Collective Devolution: The Siren Song of Pseudoscience in the Digital Age
Of the all the provocative and deeply insightful things that Carl Sagan said over the course of his brilliant career, this bit from his 1997 book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, has always stood out to me as a particularly prescient and vital observation:
“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us-then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”
Perhaps Sagan could not have predicted the rapid proliferation of internet-enabled mobile devices and the astounding rise of social media, but the oft-lamented “echo chamber effect” that attends our continuous connectivity has certainly given quick root to his concerns.
What is a fear-mongering, under-informed populace turning to archaic thought patterns and behaviors if not a Twitter mob descending upon a trending topic?
One need only look at the comments on a viral article or video to get a glimpse of the Demons that haunt us.
Truly, one need only look at the shit that is going viral.
Confirmation Bias: Our Dear, Dear Friend
Armed with an exponentially growing ocean of data and nobody to enforce (or reward) high vetting standards, it’s really pretty easy to slip into consumption habits that reinforce whatever ideas have struck a chord — regardless of whether they have any basis in fact. This phenomenon is commonly known as confirmation bias, and it seems that ocean of information at our fingertips is only making it worse.
“Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that confirms that view while ignoring, or rejecting, information that casts doubt on it. Confirmation bias suggests that we don’t perceive circumstances objectively. We pick out those bits of data that make us feel good because they confirm our prejudices. Thus, we may become prisoners of our assumptions.” (Psychology Today)
So we have an emotional reaction to something, then we read a dubiously factual piece of writing about it that agrees with us, determine We Were Right, and thus our journey to self-imprisonment begins. HAVE A GREAT SUMMER!
Okay, so the decline of journalistic integrity as a whole has, by common admission, been happening at least since the days of the Simpson trial. Longstanding and well-respected national news outlets are certainly not immune. Rags like National Enquirer and The Globe have always represented the pure inanity end of the spectrum, but there’s another, newer outfit in town that veers off into pure snake oil. The cheeky mendacity of Weekly World News or even the Witches’ Almanac, the thing that makes them innocent and actually pretty fun to read, is nowhere to be found here. Science has taken a particularly bad beating. These publications are prone to perfidious untruths and manipulation of facts so egregious that it feels like high-octane gaslighting to anyone with an even nominal understanding of the subject.
Commonly they’ll start with a legitimate scientific concept like, say, the transference of quantum vibrations from photon particles to matter. That is to say, when light (like a sunbeam) comes into contact with an object (like a sidewalk or a glass of water), some of the energy (vibrations) contained in the light particles are transferred to the object, where it is expressed as heat. Matter has it’s own vibrational frequencies, generally expressed as sound (like the sonic boom of a shotgun or a mellifluous piece of music).
Quantum vibrations sounds kind of mystical, but it’s just a complicated way of describing everyday occurrences in the physical world.
Purveyors of pseudoscience, however, are masters at cherrypicking the mystical-sounding parts and remolding them to support whatever idea they’re out to promote. As for the rest of it, they simply ignore the stuff that doesn’t support their conclusions, depending on the reader’s ignorance and desired outcome to see them through the mist.
A popular one involves water molecules that have been exposed to sounds with varying emotional connotations—a Mozart symphony, for example, or someone uttering the words “I’ll kill you” — and then frozen into crystals. Images of the frozen water molecules post-exposure present a striking assortment of structural differences, which we are meant to understand as evidence that the emotional content of the sounds had a physical impact on the water.
Here, the observed physical effects of vibrational energy (in the form of sound waves) is conflated with the more esoteric concept of emotional energy. The conclusion thus drawn is that human consciousness has a physical effect on our surroundings.
It’s certainly an exciting idea. To find out that we’re all essentially telekinetic would indeed have far-ranging consequences on how we think about our relationship with the world. But the fact that it’s appealing and provocative, that it speaks to some of our deepest fears and desires as human beings, doesn’t make it true. It certainly doesn’t make it good science.
This is where self-appointed “alternative news” sources such as NaturalNews and The Food Babe really shine. Their articles — with all their emotionally charged headlines, their subversive stances on science and health topics du jour — are some of the most frequently shared on social media. This stuff is like catnip for high-volume, low-digestion internet surfers, especially those of a certain anti-establishmentarian persuasion.
One such article that made a lot of appearances in my feed last year was titled: “Non-Conformity & Creativity Now Listed As A Mental Illness By Psychiatrists”. It’s a helluva statement, that’s for sure. But is it actually true?
The TL;DR of the piece is: Psychiatrists have created a new mental illness classification called Oppositional Defiant Disorder which is pretty much totally made up and a ploy by Big Pharma and the Establishment to vilify and control freethinking nonconformist individuals! Read it if you dare.
It's no secret that when society, as a whole starts thinking outside the box, or starts to question what's really…www.collective-evolution.com
Now, this deals with a couple of issues that are close to my heart, so I hope you’ll forgive me if my language gets a bit emotional from here on out.
The thing is, it deeply pains me to see people I love and respect being taken in by pseudoscientific woo clickbait — and that’s exactly what this article from Collective Evolution is. That’s what this entire condescendingly-named website is. Just a fountain of misinformation, conspiracy theory tripe, and frankly shitty judgmental nonsense.
Read through the archives and you’ll find anti-vaccine fear mongering, Nazi-themed 9/11 Truth, lizard-people Illuminati bullshit, and an article claiming that you can control your immune system with your mind (which, apparently, has more legitimate scientific basis than actual chemistry).
As to the article itself, half the sources are from the CCHR, which is an organization created and sponsored by the Church of Scientology. These are people that are so entrenched in their opposition to psychiatry that they opened a “museum of death” in Los Angeles dedicated to its alleged horrors. The museum features exhibits which claim that psychiatry — the entire field of study, top to bottom — is actually a front for a “world domination master plan.” They even throw Adolf Hitler in there as mastermind for good measure.
So maybe their sources aren’t so good. And maybe I aren’t so surprised about that.
What is Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), though? It sounds like goofy Life Coach jargon, but it is an actual mental disorder defined by the American Psychiatric Association in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The manual, commonly shortened to DSM and cited by edition (e.g. DSM-II or DSM-2), has long been the standard of classification used by mental health professionals and those in adjacent fields (nurses, social workers, occupational & rehab therapists, etc). It defines Oppositional Defiant Disorder, in part, as:
a recurrent pattern of negativistic, defiant, disobedient, and hostile behavior toward authority figures that persists for at least 6 months (Criterion A) and is characterized by the frequent occurrence of at least four of the following behaviors: losing temper (Criterion Al), arguing with adults (Criterion A2), actively defying or refusing to comply with the requests or rules of adults (Criterion A3), deliberately doing things that will annoy other people (Criterion A4), blaming others for his or her own mistakes or misbehavior (Criterion A5), being touchy or easily annoyed by others (Criterion A6), being angry and resentful (Criterion A7), or being spiteful or vindictive (Criterion A8).
Arjun Walia, contributing writer at Collective Evolution is, of course, not buying it.
The stifling conformity and distinctly un-free thinking required to take for granted the consensus of a bunch of faceless “experts” is inconceivable for those who are part of an evolved collective. GO AHEAD, TAKE THE BLUE PILL AND STAY ASLEEP — IT’S WHAT THEY WANT, SHEEPLE! BA-A-AAA!!
Ahem.
Walia goes on to condemn the DSM as a collection of “made up mental illnesses” and likens the APA’s model of disease classification to the well-documented abuses of psychiatric medicine by Soviet officials, who used it as a tool of political oppression. Yes, that Soviet Union. Walia apparently finds it “quite shocking” that the medical community persists in this idea that the origins of most mental illnesses are biological in nature, given that “over three decades of research have not been able to provide any proof” (no links to back this claim up, though, which I find quite shocking). But like, the Soviets and Communist China told lies and did bad stuff with psychiatry, so psychiatry must be a field full of lying liars who do bad stuff. For money.
According to the woke AF Walia, an ODD diagnosis is just another ploy by the pharmaceutical industry to condemn and pacify people who “think outside the box”. K. If you actually read the entire entry on ODD from the DSM-IV (page 91 of this link from the article), it says pretty plainly:
“To qualify for Oppositional Defiant Disorder, the behaviors must occur more frequently than is typically observed in individuals of comparable age and developmental level and must lead to significant impairment in social, academic, or occupational functioning.”
Not exactly easy diagnostic hoops to jump through. Also: ODD is not, in fact, a “new” classification as Walia implies, but rather made its first appearance in the DSM-III, which was published in 1980. Neither is DSM-IV, which edition the article cites, the most recent; the diagnostic criteria for ODD have since been updated (not that this in any way legitimizes Walia’s claims). Maybe that’s nitpicky, but this kind of poorly researched, poorly written crap really deserves to be picked apart.
The rest of the article consists of quotes taken either out of context or directly from the madcap medical whistleblowers at the CCHR. It also includes a recommendation to watch the film Generation Rx, directed by the apparently world-renowned Kevin P. Miller.
Just for funzies, I looked up Mr. Miller on IMDB. Though I did not recognize any of the five movies he has been involved in making, I was impressed with his self-submitted bio. It confirms that Kevin is indeed an “international award-winning” filmmaker who has won “numerous international awards”. While the specific awards he has won are not listed, there is a convincing endorsement from Paul Haggis —who just so happens to be a two-time Academy Award winner. So, you know. Apply deductive reasoning and so forth.
But I digress.
The Rapid-Fire History Section
FACT: Psychiatrists aren’t just slapping every willful kid with the ODD label and shoving drugs down their throat. The medical community has long acknowledged that mental health is not an easily defined or treated sphere of medicine. Physical ailments are simply easier to identify, confirm, and track.
This idea that a bunch of mental health professionals are lackadaisically “making up” disorders and shilling for Big Pharma, with little concern for the actual health of their patients, is as patently ridiculous as the idea that mental health problems are caused by disgruntled demons and goblins that live in your brain.
The latter was a widely accepted idea during the middle ages, and was later replaced with the Humor Theory in the 18th century — which purports that the balance of four liquids in the body is responsible for all aspects of one’s health — leading to the widespread use of blood-letting as medical treatment (and a whole lot of anemia and death). It was also the first time in western medicine that supernatural forces were completely disregarded in favor of the idea that natural occurrences in the human body were the cause of illness.
The advent and evolution of mental asylums saw even greater changes in how mental health was perceived and treated, by turns horrifying and revolutionary in practice.
Enter the modern era and the introduction of advanced biochemistry and psychopharmacology: suddenly large numbers of people are de-stigmatized and report massive relief from lifelong suffering. This convinced many people that ALL mental illnesses could be managed with medication, leading to the rapid deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s. It was believed at that time that humanistic community facilities would be made readily available to mental health patients who needed cognitive-behavioral support in addition to or instead of medication. Unfortunately, this idea never materialized, leaving thousands of people incapable of living on their own with nowhere to go but the street or, increasingly, prison.
This realization has caused yet another shift in thinking, where a more balanced approach is taken toward treatment, and direct confrontation of mental health issues through counseling and behavioral therapy is generally seen as a prerequisite to pharmacological treatment.
The Lessons We Have Learned Section
Coming to understand our inner and outer worlds has always been an incredibly bumpy process. We are driven to find Indisputable Truths and Final Answers because those ideas are comforting; they make life seem more manageable. When an answer to a problem that feels right is presented to us, we naturally want to latch onto that and it can be very hard to let go, even when mounting evidence has created a formidable case against it (see: confirmation bias).
Everyone is susceptible to this trap. In the case of mental health, pioneering science-based treatments have at times been just as damaging as archaic ideas about supernatural forces and corporal punishment.
Those who ultimately do best by themselves and the people around them are the ones who avoid thinking in absolutes as often as possible. When we approach new information with a skeptical eye yet expect our ideas to eventually be proven wrong — and most certainly when we are able to accept that what is right and true for us might not be so for many other people — we avoid a whole lot of pain and frustration. Many people who suffer from generalized depression, anxiety, and other psychological ailments, don’t feel that medication is the right choice for their mental health. That doesn’t mean that the people who do choose it are wrong or lazy or suffering under some medically-endorsed delusion. Some people’s lives are quite literally saved by their medication. I’m incredibly grateful for what psychiatry has done for me and the people I love. I’m grateful that we all have options to choose from when it comes to maintaining our health.
The fear-mongering rhetoric, utter lack of research, and dichotomous judgment on display at Collective Evolution is no different than the religious right trying to encode their personal beliefs into law. These modes of thinking are the greatest impediments toward a world where everyone can make informed choices not just about their bodies and minds, but about their entire lives. We’d all benefit from taking a little more time to think before casting our vote on how everyone else’s health and well-being should be handled. And maybe just taking a little more time to think, period.
This is the part where I’m supposed to ask you to recommend this story, if you enjoyed it, by clicking the little 💚 below. It helps more people see it, thereby earning me more Recommends (which I’m told are the new currency of the future, now that Bitcoin isn’t panning out).
