Ignorance Chic

Humans, as an Internet friend often notes, are funny critters. While we are far less instinct-informed than other higher mammals, we nevertheless have certain predilections born of evolution. Among those proclivities is the desire to stand out, if for no other reason than to have a better chance at attracting the best mates.

In our modern, civilized First World, where the daily battle for survival is no longer an issue, some of these predilections produce disappointing results. The Internet, a world-changing tool of information access, has caused such disappointments to metastasize.

I write of people ignoring simple and plain truths in favor of embracing and peddling "secret knowledge" alternatives. This will include such as 9/11 and lunar landing truthers, but it goes way beyond conspiracy theorizing.

Consider the phenomenon of the flat-earther. As political commentator Konstantin Kisin noted,

There's probably more flat-earthers now than in the fifteenth century. God bless the Internet.

Humans have known that the Earth is round (an oblate spheroid, to be more precise) for thousands of years. Anyone with good vision watching a ship sail away will note that its hull disappears before its masts. Basic physics and the premise of gravity, taught in grade school, affirms this reality.

Yet we have literally millions (per one study, as many as one American in six) who are not fully convinced, and a nontrivial subset of them actively reject the sphericity of the Earth.

The stupidity is enough to make claw at my face.

Why would people do this? I'm going to call it "ignorance chic." If you want to stand out, if you want to present as a cool kid and "hipper than thou," if you want to feel special rather than just one of eight billion, and if you want to find an in-group acceptance, then running with some contrarian idea, no matter lack of evidence, and no matter overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It spans the political spectrum, too. Before COVID made anti-vax a generalized hesitance rather than about a wholly debunked connection to childhood autism, it was the province of the Left, just as young-earth creationism is a province of the Right.

The latest form of ignorance chic, and it's horrifying, is the denial of Hamas atrocities on 10/7. People in the US are ripping down pictures of the hostages that Hamas took because, at least in some cases, they've embraced the assertion that the hostage-taking is a Zionist lie. Ditto for the mass murders of children and babies and the rapes of civilian women - all of which are not only documented, they were documented by the Hamas terrorists themselves, and broadcast with pride to their families.

Then there are those who acknowledge the atrocities and the hostages, but nevertheless side with Hamas (though they're often careful to voice solidarity with "The Palestinians" or "Palestine," ignoring the widespread hatred of Jews throughout that population and the fact that Gazans elected Hamas to power). They peddle the "open air prison camp," "apartheid state," and other catchphrases that have been provided to them. Some might remember the Morton Downey, Jr. show, and the host's use of the phrase "pablum pokers" to describe people who brainlessly regurgitate what they've been spoon-fed. It's a coarser iteration of Orwell's sheep, who bleated and repeated phrases given to them by Napoleon the pig.

Ignorance chic is also a sufficient explanation for the continued embrace of Marxism by the young, no matter that it killed two hundred million people last century.

People can be incredibly creative and contortive in fitting explanations to their preferred conclusions. We have a a remarkable ability to find patterns and assign agency, an ability that served us evolutionarily, but that also often leads us astray. Twenty-four hundred years ago, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and some of their pals came up with the celestial sphere model of the cosmos. Wildly complicated, it is a classic (pun intended) example of motivated reasoning meant to support a predetermined conclusion - in that case, that the Earth was the center around which everything revolved.

We all know today that the Earth revolves around the Sun (if you want to be pedantic, they both orbit a common barycenter),

and that the Sun is one of about 100 billion stars in a rotating spiral galaxy we call the Milky Way.

That this is mundane in comparison to the conceit that the Earth is the center of everything stood in the way of truth for centuries.

Conceit and its cousin narcissism are at the heart of ignorance chic. Almost as bad are the people who bleat "I trust the science!" as a rebuttal to differences of opinion on certain matters. Apart from the usual retort that science is a method of inquiry, not a "thing," many who use that rebuttal are simply engaging in appeals to their preferred authorities rather than refuting with facts, evidence, or well-supported theories. But, that's the Internet for you, where stupidity reigns paramount, and "cooler than thee" is what satisfies.

Post-modernism deserves a mention here as well, with its “there are no universal truths apart from individuals’ experiences” relativism nonsense.

Vehemence of assertion, no matter how stupid, can sometimes lead those who hear it to back off, to grant a smidgen of "maybe it's possible" to that assertion, and then get inundated with some cockamamie construct that “proves” the nonsense. That's because most of us want to be nice, to get along, and not to be as abrasive as the braying jackasses who proclaim "the earth is flat, you've been lied to all your life."

At some point, however, a rational person has to simply tell the flat-earthers and the other reality-deniers out there "stop being stupid, you are wrong." If they persist, then they deserve to be mocked and called morons. Mockery is its own form of shunning, and it can be a powerful antidote to ignorance chic.