My aim in what follows is to suggest some possible linkages that point toward some possible ways to understand some possible trends among some possible constituencies about some possible issues, which trends trouble some other possible constituencies. Note my equivocation. My impression is that many of us including myself are befuddled by various trends we now see around us, but we don’t see them as related. Are they related, or are they not related, and if they are related, so what? I guess that is my question.

Twelve years ago in The Nation, Katha Pollitt wrote about a then new Gallup Poll that purported to reveal quite a lot about American society. Of course, all polls are far from perfect, but they generally do at least reveal a degree of reality’s contours. Among them, I am told that Gallup tends to be pretty scrupulous, and so perhaps their then new poll could be cautiously extrapolated to the general population without too great error. As Pollitt eloquently recounted in her article, that Gallup poll indicated that 46% of the U.S. population believed that God created humans sometime in the last 10,000 years and God then plopped us down here on Earth in one swoop. So? Religion in the U.S. Nothing new there. No big deal.

Well, imagine you were in a stadium with 100,000 randomly selected fans at a football game 12 years ago. Someone is sitting to your left, to your right, immediately in front of you, and immediately behind you. The poll said that on average, twelve years ago, two of your four neighbors thought something that if true would mean that essentially all physicists, chemists, biologists, geographers, archeologists, and more were either willfully lying in the mother of all conspiracies—or they were all maliciously deluded by the mother of all conspiracies. Even if the poll was horribly flawed, okay, then perhaps “only” one of the four fans seated around you thought that—or maybe only one in six—or whatever. Still, more than you might guess, no?

People go to doctors when sick. We trust them with our life and limb, with our kids and parents. Then a lot of people don another hat, or perhaps it’s another persona, and assert things that would mean that all doctors are either deluded or deluders because not just evolution but derivatively virtually all hard science that verifies evolution is for them nonsense. Well, hold on. What is really going on, because it surely isn’t the case that half the population refuses to see a doctor, right?

Whatever the real creationism stats might be, this is not the familiar case of dominant mainstream newspapers, TV, and movies lying and people then getting sucked directly into believing the ubiquitous lies. Only in very rare cases do such big audience outlets convey anything even remotely like these particular beliefs. They do, however, relay other incredibly harmful beliefs, yes—of course they do—but not these.

Sadly, according to Gallup, while one might think that the 46% who believed that people have been on Earth for 10,000 years or less, created whole cloth by God, overwhelmingly had as an excuse that they had virtually no contrary education and a ton of religious training. But it turns out that this explanation is wrong. The Gallup Poll went on to reveal that for college graduates—that is, for people who have been in the American educational system for 16 years—the percentage who denied evolution and thus by implication denied biology, chemistry, geology, physics, etc., etc., was, again, 12 years ago, 46%. How ridiculous is that? Can’t be true, can it?

Imagine it is graduation season. Go around the country and randomly select 100 graduates from each of 1,000 colleges. After getting the random folks from earlier to leave, put the 100,000 college graduates in the earlier-mentioned stadium. Look to your right and to your left, to your front and to your rear. On average, again two of the four people you see, or at least one to be cautious about it, despite their sixteen years of schooling, when polled by Gallup indicated that they believed a story that by direct extension, to be consistent, they would have to think modern science is a giant scam. Could that be the case?

Supposing it was even partly true of the world, what did it say about our schools and for that matter about our teachers? To me it said, not only are we an ignorant nation in which a scant twelve years ago one out of every two or perhaps one out of four people had a belief that implied science is a giant lie, we are also a nation in which education does very little if anything to yield different thoughts. Are educators too cowardly to address such matters? Do they too believe utter nonsense. Has the situation, whatever it actually was, gotten better or worse, since twelve years ago? I would bet that on this issue, creationism, it has gotten a bit better, but on some other issues, I think that perhaps things have gotten somewhat worse. Trends.

Set aside for a moment deep analysis of economic and social institutions. What does it do to the overall prospects for trust and communicative exchange that a large segment of the public is seriously ignorant and that, worse, what methods get used to inspire people’s capacities for careful, critical thought instead apparently crush those capacities?

Whatever values and politics you may have, shouldn’t we all acknowledge and be troubled by these observations? What kind of audience does generalized confusion or mistaken belief create for manipulation by grifters and even cultism? Okay, but why do such trends emerge and persist? Is this just a matter of religion?

Hypothesis: For home life and education to allow and even to propel blind belief in authority and to crush creativity and to banish clear thinking so that people become well prepared to operate in a society which demands subservience from many participants and elitism from few participants, is not only oppressive, but also has no guard rails. It yields not just many people prepared to abide boring, repetitive labor and to obey orders, and a few other people prepared to dish out orders from above. No, over time it also generates subsets of people ready to hop on board leadership cults so long as said cults offer that if you hop on board then joy, dignity, and rewarding team membership will be yours.

Is that an overreach? Perhaps, but shortly after I read Pollit’s piece, I came upon another nugget of disturbing news, another trend, also from over a decade ago. A study of 2,000 people in the UK found that on Facebook 80% confessed that they doctor their photographs so they appear to be more exciting, smart, and good looking than they are. They link to articles to appear intelligent. They tag themselves at interesting locations they have never visited. They enter fake personal information and fabricate status updates.

Users presumably feel relentless pressure to give the impression that they lead more exciting lives than their reality. Or maybe they just do what they think everyone else does, about which they would appear to be close to correct.

People in this study used Facebook to mediate their interrelations and create fake portraits of themselves. People removed anything from their pages that looked boring. People wrote statuses or tweets to gain attention from others. People checked into places just to show off and make friends jealous. People referenced being places to look cultured or interesting. People linked to an article purely because they thought to do so made them look intellectual or they read a story on a newspaper app because they knew it will show up on their Facebook Wall. People altered photos of themselves to look better. All of this had a thread running through it. People reflexively lied. But this was over a decade ago. What about now? Where do trends wind up?

If I had to guess I would say there is less of the Facebook-style trending now, twelve years later. Don’t you think so? But if not, is it now not only the case that if you are in a shopping mall the odds are good not only that one out of every two people or one out of every four people or at the very least a whole lot of people you encounter believe that people arrived on earth by God’s placing us here some time in the last 10,000 years, but also that upwards of four out of five people you encounter, if they use social media, lie and manipulate to appear to be other than who they are? That may sound highly exaggerated. But is it?

My own gut said it is somewhat exaggerated, but then I Google-searched and found that the cosmetics industry bottom line was, in the U.S., in 2023, a smidgin under $63 billion dollars for the year. And that a year earlier, the cosmetic surgery industry was about $55.6 billion for the year. The former is almost entirely purchased to appear to be what one is not. The latter is largely purchased to also deceive. Of course, if you try to appear to be other than what you are, even just somewhat, or even just to have fun, or perhaps to manifest aesthetic creativity, starting at, what, ten years old, won’t you likely then rationalize it? Won’t you become open to doing more of it later? Trend? If you are a teenager who watches well-off parents who go out a lot—much less who watches celebrities or big time internet influencers who have teams of cosmeticians to modify their appearance, you may wonder, why don’t I look like that? So you do some more make up, and then some more, and then maybe a little surgery. Trend or rabbit hole?

I know, you might say for some reason or other that this is mostly women, but is it? Even if we ignore how men do their own versions, are men put off by a woman who lies or are they attracted by a woman who lies? And vice versa. So, should we look at everyone in the mall—and perhaps even look in a Mall mirror—with dagger eyes to convey disdain and disgust? 

Hold on. Not so fast. Where does the real fault lie? Put differently, what does it say about our culture, our schools, our economy, our polity, that these observations about widespread confused or manipulated trends are not only ubiquitous, but I would guess that a very large portion of the population, even including those who are not actually in or accepting of the trends discussed—which is virtually no one—would respond, well sure, of course this is the case, but so what?

Next, consider click bait. Bite bait is that you put something tasty on your fishing line to lure a fish to become your dinner. So, what is click bait? It is when you craft a title to serve as a link to get someone to click to see your content. Why? Often, but not always, to grow revenues. Sometimes ego. Sometimes even edification. Initially I think click bait was just giving more time to settling on titles to advance distribution. But then it became more like a skill in itself. With actual rules of thumb for what works. And then it became so aggressive that, and this time I am relying on what I myself find when on YouTube, that titles very often promise the user what isn’t in fact in the content. Not just not quite there, but even not there at all. Oh wait, that is just a new kind of advertising, isn’t it? Yes, it is. But it is also another form of lying. One trend morphing into another trend?

The fact is, in our society, not only is lying everywhere, lying works. Income depends on lying. Popularity depends on lying. To avoid hassle and to dodge problems depends on lying. Deception often paves the road to success. Honesty risks loss. People choose to twist themselves and their words not because they want to hurt others—leaving aside Trump, the apex liar—but more often just to get by, to fit in, or at worst, to get ahead. To not lie seems very often dysfunctional. It is very often dysfunctional. The lying trend in diverse forms isn’t genetic. The individuals who lie say and do things that make sense in their constrained situations. It’s the situations, the society, we ought to address with disdain and disgust.

If you are at all shocked by this picture, by these particular trends, you might want to consider why any of it comes as a surprise or appears grossly exaggerated. You might not engage in any of the above forms of deception. So, you doubt them, or they shock you, or you deny them. Okay, consider some different (yet not very different) surveys that Gallup might have unearthed if its scope were wider, and it risked looking at less openly normalized stuff.

How many people believe that our schools try to educate everyone as best they can? That our hospitals try to aid everyone as best they can? That our governments try to represent everyone as best they can? How many believe that to look the other way regarding ecological nightmares is warranted? Even that to look down is wise and mature? Whereas to look up and fear for humanity’s survival is alarmist, ignorant, and childish? How many people believe corporations try to meet public needs? Or, arguably worse, how many people don’t actually believe all these lies but behave as if they do? Finally, on these types of social matters, who are further down the relevant belief rabbit holes? Is it the little-schooled? Or is it the highly schooled?

Shouldn’t we ask, supposing we are not pacing the bottom of some particular rabbit hole, how might we best help others who are down it to climb out of that particular hole? For that matter, how might we realize when, about some other topic, we are ourselves pacing or stomping the floor of a topical or behavioral rabbit hole? And how might we assess if instead of getting out, we are just trying to get others down into the hole we are in? And then, should we also ask, is society on balance in a hole so deep that it cannot climb out?

I don’t think it is. I certainly hope not. But I am quite sure angsting over the possibility won’t improve things. I understand fearing society’s current trends—from many angles. After all, otherwise good people—and at birth, that is virtually everyone—are constantly tricked, sucked, lied, bashed or even just make a mistake and trip into an erroneous stance. And then, too often, just to avoid admitting error, sometimes lots of us double down on our wrong stance? And then we defend ourselves and the new team we suddenly find ourselves on until we finally creep deeper and deeper down our particular rabbit hole aka trend.

One instance of this occurring before our eyes is people initially weakly supporting Trump because they see him as an outsider who might turn horrible things upside down, and because he seems to talk plain and to empathize with them and is getting attacked by the justifiably hated mainstream. And then, in self defense, the tentative Trump advocate doubles down on the stance and gets defensively aggressive to ward off harsh attacks from the other team. And before long the Trumper is wedged at the bottom of a vicious rabbit hole. But as important as that situation is vis-a-vis understanding Trump’s support, I want to focus for a moment on another vicious trend that’s occurring right before our eyes. Consider Israel’s war on Palestine and particularly some people’s reactions to it.

Of course, the primary issue is the human carnage and social devastation, and the precedent established for unleashing more of each. But more relevant to this particular essay, consider the podcast in Israel called Two Nice Jewish Boys. The hosts are Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein. In a recent episode Weinstein said: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second.” He added that “most Israelis” would do the same and then his co-host, Meningher added that they would also want to wipe out Palestinians in “the territories.” “Because that’s the reality we live in, it’s us or them, and it has to be them.”

Weinstein added, Israelis want “full-scale war.” “Full-scale war wouldn’t mean that we’re just in Gaza. And it also wouldn’t mean what we’re doing in Gaza, because in Gaza, maybe there’s mass destruction but there’s not massive death.… Forgive us if we don’t give a shit if everybody there dies. It’s just the way we feel. It’s just the way Israelis feel.”

Weinstein adds “make it all Israel.” “The baby that’s born in Gaza is technically innocent, I could give zero fucks, I don’t care if he gets polio,” Weinstein said.

The above account is second hand, I am not in Israel. But it is quoted in lots of reliable places and feeds. Is there some twisting? Probably. Is there some lifting from context? Probably. And do these two guys have their fingers perfectly on the pulse of all their fellow Israelis? Highly unlikely. Still, are these two guys and those who relate positively to them down a rabbit hole? Were they born down there? Of course not. They trended to there.

CBC journalist Evan Dyer shared the clip including the above on X. He pointed to Meningher’s former media roles in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s last five political campaigns. He added: “This is not a fringe show or fringe people… the show is as mainstream as it gets.” True, not true? Like with the Gallup polls, we of course can’t be certain of exactitude. But if we consider the two nice Jewish boys, how else can we describe their current dwelling place other than as a deep rabbit hole?

Back to the USA, USA. We finance and cheerlead the carnage and devastation. Our basic institutions—educational, economic, cultural, and political—are literally designed to instill fear and ignorance and to generate and then coddle and even elevate the likes of Donald Trump, even if he was a not specifically sought side effect. Can we here in the U.S. nonetheless see the need to help other people and ourselves out of rabbit holes? Can we see that stretching a hand, a ladder, is better than throwing invective, rocks, or bunker buster bombs down such holes? Can we see the need to fight for Palestine and to communicate with those who don’t see that need? Can we see the need to stop Trump and simultaneously communicate with those who now support him? Can we see the need to have Harris and Walz and other Democrats win, even as we abhor their basic allegiances and prepare to fight from day one of their new Administration?

I surely hope we can, and will.

And now, there is a perfectly fair question you may ask. How? What words or acts can open passages of information flow into and sometimes even across rabbit holes? I think I know that dismissal won’t work. Denigration won’t work. Calling out and shaming Trump’s voters won’t work. More, what will work won’t be one size fits all. There won’t be one approach suited to reach all Trump voters. Much less all harmful trends. Nor will there be one approach suited to use by all who reach out. But I don’t know what many options will work. Do you? And isn’t that a question activists most need to answer?

---