A vulnerability exists in individuals who are especially receptive to learning, which could allow an attacker to flood them with information that could induce an excess of self-doubt and disunity. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take partial control of an affected mind.
A few months after Hitler took over as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Bertrand Russell responded with the kind of violence that is typical of philosophers: with a scathing essay. He called this essay The Triumph of Stupidity, and I want to expand on just two sentences from it. The first is one of his most famous quotes. Speaking of the new regime, he lamented that "the fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
The phenomenon he was talking about is now known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect after Justin Kruger and David Dunning who have been measuring it experimentally since the 1990s. They say the inspiration for their research was the story of an aspiring bank robber named McArthur Wheeler:
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. "But I wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras.[Source]Dunning had learned about Wheeler's story from an article by Michael A. Fuoco in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. According to the detectives Fuocco interviewed, Wheeler was "shocked" to see himself in the surveillance pictures because he had actually gone to some trouble to test the juice trick after an acquaintance had told him about it:
"He said the lemon juice was burning his face and his eyes, and he was having trouble (seeing) and had to squint," said Sgt. Wally Long of the robbery squad. But the pain was worth the pleasure Wheeler felt when he snapped a Polaroid picture of himself and he wasn't anywhere to be seen.[Source]How Wheeler managed to convince himself that he had photographic evidence of his invisibility is anyone's guess, but Dunning and Kruger realised that...
when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine.[Source]Dunning and Kruger along with others in their research group carried out a number of studies exploring this phenomenon and discovered that, for a wide range of skills, nearly everyone overestimates their ability, but especially the very worst performers, who they argue "grossly overestimate their performances because their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits".[Source].
The familiar part in all this is that the more one learns about a subject, the more one realizes how much more one has yet to learn about it. The questions just multiply. With that in mind, it's not too difficult to see how a person might move from a black-and-white understanding of something to one assailed by questions and doubts. And if it's about knowledge rather than intelligence, then even people who are perfectly capable and intelligent should find themselves believing things are simpler than they are before they've learned enough about an unfamiliar subject to get a sense of its complexities.
Unfortunately, it's possible to induce doubts in a person's mind about a subject, even when they have a good understanding of it simply by drawing excessive attention to minor details. In the Coen Brothers film The Man Who Wasn't There, big-name defence lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shalhoub) describes how he intends to apply this principle in defence of his client (Frances McDormand) to obscure the damning evidence against her in a fog of detail. His plan involves simply looking ever more closely at the evidence to induce doubts in the minds of the jury. "The more you look", he says, "the less you really know".
As a character, Riedenschneider embodies many of the points discussed above. By confidently running off a series of inaccurate statements about what the Uncertainty Principle is, who proposed it, and what Einstein's attitude was towards it, he embodies Russell's archetype of a person who is at once ignorant and cocksure. But if simply drawing attention to details is enough to sow doubts, then we have every reason to believe that the strategy he describes is effective enough to warrant raising some mental defences against it.
We can see Riedenschneider's Uncertainty Principle in the tactics of American creationists for example who would like to convince school boards that the evidence for evolution is vague and open to interpretation. They typically do this by raising various questions that have perfectly adequate answers which they proceed to ignore, shamelessly. They are essentially just moving their mouths a lot, which makes the whole thing resemble a discussion. Darwin himself encountered opponents who apparently preferred to foster doubts about evolution than to give the evidence an honest hearing, and he reacted in terms that were strikingly close to those Russell would later use:
It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.[Source]****
The second sentence that I'd like to draw attention to from Russell's The Triumph of Stupidity is less often quoted. Immediately following his lament about the stupid being cocksure and the intelligent being full of doubt, he redoubled his lament with the observation that "even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum [i.e., a remedy] are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points".
By virtue of their education, we can expect educated people to have a greater awareness of the details that divide them, and getting them to band together under a common cause can indeed be like herding cats. So knowledge isn't always power. Not only can it paralyse people with doubts, but it can also fuel political divisions. Nothing about this should lead us to prefer ignorance, though. While knowledgeable types are pre-occupied with navel-gazing and squabbling, their less educated counterparts will be even worse off as they confidently march into the abyss. Ignorance leaves people less equipped to detect flaws in arguments, and more fanatical in their defence of them, both as individuals who overestimate their own competence, and as groups with very low levels of internal dissent. All of this points to an inherent trade-off between the rationality of political units on the one hand and their strength on the other, essentially confining variation to a continuum between impotent reason and rudderless strength. The risk is always that the ignorant will be credulous enough to come under the spell of narrow interests, who will steer them by propagandistic means. The problem with the slogan "ignorance is strength" isn't that it's untrue.
The year after The Triumph of Stupidity was published, Leni Riefenstahl made a film which its executive producer (Adolf Hitler) chose to call Triumph of the Will. The parallelism in the titles makes it seem all the more like Russell's essay was commenting on the future, but what's also fascinating for anyone interested in understanding the mindsets behind radically opposing views is that the two works were fundamentally about the same thing, except Riefenstahl's film appeared to be celebrating the very thing Russell was deploring. The film, now widely considered a masterpiece of propaganda, contains some striking examples of a naively confident people speaking and marching with unified purpose at the Nuremberg rally of 1934. The Germans who attended this rally supported Hitler with great enthusiasm, against their own interests, to embrace a dictatorship that severely curtailed their freedoms and which used them as cannon fodder in one of the most depraved wars in history.
It's a familiar refrain, but education really is likely to be an antidote to fanaticism of this sort, but not just because it gives people an opportunity to correct whatever misconceptions they may have about a subject. It can also make them more cautious in the claims they make in general - the complete opposite of the proud absolutism we find among fanatics and fundamentalists.
The problem is that selective education is also likely to be a very effective weapon against people who are already quite 'burdened' with knowledge. Along with paralysing people with doubts, the use of wedge issues to divide and conquer political opponents is a case where educating people (specifically about the issues that divide them) can be used to weaken political units. What's worse is that this should be the most effective against those who are the most receptive to learning.
A genuine triumph would be to bring rationality and strength into alignment by somehow altering the dynamics so that one doesn't always trade off the other.
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