The View from a Drawbridge

Yes, I know that “stupidized” is not actually a word. Well, it is now. If Shakespeare could invent (or at least be the first to document) over 1700 English words, I figure the lexicon is fair game for all of us if we can reasonably explain our additions. And if ever there was a time to introduce the words “stupidize”, “stupidized”, and “stupidization”, that time is now. (I’d even throw in “stupidizers”, if only I were sure who “they” were and could be convinced that they come from some cohesive conspiratorial group, but I don’t buy that.)

I define stupidization as the act of getting people to accept increasing levels of illogical, improbable, or irrational things. And the scary thing is that none of us appear to be immune, regardless of education, faith, or political predisposition. I’ve fallen for it myself on more than one occasion. (I wanted to make it clear from the beginning that for once I’m not intending to target any particular group, here.)

Sometimes, when information is getting thrown at us at an unprecedented rate, our critical thinking skills become exhausted. After a while, we want to stop listening to that little voice inside our heads that is whispering, “But that doesn’t make sense…” because it’s so much easier to just say, “Yeah. Okay. Why not?”

Stupidization, as far as I can tell, comes in several distinct forms. I’ll describe to you the ones I’ve identified, and then I’ll reveal my theories as to why this is happening here and now. But by way of a starting point, I’ll tell you that I first started forming my Theory of Stupidization because of this image.

It was posted to a group on Facebook that I used to enjoy. But I was souring on the group as it had been posting increasingly improbable imagery. This one, in particular, was the last straw for me, because I knew that there was no way on earth that this was real. When I saw it, my comment was, “AI and forced perspective.”

This was months ago, and I still get outraged responses to that comment every now and then. The comments range anywhere from how stupid I must be, to how sick and tired they are of people’s kneejerk reactions that everything is AI, to I must be a troll, to various ways of saying I’m harshing their mellow. (Boo hoo.)

At first, I tried to reason with people. I explained that, while the wingspan of the Andean Condor can get up to 10 feet 10 inches, and it is the largest bird of prey in the world, an exceptionally tall one only gets up to about 4 feet 3 inches. So unless this guy is extremely short, he’s not standing that close to the bird. Also, there’s something off about the guy’s feet.

At the time, if you tried to find any other images of a condor standing with a human being, anywhere on the internet, all that popped up was this image. And if you were to find such an image, that bird would definitely not be standing placidly and indifferently with his or her back turned toward the human being in question. Don’t you find that odd? Condors are not warm, fuzzy, human-loving creatures. (Now, of course, you can find human/condor images all over the place. Once people realized the clickbait value of them, they cropped up like mushrooms.)

Because of this, I’m calling this category of stupidization, “If only wishing made it so.” It’s basically those things that any rational, educated person knows can’t be true, but they want it to be true so badly that they accept it. I first came across it when I was in my early 20’s. I was standing in a grocery checkout line and saw a tabloid headline that I’ll never forget. It still makes me laugh. It said, “World War II Bomber Found on the Surface of the Moon!!!”

You can still find web pages that talk about that one. But I mean, oh, for the love of God. Seriously?

Another memorable one was the time I saw an ad about Sokoblovsky Farms, a place that supposedly bred petite lap giraffes. A lot of people fell for that one, including a lot of my friends and relatives when I posted it on my Facebook page as a joke, never thinking anyone would think otherwise. I’d love to have a pet like that, but I live in the real world. (I blogged about it here.)

One topic I have learned to avoid is that of teacup pigs. They’re sooooo cute. Who wouldn’t want one? But folks, they don’t stay tiny and cute forever. They can get up to 60 pounds and 16 inches tall. They’re smart. They get bored and will chew on anything, and can live for 15 years. They need the space to root and wallow and forage. They are pigs.

So if you’re looking for a cute little darling that will wander around your house like a docile version of a puppy for the rest of its days, you are in cloud cuckoo land. But oh my God, try telling that to someone who has their heart set on one. They get furious! “You’re wrong! They’re called teacup pigs for a reason!!!”  (Yes, and that reason is market value.)

The next category of stupidization is, “The facts are true, but the images are not.”  An excellent example of this came from a friend’s Facebook page (Hi, Jen!). She got it from the “Ancient Footprints” Facebook page, which she says purports to be a media/news company, natural history museum, and a historical tour agency, but it doesn’t attach to a real place or business. That page presented information about a 1,000-year-old Native American canoe taken from Lake Waccamaw in North Carolina. The story is true. But the image is most definitely not.

Here’s the actual canoe:

Here’s the canoe Ancient Footprints wants you to think came up:

What I find heartbreaking about this category of stupidization is that the canoe story is exciting and archeologically important, but this fake image makes the reality seem boring, insignificant, and disappointing. It robs the actual find of the attention (and possibly the funding) that it deserves.

These last two categories are the ones I tend to fall for the most.

“It sounds outrageous but plausible to me.”

I have to admit, to my everlasting shame, that I fell for the “ICE is buying guided missile warheads” story. Why? Because ICE is despicable. ICE attacks people on American soil, beats them, tear gasses them, drags them away from their families with no due process. Is it really that big a leap to believe they’d be allowed to up their armament to that degree?

I was horrified (and frankly, as someone who sometimes peacefully protests, really scared) by that story, but I could believe it. Fortunately, as I wrote in this post, that turned out to be totally untrue. It was just a paperwork coding error. (Which is even more plausible, because, hey, we’re talking about the federal government, after all.) Unfortunately, what they probably bought instead was a whole lot more explosive distraction devices (flash bombs) and more teargas. So it’s not the best news, but at least we don’t have to anticipate a warhead being launched at us. Yet.

A similar, believable, yet untrue story was that Governor DeSantis prevented a pride protest by making the site of the protest, a drawbridge in Jacksonville, Florida “mysteriously and inexplicably” get stuck up in the air when the protest was supposed to occur. I was able to debunk that one myself, and did so in this blog post, because I have inside sources, and also know how Florida drawbridge bureaucracy works after having been in it for 14 years. It kind of killed me to debunk that one, because I can’t stand DeSantis, and find it easy to believe that he’s capable of all things heinous. But the truth is the truth.

The last category, the one I hate having to become jaded about, I call “Thank you for restoring my faith in humanity.”

At a time when all of us are polarized and on edge, and feeling uncertain about the future, it feels good to read stories about over-the-top decency and kindness. We want to be able to feel good about human nature. We are seeing people’s worst instincts coming out to play, and it’s scary and horrifying, and we’d give anything to think that the hate and the violence and the destruction and the greed is the exception rather than the rule. We want to go back to a time when we thought that all people were basically good at their core. So we get sucked in by stories of generosity and heroism. If it’s someone who has suffered themselves and is now rising above it, or someone we already know and love, then so much the better!

Sadly, a lot of these stories can be easily debunked. The people who create them are counting on the fact that we really don’t want to debunk them. We don’t want to become that cynical. But if we want truth, we need to.

For example, there was a recent story going around about Barbra Streisand. (Poor Barbra seems to get a lot of these. Probably because she’s a very private person and tends not to generate a lot of legitimate news fodder.)

In this particular story, she quietly arrives at a Londan hospital to visit a frail and pale Céline Dion. The way the story unfolds, all smarmy and set to maximum tear-jerk mode, is a huge tip off that it was fake. It goes on like this:

“Céline’s eyes fluttered open, her lips trembling as if searching for words. Without speaking, Barbra pulled a chair close and began to sing softly — “The Way We Were.”
“Her golden voice, tender yet strong, filled the sterile room with warmth, moving the nurses nearby to tears. A single tear traced down Céline’s cheek, as though the song itself reached into her soul.”

Um, forgive me, but how would the writer of this story know all this if Barbra as being so discreet? And if this actually happened, don’t you think that writer would have sold the story to a major newspaper or magazine, where they would have fact checked it (and hopefully improved the writing style? But no. You can’t find the story on any legitimate news site.

Another question to ask yourself is why Céline and Barbra are both wearing two different shirts in the photos? Did Barbra spend the night there, singing her lullabies? And don’t you find it odd that Barbra is sporting the exact same hairdo she wore in The Prince of Tides, a movie which came out in 1991?

And then there’s this interview that says she learned guitar to play a song in A Star is Born, but cut the scene because she felt vulnerable. And if she was trying to be discreet, and with a voice like hers, why would she even need to bring a guitar? And “The Way We Were” is an odd choice for a hospital visit. It’s guaranteed to make you cry, and it basically says, “Yep. You’re dead meat, girl.” If I had been Céline, I’d have said, thanks for trying, but GTFO.

But sooooo many people love this treacly story! They want it to be true so badly that they’re willing to overlook anything, everything, in order to believe it. They don’t even mind the purple prose that sounds like it’s the love child of ChatGPT and a Harlequin Romance. Sigh.

At least I didn’t fall for that one. But I did fall for this one for about a half day. It’s the story of Hank Wilcox, the Water Grandfather. It’s the story of an old man who had turned bitter after his son died in Afghanistan. He supposedly was sitting on his porch at his farm during a heat wave, watching some immigrants toiling in the cornfield nextdoor, sweating like crazy, and one of them was a heavily pregnant woman. So he puts a water station out in front of his house, with a sign that says it’s free, no papers needed.

He defied local authorities. He defied his neighbors. He stood by his principles. I fell in love with Hank that instant.

But then we’re supposed to believe that on the “hottest day in his county’s history” (112 degrees) this 71-year-old was out fixing a fence post. (Yeah, right.) And he sees the pregnant woman collapse. He apparently saved her with his water and his shade. Without Hank, she’d have died within 10 minutes. The paramedics said so.

Next thing you know, poor Hank’s farm is swarming with TV trucks. (Which is doubly amazing when you discover that there are no news stories about him anywhere. Maybe they just came for the ice water.)

And the story came with this picture. God, how I wanted this story to be true. But who’s going to sit there snapping pictures at a time like that. And what the hell is Hank looking at? And… why does the woman only have 4 fingers?

So, Why is this happening? I can think of many reasons. I’m sure you can come up with many more. But here’s my short list.

• Because it can. Now, with AI, ChatGPT, Deep Fakes and the like, it’s easy to make fake images and videos to suck people in. That isn’t going to go away. It’s a disappointing fact of modern life. Question everything you see. Listen to your tiny inner voice.
• Because content creators are desperate to create clickbait. The more you click, the more they earn. So yeah, you’re going to want to read more about some crazy story, right? Yup. And as long as people profit from that, it will continue to happen.
• But the most nefarious reason falls under the umbrella of opiate of the Masses. Now, before you accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, please know that I do not believe that there is one coordinated, diabolical cabal out there that is trying to brainwash us all. But much can be gained by overwhelming us with information so that our gullibility floats to the surface. The bottom line is, if we believe you, you can control us. On 23 January, 2016, President Trump actually said that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. Such is the loyalty and gullibility of his base. And he’s proven (and banked on) that, time and time again. They’ll inject themselves with bleach, refuse vaccines that he himself takes, and are convinced that any news that Trump declares to be fake is fake. I wish I could find the old interview I saw where he expressed his surprise that he could say anything and people would believe him. That was early on. Now he embraces that superpower, and there’s no turning back.
• Others may be using this stupidization technique as a sociological study, or a kind of a trial balloon. What types of things are people most willing to fall for? How do we have to phrase things for people to want to accept them? How outrageous can our declarations become before people stop believing? Those kinds of people are learning from our stupidization. To influence elections? To part us from our money? To convince us to join their side on an issue? To influence us in some other way? I don’t know. But rest assured that this stuff is not going on just for the fun of it.

So, you heard it here first. We’re being stupidized. Let’s all do our best not to relax our grip on reality. Because the alternative won’t be pretty.

So how do we fight against this trend? Critical thinking is key. That’s not being taught in schools anymore. We need to teach our children this skill at home, and model it for them, too. Read all you can about the subject. As you can tell from the following blog posts, this is kind of a soap box issue for me. Once you start learning to question things, and know what to look for, it becomes easier.

Urban Legends, Falsehoods, Satire and Lies

How Easily We’re Taken In

Doubt Tempers Truth

Caveat Lector

Questions for a Conspiracy Theorist

Unquestioned Answers

So, Dear Reader, what types of stories have you fallen for? What do you do to avoid stupidization? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

_____________________________________________

Beware, also, of stupidization’s evil twin, called Products Too Good to Be True. If a product online seems too good to be true, it most likely is. Brand new, state of the art telescope for $15.00 because the company is going out of business? (They’ll take your money and disappear.) “Other companies won’t sell this laser because it’s too strong!” (Other companies won’t sell this laser because it’s a piece of crap.) Absolutely gorgeous cable knit sweater, on sale now, just for you, for $39.00! (Er… How? A lot of them will say it’s because they’re going out of business and want to clear out their inventory. Pfft.)

I fell for something similar to that last one, back when these types of scams were just getting started. Gorgeous shirt. Cost next to nothing. Made of a Velvety, luxurious material. What I got was a polyester shirt, with a faded screen print of the item shown in the picture. The picture had been scraped off a legitimate site somewhere.

When I tried to get my money back, they offered me 30 percent, or I could buy another one of their products. If I didn’t want to do that, I’d have to return the item, at my expense, to their office in China (which would have cost me more than the price of the shirt), and once they inspected it for damage, they’d give me a full refund. Now, mind you, the warehouse it shipped from was out of New Jersey, but I couldn’t send it there. Oh, no. Finally, I just did a credit card dispute and got my money back that way. These Chinese companies turn out to be storage sheds on Chinese docks, and they disappear as soon as the word has gotten around sufficiently that people stop buying their products altogether.

But that was a good lesson to learn, because if not, I’d be sucked in by this newest version of that company, called Wrenoin. As you can see form the image below, all their products are stunningly beautiful and extremely affordable. But if you do your homework, you find out you get that same polyester shirt with the faded print, and an impossible refund process that I experienced all those years ago.

It’s a pity, too, because I’d buy everything in their catalog if it was legit. It might take more work to be legit, but they’d be able to stay open for a long time. But by doing your homework about Wrenoin, you’ll see that the negative reviews are spreading through the internet (including the video below), so anyone who does their homework will run, not walk, away from this company. I’m guessing they’ll be belly up this time next year, and pop up under a different name.

These places make me bitter, because until very recently I was desperately poor, and I couldn’t have nice things. (And if these sweaters really do exist out there, somewhere, they’re probably more like $500.00, so let’s face it, I still couldn’t have them.) So when I see a brief shining opportunity like this, I want to jump on it with both feet. So these people are preying on the poor who would like to have something really nice to wear for once in their lives, only to wind up receiving a piece of sh*t. It’s so cruel.

So, yeah, nice sweaters, right? DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM WRENOIN!!!!! You can’t say I didn’t warn you.