessary, for the best course of action, to identify the most prominent elements of the activist’s argumentation and those of them that are the most ingrained and that seem the most credible to the citizens who are wary of these technologies. In other words, it is a question of detecting what the cognitive products that are widely known in the market are. We must then determine the faulty cognitive foundation of these arguments and see how they can be presented so that exchanges on these questions are more reasonable.

For example, Gigerenzer [GIG 09, pp. 82–83] shows that communication with regard to detection of breast cancer can be done by means of very different presentations. We can say, on one hand, that detection through mammography reduces by 25% the risk of breast cancer deaths. This figure means that for every 1,000 screened women, three will die from breast cancer, while for 1,000 who were not, four will die (thus, 25% will be actually saved). It is fair to say today, on the other hand, that the reduction of risk equals one for every 1,000. Indeed, as we just saw it, a woman out of 1,000 will be saved due to a breast cancer detection test. It is easy to understand, depending on how they introduce information of this or that other manner. The impact, in terms of public opinion, will not be the same, yet none of these representations is a lie.

Those in charge of enlightenment have not become aware that their ineptitude in terms of cognitive marketing made them lose fragments of the market. It is true, that this market changed structurally and some of the rules that I tried to describe in this work only emerge through observation.

4.10. A new militancy

It is not enough that a cognitive proposition is correctly presented to be available in satisfactory manner for public space. The exposition of an idea in the cognitive market largely depends on the motivation of the suppliers and relays the Olson Effect. The Internet is, from this standpoint, a strange democracy; some vote thousands of times, others never. Thus, orthodox knowledge paradoxically finds itself on the minority side in many fields. I do not see the scientific world catching up with this problem and getting consequently involved step-by-step in this competition. I do not even think that it is desirable for the general interest, since this would necessarily rob precious time for the production of knowledge. Thus, what is missing, and which opens a path to finding solutions for this situation, is a relay network for orthodox knowledge. Such a network does exist but it is too weak; it is much more, at any rate, than the network which organized in the past the coordination of scholarly societies in our territory. The site of the National Council of Higher Education and Research identifies more than 119 scholarly societies today, while there were less than 1,000 in 1900. What is certainly more serious is that, since the year 2000, we have noticed an ageing of the members of scholarly societies and a lack of interest of the youngest categories for their activities. Maybe it is only a coincidence, but it turns out that this date also corresponds to the diffusion of the Internet network. This hypothesis is difficult to test, but we often have the impression that this network has taken charge of spreading scientific information (or intends to). One of the important stakes seems to me is to think of the manner in which these popular science networks can be reactivated. I think that teachers at elementary and secondary school could play a major role because they are competent and still benefit from a form of authority and trust necessary for such initiative. One of the chief solutions that we find for this problem is first of all micro social; it is by communicating with fellowmen, known individuals, that the feeling of mistrust can recede inch-by-inch. Several experiences have shown that the fact of having an emotional link with the broadcaster of some information, message or belief tends to give him more credibility. Shérif and Hovland [SHE 61] stress the fact that individuals tend to overrate the talents of individuals they are fond of, or that they love; on the other hand, they will underrate the talents of those whom they do not appreciate. That is why it is so important to give an almost familiar personification when possible, to the science speech in order to throw away the ghosts of a corrupted science, guilty of endless conflicts of interests and sold out to international capitalism. It is the time that every competent actor, at whatever level he is, undertook the battle of influence on the cognitive market in favor of the democracy of enlightenment and methodical thinking to send packing, everywhere, the scholars of illusion. Many of our contemporaries are currently aware of this flood of paradoxical credulity in contemporary societies; sometimes, they ask themselves “what can be done?”. The answer is simple, you do not have to do more than militant believers, those who have the motivation to occupy the empty space that we leave in the information market; all you have to do is to find and elicit the motivation to answer them. There is no need for some to make a crusade out of this, just a sufficiently large number of individuals of good will think that enough is enough and it is time to answer back. Where? Everywhere. On blogs, forums, social networks … wherever the bogus takes advantage of the indifference of ordinary citizens. It is of central importance, since, as we have seen, the structuration of the information market has an impact on the undecided. Yet, we are all occasionally uncertain on a number of issues. If this new variety of militancy could take shape, it would prove this classic sentence wrong: every despotism always knows how to enjoy the apathy of the good people.