The Curse of the Internet
or: the Globalization of Stupidity

by Harry Foundalis

(All links in the present document open in a new window.)

I know. I’ll start sounding like Greta Thunberg. Again.

(She’s actually way sweeter than that. Sorry Greta! I just had to put a picture showing you in desperation and anger up there.)

But before you (the reader) hit the “Back” button, let me tell you: I won’t be yelling angrily at you, accusing you of being hell bent on destroying the world. Instead, I plan to make fun of you, explaining how you thoughtlessly — downright idiotically — are hell bent on destroying the world.

And while I’ll be making fun of you, you’ll learn what the relation is between the Flat Earth theory, the anti-vaccine movement, the Moon-landing hoax, the Trump monolith of cretinism, the hoax of deaths from Covid-19 (a.k.a. “coronavirus”), and some other “deeply” thought of, and even more “deeply” and “critically” examined, facts of life.

Let me explain.

I was born at a time when computers did not yet exist. Well, I don’t mean they literally didn’t exist — there was the ENIAC already since 1945, and I’m not that old — but computers weren’t yet owned privately when I was a child, that’s what I mean. There were no personal computers. The IBM PC, the progenitor of the entire Windows-PC category of computers, appeared in 1981; and the Apple Macintosh series (the first computer to use windows-like graphics for its operating system) was introduced in 1984, when I was about to finish my undergrad math program. Yup, I’m that old. Needless to say, the Internet became a reality more than a decade later, and cell phones small enough to be hand-held were introduced in the early 2000’s. As for smartphones, which scaled the notion of computer down to a hand-held device, they didn’t become commonplace until the 2010’s.

What does all this have to do with your personal idiocy, by which you’ll inadvertently destroy Greta Thunberg’s dream of a friendlier future world? Wait and see. It’ll all become clear, in spite of your admittedly reduced ability at comprehending what goes on around you and in the universe.

So — back to my childhood — when I was little, information was coming to us in a standardized manner: through the TV (that was actually the most high-tech information-disseminating medium), the radio (already obsolete when I was a child), and some weird media that required neither watching nor listening, but (hold onto your seats) reading: newspapers (printed on real sheets of paper), and books. Yes, books! Especially textbooks at school. We were leafing through paper-made pages, in those antediluvian days, in order to learn anything about the world.

If there was any loony in town, he could only impress a close circle of other loonies, who’d have to meet physically with the original loony. I said: no computers, no cell phones, no Internet. Lunacy was restricted to tiny groups of a handful idiots each. No one among the normal people could pay any attention to them, even if one wanted, because there was no way. They could influence no one. In absolute numbers, they were fewer than they are today, not only because of a smaller population in general (we were five-billion-something, back then), but also because they could attract no one else in their circle. Thus, lunacy was stricken by the “divide and conquer” rule: tiny groups of morons, meeting at a local café and impressing each other, but with no such group communicating with another group. So if any village idiot claimed that the Earth is flat, the fellow would be like the proverbial tree in the woods: if the tree falls but no one observes it falling, it’s as if the event never happened.

Enter the late 1990’s.

It was then when I first heard of the “Flat Earth Society”. It’s a society that has since been overtaken by the tsunami of cretins who believe more or less the same thing — that the Earth is flat — but who don’t belong to the Society because they disagree in the details.

(Don’t worry, I’ll come to the “Trump monolith of cretinism” soon. Be patient.)

So, when I first heard of the “Flat Earth Society”, I thought is was a joke. “It can’t be,” I thought, “that people seriously believe that the Earth is flat?? In our times?? Ha ha!” (← yes, proper emoticon, after having today’s knowledge with 20/20 hindsight.)

And yet, I was wrong. People seriously believed that the Earth is flat! Like this:

A Flat-Earth model

Yes, the Earth is like a pizza, they believed (and keep believing), with an “ice wall” surrounding it (that’s Antarctica) so that the ocean waters don’t “fall off” (to where, really? and why?), and with the Sun and Moon pictured as two small spheres, or maybe flat circles, rotating a short distance above the pizza, and around its center. The center of the pizza is at the North Pole, and the pizza doesn’t rotate. There is no South Pole (“South Pole” is a hoax). A world-wide conspiracy does whatever is necessary so that geography books, atlases, and globes depict a spherical Earth. But why? Because that way huge sums are allocated for the people of NASA, who thus get rich without having an actual job to do. (How evident it is that the theory is of American origin! As if there are no other space agencies in the world; the whole planet conspires to financially support NASA!)

I still thought they were really funny. It was the late 1990’s to early 2000’s, and I hadn’t yet understood what was going on.

A bit later I heard some more “looney tunes”: that it’s bad, they claimed, to vaccinate ourselves and our children, because... well, for various reasons: vaccines may cause autism (not true, see here), or “overload” (a non-medical term meaning to reduce the immune system of an infant due to too many vaccines; not true, see here), or a number of other imagined or grossly exaggerated problems, to the vaccinated individual.

This time I didn’t laugh. Some people’s lives, and in particular children’s lives (which hurts me the most) were at risk. And lives were at risk not only because of failing to protect them directly with vaccination, but also because, by allowing diseases to spread, some people started contacting diseases that otherwise would not appear in the community, due to the phenomenon known as “herd immunity”: if enough individuals are immune, the disease doesn’t spread because it doesn’t find enough people in the community who are vulnerable to it. The baby shown below, Charlotte Cleverley-Bisman, had all four limbs partially amputated when she was seven months old, due to meningococcal disease — a disease that can be avoided if the community develops herd immunity to it; but without vaccination, the disease will spread, and will ruin the lives of innocent little ones, like Charlotte. Does that look funny now?

Flat Earthers can destroy their reputation of sanity only,
but anti-vaxers can destroy the lives of children like little Charlotte, seen here.

The anti-vax movement has existed ever since vaccines became available. But in older times, when we were getting our information from books, newspapers, radio, and the TV, we couldn’t hear them loonies because they were fragmented, in tiny groups of a handful morons each.

But now we were in the early 2010’s.

Smart phones started appearing in people’s hands walking down the street, bumping against each other as they were paying attention to their phone rather than who was coming from the opposite direction — someone absorbed in their own smart phone, of course.

Further, it was the time that “social media” platforms became popular: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other, less common fora for sharing your wisdom with and impressing “friends” (usually people you had never met in person), and causing others to “follow” you, so as not to miss any of the mental farts that you might produce with your incapacitated and poorly informed mind. An idiot would inform another idiot not only that the Earth is flat and vaccines would definitely cause them autism, but also that “evolutionism” (no such term in science) is wrong because the world was created in six days some 6,000 years ago; that Americans didn’t go to the Moon in 1969 and the following years, but the whole thing was staged in a huge studio in Hollywood (the “Moon landing hoax”); that global warming is a conspiracy of the elites, it doesn’t exist and doesn’t happen (this is what my beloved Greta Thunberg fights against, mainly); that the entire world is financially manipulated and controlled behind the scenes by a handful of Jews (spelled like this: “Jooz”); that the Holocaust in WWII never happened; and many others.

Granted, some of these idiocies are harmless. I mean, if you believe that the Moon landing was a hoax, who cares! But if you believe that “Jooz” control the world, or that the Holocaust never happened, you become a racist who will hurt real people: the actual Jews. And if you believe that global warming is a hoax, you are criminally dangerous, because you put at risk not just your worthless life, but the life of the entire biosphere of Earth! Our planet might end up with a runaway greenhouse effect, as has happened with planet Venus, where the surface temperatures average 464°C (that’s 867°F, for those of you who are stuck with your medieval-times units of measurement). The “Earth biology experiment” might be put to an abrupt end. Greta is right (in her concerns, though not quite on the ways to deal with the problem).

That’s how the Earth might look like in the future,
after undergoing a “runaway greenhouse effect” like Venus:
a hellishly hot place, just as it was when it was formed.

Think of this now:

Say, I come up with a new hoax. Why? Maybe because I’m a true idiot (although I overestimate my intelligence — this is the so-called “Dunning–Kruger Effect”, which I’ll talk about soon); or maybe because I’m immature enough to think it’s a “cool” thing to trick other people into believing nonsense. For example, I claim that the new detergents now include invisible chemicals, seen only under a powerful microscope, so that when you do your laundry those chemicals are spread in the clothes you wear, and from there they go into your body, sending information about you (where you are, what your heartbeat and temperature is, what music you’re listening to, which TV programs you watch, which web sites you visit, and so on) to some governmental agency that collects this information in a database. Then, some government officials may choose the time and spread cancer into your body, through those chemicals, because you did something that upset them. That’s my wise “theory”. I then disseminate my wisdom to my “friends” through Facebook (or some other wisdom-spreading platform). Whether I truly believe what I write is irrelevant. The point is that my “friends” (of equal or less ability for critical thinking than mine) believe what I say, and so my wisdom becomes known at the other side of the planet — because distances don’t matter in a virtual world. Many recipients of my wisdom find it wise enough to re-transmit it to their “friends”, and the thing now becomes “viral” and established truth: detergents allow some State authorities to control you and your life, and even get rid of you if you bother them too much. Wise, eh? You’d think it can’t get any more ridiculous.

Well, you’d think so in the mid-2010’s. But then, this happened:

We are now in 2016. The number of active users in Facebook are well over 1.5 billion. (Population of Earth: 7 billion.) Active Twitter accounts are over 300 million, and the rest of the social network platforms follow suit. Opinions circulate at a frenzied rate in such platforms, with every moron stating their “established truth” in a matter-of-fact-ish way, passing it along to further morons, who may add a bit of idiocy-value to it, creating the concept of “fake news”. A significant percent of the population in the U.S. is disgruntled with the current state of affairs, believing that immigrants to the U.S. are responsible for taking their jobs. Fake news about the mental health of the Democratic Party nominee for the Presidency, Hillary Clinton, circulate in the networks, created and enhanced by agents who act on behalf of the Russian government, which (for all intents and purposes) means the Russian President Vladimir Putin; a very clever man who has good reasons to support the Republican Party nominee, Donald J. Trump (pictured above). You see, Putin knows that once Trump is elected, Putin will be able to manipulate Trump “like the fiddle” (as a member of the U.S. administration stated in 2020). The polls show a slight advantage for Clinton, but in November 8th, 2016, the underground, Russian-boosted tsunami of Facebook “news” and Tweeter “tweets” makes itself known with a huge splash: Trump is elected President of the U.S. (losing the popular vote, but winning the “electoral college”, a body of 538 people who are elected by the popular vote and decide who the President will be). Putin won! His favorite, whose policies he’ll prove to be excellently capable of manipulating in the next four years, is now “POTUS” (^*).

Now, I know I need to be careful with what I’ll say about the Trump phenomenon. I am not a U.S. citizen, nor do I reside in the U.S., but still, I need to avoid directly defaming the Trump. You know, vicious miscreants of this world often attack and destroy those who hurt their vastly bloated ego. And with what I’ll say I’m going to hurt one vastly bloated ego.

In the four years of Trump’s presidency we watched a President quite unlike any other who sat behind the “resolute desk” in the White House. Instead of learning how the most important job on the planet is done, it spent its time tweeting (yes, tweeting!) all sorts of irrelevant and/or unsubstantiated gossips and fake news, competing in naiveté and childish silliness with those who elected him. It ruined the U.S. relations with the closest allies (mostly the European countries and powers), building instead stronger ties with every true and elected dictator in the world: Kim Jong Un of North Korea and Xi Jinping of China (true dictators), and Vladimir Putin of Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey (elected dictators). Why? Because in its absent ability for critical thinking and childish intelligence, it admires strongmen! It would like to be one of them when it grows up, as its deeds clearly proved while in office.

But there are four most salient features of Trump’s character that completely determine its behavior:

1. There is only one entity in the universe: Trump! Everything else has to revolve around that entity.

2. It lies compulsively. Everything it says or claims is a lie. It lies even when there is no reason to lie, when truth wouldn’t hurt.

3. It is of really low intelligence, but wants to project the image that it’s a sharp-as-a-tack genius. The Dunning–Kruger Effect is in full swing on it. Nonetheless, it feels extremely insecure about its intelligence and, like a child, tries to persuade everybody that it’s a genius, a “stable genius”, as it once called itself.

4. It lacks some quintessential human feelings. (And this explains my consistent use of “it” for it.) Specifically, it feels no empathy toward human beings. Everyone is an “it” for it.

Below I’ll spend a few lines to explain the above four features of Trump, so the future reader understands how the world can go awry and be ruined in faster and more direct ways than Greta Thunberg may imagine.

Trump’s universe is a solipsistic(^*) one, so all of its actions must revolve around the idea of serving its own interests, and nobody else’s, since, to a solipsist, everyone else literally does not exist. Now, the nature of the Office of Presidency of the U.S.A. requires that the President does care about the U.S. citizens, which seems to be in direct conflict with the world of a solipsist. How did Trump get around this? Quite simply, U.S. citizens mattered to it only in so far as they were useful for its reelection. For example, if some Americans suffered financial losses to the point of losing their jobs, hence their insurances, and/or their homes (and this really happened, for the reasons discussed below), then Trump couldn’t care less if it thought that those people, as voters, wouldn’t matter. (And yet it was wrong, because of #3, above.)

To achieve its purposes, Trump used lies extensively and consistently. And it was consistent with its own self, because if you are a solipsist, you cannot hurt anyone with your lies, since no one else exists! Actually, “hurting” is meaningful only when you yourself are hurt — only then is it experienced as a negative feeling — so, to a solipsist, hurting other people makes as much sense as hurting a chair or a rock. Except that — and here is where the obstinate issue #3 above creeps in the picture again — if you’re of really low intelligence, you’ll fail to realize that constantly hurting the feelings of others will turn around like a boomerang and harm your chances at reelection, hitting you straight in your uncomprehending face.

The other problem with lying is that you become completely predictable. Simply, everyone soon understands that for whatever you claim, exactly the opposite is true. If you claim “No, Putin didn’t influence the 2016 U.S. elections!”, I can be sure that he did. If you claim that you’re an expert on this and that, and “Nobody knows about X more than I do”, I can be sure that you know next to nothing about X and that most people know about X more than you do. Further, you can’t say a truth anymore, even if you wanted, because everybody knows you’re lying all the time, so you’re caught in the trap of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Intelligence is a big part of the picture. (After all, it’s also the focus of this article; that’s why Trump is discussed here.) The crucial observation is that intelligent people never boast about their intelligence. They let others infer it and advertise it. For, if you go and advertise your own intelligence, this is a sure sign that you’re unintelligent enough to understand that what you’re doing is stupid. If you are tall, it’s of no use boasting “Hey dudes, looky here how tall I am!” People can see if you’re tall or not and can judge by themselves. If you’re fast, again, it’s of no use boasting about it, saying you’re the fastest man in the world. If so, you can go to the Olympics, run the 100 m in track-and-field, and break Usain Bolt’s world record(^*) — that would do it. Ditto with intelligence: others can understand if you’re smart or not. But with intelligence, there’s something more: if you boast you’re smart, we already know that you aren’t, because boasting about your intelligence is one of the stupidest things you can to to persuade others; with the exception, of course, of those who are even stupider than you.

And Trump — boy, oh boy — did it boast about being intelligent! It claimed it took a cognitive test, the MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment), and “aced” it. The problem is, the MoCA test simply verifies that you don’t suffer from dementia! In other words, Trump boasted about not suffering from dementia without realizing how dumb it is to do so. That alone shows that Trump’s intelligence is abysmally low. Any above-average-intelligence person would understand the stupidity of boasting that he is not demented, especially when the boaster’s job is to be President of the United States. A second problem is that if the compulsive liar Trump boasts that it “aced” the MoCA test, this means that most probably it screwed it up.(^*)

Then the evidence for Trump’s dementia started to accumulate. Because 2020 arrived and this happened:

Image of the virus SARS-CoV-19, which causes the disease Covid-19,
a.k.a. “the coronavirus” (although it’s not the only one; the common cold is also a coronavirus)

In January 2020, reports about a dangerous coronavirus that originated in China started spreading in the world, together with the virus itself. China was hit hard first, and by February Italy succumbed. The virus, which was named SARS-CoV-19 and caused the disease Covid-19, created many small “pockets” in many places of the world, and the World Health Organization called the situation a pandemic. By March, Spain and France had succumbed, followed soon by the U.K.

Immediately, various fake news and conspiracy theories spread through — what else — the social media:

• The virus is a hoax, it doesn’t exist. (The well-known “covidiots”.)

• The virus exists, and spreads by means of antennas for the technology of 5G.

• The virus is no more dangerous than the flu (Trump claimed exactly this, while Covid-19 had just started spreading).

• Not only does the virus exist, but even its vaccine is known. However, the vaccine is not given to the people so that its price is high when it is announced, to let the rich get richer. (This wisdom was a claim made by Madonna, among others. In August 2020 the Australian Prime Minister announced that the vaccine will be given to Australians for free, as soon as it becomes available.)

• The virus was created by Bill Gates (a multi-billionaire and co-founder of Microsoft). And why? Because Gates wants to inject nanobots into the bodies of people! The nanobots will be in the vaccine for the virus and will enter the bloodstream. This way Gates will control humanity through those nanobots.

Thus, idiocy hit new levels, reaching the stratosphere. Quick note: nanobots do not exist in 2020. They are a “good idea” for curing diseases, and some prototypes already exist at the experimental and research level, but nothing useful can be done with them yet in 2020. Perhaps they will be a reality in the future. Conspiracy theories, however, are divorced with reality, as is well known.

The virus had already appeared in the U.S. in February. The first death of an American was reported on February 29, but President Trump dismissed the seriousness of it all, claiming that the virus would “just disappear” very soon, all by itself. By March 15 the death toll was 73; by the end of March it rose to over 5000; and by the end of April to over 65,000. Trump kept saying that the virus would “just disappear” (adding, “with the summer heat”, when there was no such evidence coming from tropical countries), and kept doing nothing about it. In fact, it dismissed the advice of experts and scientists; removed from the limelight the leading epidemiologist of the U.S. and member of the White House staff, Dr. Anthony Fauci; and on April 24, in a White House briefing, it suggested to experts to use ultraviolet light and disinfectant, inserting those somehow into the human body, to kill the virus!!

This Presidential mental fart of gargantuan proportions corroborated beyond any reasonable doubt that Trump is as clever as a preschooler, and was met with so loud a brouhaha around the world that Trump decided to stop those daily White House briefings, relegating the task to a spokesperson.

Trump’s handling of the pandemic (or rather, its failure to do anything about it), made the following observations quite evident:

• Trump has a problem dealing with facts. It believes that reality is whatever its own mind decides it to be. (In a solipsist’s universe, this is not surprising at all.) For example, in early August 2020, when the number of deaths exceeded 150,000 and the cases and deaths kept increasing sharply, Trump claimed that Covid-19 was receding.

• Consequently, Trump hates science. After all, scientists observe and deal with facts. Trump, maintaining counterfactual knowledge in its make-belief universe, thinks that it knows better than scientists (being “superior” in intelligence to them), and so it can give them some advice. (See its suggestion to Dr. Deborah Birx, sitting next to him in the video above, to shove disinfectant and ultraviolet light into the human body. Also pay attention to its comment at 1:07–1:12: “I’m not a doctor, but I’m like... a person who has a good... you know what” — pointing to the place where its brain theoretically should be.)

• Trump believes that the pandemic can be handled by doing public relations and by talking about it incessantly on Twitter. Letting experts design a plan and follow it is beyond Trump’s mental horizon.

By early August it became more than obvious that Trump wouldn’t do anything about the pandemic, and also that it didn’t care about the dead Americans. (When asked to comment on the very high number of deaths, it said: “It is what it is.”) Its only concern was its reelection. In so doing, however, the inadequacy of its intelligence was made patently obvious, for the following reason:

If Trump wanted to be reelected in November 2020, it should give the successful handling of Covid-19 the highest priority! For, by doing that, the American economy would not suffer a severe blow (as it did, thanks to the lockdowns and severely reduced activity due to the pandemic), and the majority of voters would be satisfied and vote for Trump again. But it could not understand this — a political thought so elementary that even a kindergartener could grasp.

Lack of intelligence? Most probably. Or, perhaps, a combination of lack of intelligence and lack of empathy, which prevented Trump from understanding the impact that the hundreds of thousands of deaths would have to the American voter.

I discussed the Trump phenomenon to some extent because it is an exemplary case of how the stupidity of some people, coupled with the magnification effect of fake news and conspiracy theories that find fertile ground in social media, results in voting for leaders who, just like their voters, are utterly incapable of understanding what is happening around them and in the world; leaders who, after all, become tremendously(^*) dangerous not only for their voters, but for the future of our world.

What remains is to talk a bit about the psychology of the average conspiracy-theory follower and fake-news spreader.

The first and foremost observation that describes the psychology of such people is the so-called Dunning–Kruger Effect. It says, simply, that people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability at that task. (It also says that people with high ability at a task underestimate their ability, but it’s the first clause of the effect that concerns us here.)

It sounds trivial,(^*) doesn’t it? And yet, how common it is! How often do we see a person who, without having basic knowledge of a subject, has an expert’s opinion on it?

An extreme case of idiocy became the cause for Dunning and Kruger to start their study on the phenomenon. On April 19, 1995, McArthur Wheeler, a resident of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. He was easily identified later that night at his home, because he did the robberies without wearing a mask on his face; in fact, he smiled to the surveillance camera while exiting one of the banks. Upon his arrest, he told the policemen, in puzzlement: “But... but... I wore the juice!” Why? Because Wheeler thought that by smearing lemon juice on his face he would make his face invisible! Yup. Lemon juice is used by kids to write in “invisible ink”, right? Well, since the ink is “invisible”, it should make everything under it invisible!

(If you didn’t already die of laughter, it must be because you’ve heard of this famous incident before. Whoever learns about it for the first time, either rolls laughing on the floor, or remains speechless, stunned by the magnitude of human stupidity.)

When the policemen arrested Wheeler, “detectives concluded he was not delusional, not on drugs — just incredibly mistaken”, according to some reports. But this is just PC-talk to hide the stinging truth: Wheeler wasn’t “just incredibly mistaken”; he was stupendously stupid. In fact, this specific instance of blatant stupidity prompted David Dunning, a Cornell psychology professor, and his then-graduate student, Justin Kruger, to conduct a study that confirmed what became known as the Dunning–Kruger Effect: people who don’t know how little they know overestimate their abilities to issue a judgment on things they don’t know.

When a “Flat Earther” (see the “Flat Earth model” image, near the beginning of this text) denies that the force we call “gravity” exists, but that water appears to have a flat surface (e.g., in a bathtub) because the water “seeks its own level” (whatever they mean by that), it is because they are completely ignorant about facts that we learn at school and may verify, if we wish; such as that a string kept straight by a slight weight hung from it will not point straight down near a mountain, but will be slightly attracted toward the mountain by the force of gravity produced by the mass of the mountain; or that there is a formula that gives us the value of the force F of gravity, which is F = G m₁ m₂ / r², where m₁ and m₂ are the masses of the two attracted bodies (such as the Moon and the Earth, or your body and the Earth, or a pin and a cup, or the sea water and the Earth), r² is the square of the distance r between the two bodies (in other words, r X r), and G is a constant, the gravitational constant. This formula was given in 1687 by Sir Isaac Newton. And although Newton’s formula gives an excellent approximation for F, it was improved by Einstein in 1915–1916, with a formula that I don’t dare write here or I’ll lose you, my reader. There is an incredible amount of knowledge and depth behind the notion of gravity, which gives the nearly spherical shape to our planet (and every planet, and the Sun, and the Moon). Two of the greatest physicists of all times, Newton and Einstein, contributed to our better understanding of gravity. And yet, Flat Earthers ignore this fact, believing they’re smarter than Newton and Einstein combined! Can their apparent idiocy be attributed to mere ignorance, to a complete failure of the American system of education (for, Flat Earthers are almost exclusively American), or to some flaws of the American culture, such as the idea that there can always be various opinions, and the truth is found democratically by voting for whatever opinion seems the most attractive to us? (Hint: science doesn’t work like that!)

Likewise, when Trump suggests shoving disinfectant and/or ultraviolet light in people’s bodies to cure Covid-19, it is clueless about how little a real estate gambler (and a failed one at that) knows about medical matters. But that’s the amazing result of the Dunning–Kruger Effect: unaware, hence undaunted by its own cluelessness, Trump unleashed an idea of such monumental idiocy that its aftereffects will be felt for years to come. At least one generation throughout the world will be dead laughing with this show of blatant ignorance by the cartoonish character that Americans elected to be their President (with Putin’s help, unbeknownst to them).

(Indeed, entering “Trump idiot” in Google yields 58 million results, in 2020. For comparison, “Obama idiot” yields 11 million results. Worse, typing simply “idiot” in Google Image search, Trump’s face appears first, and also several times among the results. In contrast, typing “genius” in Google Image search, the first face of a real person is, quite expectedly, Einstein’s.)

A second observation that explains the psychology of idiots who support the Flat Earth, coronavirus hoax, and other conspiracy-theory-driven ideas, is that such people have the “I am not going to be fooled” attitude. They think they are smart, smarter that the common sheeple (as they call those who follow the general consensus; a blend of “sheep” + “people”), overestimating their cleverness (once again: the D–K Effect). Believing they are above the average “sheeple” boosts their ego and self-esteem — and Trump is very well known for falling into this fallacy.

A third characteristic of the psychology of such people is that by belonging to such groups they get a sense of belongingness. Those who are hard to build friendships and social relations are often found here: the common belief in a conspiracy theory or “hoax” is what binds them all. In the marginal group, which is even “persecuted by the establishment” as they believe, they meet their “buddies”, and this helps them overcome their natural social inabilities.

Finally, a fourth reason concerns the “I am an expert at X”-type of person. People who are indeed good at something, falsely conclude that they must be good at everything. Thus, famous people like Madonna, but also the actor Woody Harrelson, the tenor Andrea Bocelli, and others, accustomed at receiving acclaim and applaud from their fans all the time, wrongly conclude that they must be more intelligent than their fans, followers, or subordinates (a clear non-sequitur). Thus, those celebrities mentioned above falsely supported Covid-19 fake news. (In Madonna’s case, Instagram blurred the video she posted, adding on it: “False Information– Reviewed by independent fact-checkers.”; the video was subsequently removed.)

Conclusion

Overall, the advent of the Internet, smart phones, social media, and everything else that allowed people to communicate massively and world-wide had both positive and negative effects:

• On the positive side, it allowed a better understanding of the “other”. Before, the image of the “other” was filtered through governmentally-controlled sources of information and mass media. After, the “other” could talk directly to you and explain his or her situation, and you could develop empathy and realize that the “other” isn’t very different from you, after all. It also allowed people to organize protests against governments, communicating with each other under the radar of the State.

• On the negative side, it allowed every idiot to spread their unconfirmed, unverified, and untested “theory” to the world — a world untrained in receiving such information and weighing its truth value. It allowed States to control other States, as was the case with the Russian State controlling the US, by spreading fake news in American social media, influencing the US elections and causing the election of Trump as President; a severely mentally challenged man, eminently incapable and unfitting for the job, a sociopath who proved extremely dangerous not only for the American people but for humanity in general.

Fake news and conspiracy theories spreading through the Internet keep causing damage and actual deaths to the world. Whether they’ll be able to kill the entire “human experiment” of our universe, remains to be seen.