Every day we get hit with many ads that are untruthful either in an outright sense or because they are designed to make us think something untrue. There are product claims, of course, but also all these subtle implied messages, like smoking this cigarette or drinking this beer or driving this car will make us healthy and young and attractive, and similar others will have sex with us. Depending on how you count, there could certainly be a hundred such mistruths every day.
I think we accept this as an ugly given, and think of it as everybody’s individual job to process all this deceit without any problems. In fact society so trains us in this way that I think asking this question seems a little silly.
But evolutionarily, living a lifetime with a hundred mistruths a day would be a pretty surprising thing, and we are very social animals.
Has this hurt us all in some deep unacknowledged way? Cheapened our views, required us all to be cynics first?
Well, I think that looking at the origin of Caveat Emptor can put things in perceptive; to begin with, the effects and warnings about the lies and deceit out there are very old, even older than the classic “Caveat Emptor”:
Seems to me that we have survived for a long time with a lot of misleading info out there. If there is one thing though that I see that is different now than it was before is the fragmentation of the authorities that we use to check for who is giving us “the straight dope” on a product, service or an organization plan to follow. There are many places where one can find good information and they are mostly available now almost to everyone, but a solution like the Internet has also given us the capacity of misleading many.
I do recommend to read Carl Sagan and look at the advice of people that are more involved in the education others rather than being related to powerful interest groups. And always check your sources.
Humans are liars, going back million of years. Generally the more cooperative and social a species is the more deceptive behavior is encouraged game theory wise because successful deception brings higher rewards. Have things changed much, fundamentally? A snake oil salesman in the past would have to travel village to village, or maybe put an ad in a newspaper. Now he can put it on the internet for the whole world to see. Different tools is all.
Given how much BS people still swallow I don’t know if you can make the case we’re too cynical. Maybe in specific instances – opposition to GMOs, perhaps.
Naive cynicism is a thing, or a kind of smug cynicism where the person thinks they’re superior to all the fools who don’t know how things really work. This can lead to disengagement from the political sphere. I guess whether you think that’s good or bad depends on how cynical you are about the possibilities of change from below.
on a product, service or an organization plan to follow. There are many places where one can find good information and they are mostly available now almost to everyone, but a solution like the Internet has also given us the capacity of misleading many.