The new age of gullicism
Adam Serwer on Monday took on our “bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism” in The Atlantic. “Gullicism” is his shorthand for this explosion of a variety of epistemic closure. Or is that “epistemic explosure”?
Serwer writes (gift link):
Many Americans believe that vaccines are unsafe, but will jab themselves full of performance enhancers. They think seed oils cause chronic disease, but beef tallow is healthy. They’ll say you can’t trust federally insured banks, but you can trust the millionaires who want you to invest in their volatile vaporware crypto tokens. They think food additives are toxic but support an administration removing all restrictions on pumping pollutants into the air and water. They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.
A carnival of mountebanks (if that’s the right collective noun) exploits the suckers born every minute, as our sitting president surely has tens of millions. Vaccine conspiracists are behind the measles outbreaks across the country, Serwer notes, a disease thought eradicated 26 years ago.
It’s unnerving to watch friends and relations disappear down the conspiracy rabbit hole and become gullicists. The schoolteacher who “did her own research” in online threads and recommends stockpiling supplements for warding off Covid. The once liberal nurse whose Facebook posts suddenly fill with vaccine conspiracy “truths” from right-wing websites. All enhanced by the confidence in knowing that the rugged, fiercely independent You know more than the duplicitous Them. Gullicism knows no partisanship.
(I’m still waiting for someone on the left to produce a perpwith the means, motive, and opportunity to steal Ohio for Bush in 2004, or for Rudy Giuliani to produce the volumes of proof he repeatedly claimed to have that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump.)
Serwer is on my page when he writes:
Part of what’s going on here is that people want a simple explanation for their troubles in a complicated world. Autism? It’s vaccines. Disease? Some foods are “poison.” Trouble with your kid? Must be brainwashed by … novels? Video games? Rap music? (This one depends on the decade.) The One True Reason trains a mind not only to reject complexity but to accept bigotry—which is why it’s so ideal for reactionary politics. No housing? Immigrants. No job? Immigrants. Inflation? Immigrants. Immigrants? It’s the Jews.
Lately, however, even some conservatives have begun to lament this monster they’ve helped create. The right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who peddled garbage about African immigrants eating pets, recently complained that “the right’s brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy and algorithm chasing.” But conservatives built that vat. Using legal and political pressure, they pressed the platforms to eschew any consistent or responsible content moderation in the hopes they would serve as frictionless distributors of conservative propaganda. They got their wish.
My decade-old analogy involves waking up helpless in the trunk of an out-of-control car.
But it’s Serwer’s reference to frictionlessness that’s also familiar. At The Ink, Anand Giridharadas writes about the culture of elite impunity and, especially, immunity from respecting any limits at all. “These are men who do not like resistance. Friction. Pushback. Any obstacle to the sprawl of their ideas and needs.” he writes. Including women who might have ideas and power of their own. That’s what makes young girls so attractive to the Epstein class:
It is a different experience of life never to have to wait for your turn on the ski lift. Never to have to contend for space in the overhead locker with another person. Never to have to be charming to get into a restaurant. After a time, one imagines, all the not-having-to-dos will change you. You will become less capable of exerting yourself in ways you once did without a care. And one can even dig deep and muster the empathy to appreciate that, the smoother and easier and more frictionless many parts of your life become, the more intolerable is whatever continues to resist you.
Like having to pursue and woo a grown woman.
There is a politeness culture, Giridharadas writes in another installment, “where disagreement is treated like ugly tribalism rather than intellectual engagement.” But the need for frictionlessness is a culture among grifters and gullicists in general, and not isolated to the rich.
I observed it while studying the New Age Movement of the 1990s. One vendor at a New Age trade show might offer a (non-FDA approved or tested) device that would reduce wrinkles with electrical stimulation. The vendor in the next booth might sell magic amulets (made from recycled circuit boards) that they claimed removed the harmful effects of electrical fields. Neither questioned the other’s placebo. It would be bad form. Like questioning the young girls hanging around Epstein giving massages on demand.