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Empire Of Lies
Why the human brain prefers to be duped rather than try to engage with reality
According to a couple of fairly recent studies, lies spread six times faster across the Internet than factual information. Moreover, people cleave far more strongly to lies than to reality-based information.
This is because, for nearly all of our evolutionary history, calories were scarce and uncertain. Our brains thus evolved to do as little active thinking as possible, because attempting to think burns enormous amounts of calories which for the most part were more usually needed to power muscles in order to flee from predators or forage for food. As a result, our brains overwhelmingly prefer simple over complex because simple is easier to cope with and requires fewer calories to be expended on conscious thought.
Lies can be infinitely more simple than reality, because reality is invariably highly complex. We are thus perfectly evolved to be susceptible to lies provided they are suitably infantile. This fact about human nature has always been implicitly understood by cynical demagogues; today our wondrous technologies ensure that lies are now the currency of power everywhere.
There is no real difference between the lies the Kremlin pumps into the heads of ordinary gullible Russians and the lies the US Republican…
