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How to Become and Easily -Brainwashed Sucker in 5 Easy Steps
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How to Become an Easily-Brainwashed Sucker in 5 easy steps!
by Anthony Colpo
What is the scarcest commodity on planet Earth right now? Oil? Gas? Clean water? Unpolluted air?
If you nodded "yes" to any of the above, you're not even close. The scarcest commodity on this planet right now is the ability to think in a rational, critical, logical, and independent manner.
If you want to be among the world's great mass of unthinkers whose ignorance and gullibility allows the incompetent, the unscrupulous, and the corrupt to run amok, then be sure to live by the following five tips!
1. Fail to verify information for yourself
Perhaps the most important characteristic of the Easily-Brainwashed Sucker is a blind reliance on second-hand information. This is information derived from external sources, such as newspapers, magazines, internet sites, popular books, television, family members, neighbors, work mates, and so on.
You would think that, when contemplating information whose accuracy could have a profound impact on one's continued well-being--for example, the decision to change one's diet, take a prescription medicine, make a large financial commitment, or support a nation's entry into war--one would make an exerted effort to verify the reliability of that information as best as possible.
Most people, however, put more effort into combing their hair than they do analyzing the validity of potentially life-altering information. It is nothing short of startling how many of us will make major life decisions based on information that is little more than hearsay.
Unwilling or unaware of how to check out the facts for ourselves, many of us assume that because: something is in print; reported in the media; widely believed by others, or; has been disseminated to us by some apparently respectable source, it must be true.
The situation is worsened when such folks are presented with a multitude of differing opinions or viewpoints. "There's so much conflicting information out there," they complain, "you don't know who to believe". Many folks simply bury any rising sense of confusion by going along with majority opinion or the opinion of whoever appears to be the most highly decorated or popular commentator. Others will simply believe the version of events that 'seems', 'feels' or 'sounds' right to them.
If someone says that studies have proven "beyond all doubt" that eating saturated fats is harmful, do you ask to see those studies before vowing to surgically trim all the fat from any piece of meat that ever passes your lips? Or do you simply believe them? When vegetarian activists claim that avoiding meat will make you live longer, do you ask whether any studies exist that actually show this to be true? Or do you believe their emotionally based anti-meat scare mongering and proceed to delete the most nutrient dense food ever known from your diet? When the leader of your country announces that he is about to support war on a country that is allegedly harboring weapons of mass destruction, but cannot provide anything that even remotely resembles evidence, do you smell a rat? Or do you join the frenzied masses and demand that we send our young men and women off to kill and be killed, to fight in a war that will inevitably result in the annihilation of thousands of innocent civilians?
There is a widespread phenomenon that I like to refer to as the "They Syndrome". This is when people say things like "They say that low-carbohydrate diets are bad for you" or "They reckon ACME shares are a pretty good buy at the moment" or "They said in this morning's paper that Osama Bin Laden is hiding in Outer Mongolia".
Who the hell is "they"?
"They" is typically a vague and often completely unidentifiable and unverifiable source floating somewhere out "there". For the Easily-Brainwashed Sucker, that's as good a source as any!
2. Believe that because something is widely held as fact, it must be true
Humans typically find great solace in being part of the crowd. As Mark Twain once wrote, "We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove."
Being part of the crowd provides a sense of comfort and belonging. It can also have an incredibly powerful mind-dulling effect, one that is strongly antithetical to logical and independent thought. As anyone who has ever watched a mob riot or stock market panic can attest, even highly intelligent and respectable individuals quickly come unglued when caught up in the mass-hysteria of crowds. In chaotic events like these, being part of the crowd can rouse people into acting in the most irrational and self-destructive manner.
During less stormy times, being part of the crowd lulls people into believing that if everybody believes something, it must be true. After all, why would so many people believe something if it wasn't? Never mind that, not too far back in history, the overwhelming majority of people believed that the world was flat; never mind that that the increasingly concentrated ownership of mass media outlets makes the spreading of misinformation easier than ever before.
Nope, never you mind these things at all; if you want to be an Easily-Brainwashed Sucker, you need to think like the rest of the crowd. In fact, if you're a really good member of the flock, you'll make a point of vigorously ridiculing those obnoxious black sheep who dare to speak their own minds--regardless of whether or not they may actually be speaking the truth!
Baaa!
3. Practice blind obedience to authority
Some especially gullible members of our society believe that if something is proclaimed by a large organization that is considered an 'authority' in its field, then it must be factual.
I have actually read arguments in support of the anti-cholesterol, anti-fat hypothesis that went something like this:
"Do you really think that respectable authorities like the Government, the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, the American Dietetic Association, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the USDA, the American Diabetes Association, yaada, yaada, yaada, are all mistaken when they tell us that saturated fat and cholesterol are harmful?"
Such a stance is known as the 'appeal to authority', and if you ever come across anyone who uses it, rest assured you are dealing with a first-class moron.
This line of argument assumes that when a group of fallible human individuals become part of a large and so-called 'respected' organization, then suddenly, almost as if by magic, they collectively become wonderfully impartial and infallible.
Reality suggests otherwise. Most of these oft-quoted organizations have extensive financial ties to food and/or drug manufacturers that stand to benefit from official support of the lipid hypothesis.
The American Heart Association, for example, has several hundred products bearing its famous 'heart-check' logo. It is estimated that the AHA earned over two million dollars from its certification program in 2002(1). Among the so-called 'heart-healthy' foods that can be found on the AHA heart-check list are(2):
* General Mills Cheerios, Cocoa Puffs, Cookie Crisp, Corn Chex, and Count Chocula;
* Healthy Choice Low Fat Ice Creams;
* Chocolate Moose Milk Chocolate Drinks;
* Malt-O-Meal Frosted Mini Spooners, Honey Graham Squares, and Honey Nut Toasty O's;
* Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats Big Bite;
* Kellogg's Nutri-Grain Cereal Bars;
* Pop-Secret 94% Fat Free Butter Microwave Premium Popcorn.
Sugar-laden, highly processed garbage, you say? Well, don't expect the AHA to concur, so long as the giant health organization continues to receive up to $7,500 per product per year to endorse such foodstuffs! The AHA has also received funding from cholesterol-lowering drug manufacturers like Merck, Pfizer, Astra-Zeneca, and Bristol-Myers-Squibb.
The American Dietetic Association (ADA) issues 'fact sheets' providing information on various nutrition and health topics; most of these are underwritten by companies whose products are discussed in the fact sheets. Manufacturers that have given at least $100,000 towards the production of these sheets include Coca-Cola, Kellogg, Kraft Foods, Weight Watchers International, Campbell Soup, National Dairy Council, Nestle USA, General Mills, Monsanto, Nabisco, Procter and Gamble, Ross Products, Wyeth-Ayerst Labs, and Uncle Ben's(1).
The Los Angeles Times revealed in late 2003 that hundreds of National Institutes of Health employees had been accepting consulting fees from biotech and pharmaceutical companies at least since November 1995. Over 500 agency employees had engaged in paid consulting arrangements with 1,515 outside employers since 1999. Some of these contracts involved such major cholesterol-lowering drug manufacturers including Pfizer, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and AstraZeneca(3-5).
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the massive government agency that decides which new drugs will be allowed into the market, when a drug should be pulled from sale because of safety concerns, and whether specific health claims can be made for individual food products and supplements.
In September 2000, USA Today reported that fifty-four percent--more than half--of the experts hired to advise the FDA on the safety and effectiveness of medicines have financial relationships with drug manufacturers that will be helped or hurt by their decisions. Some of these advisors had helped a pharmaceutical company develop a medicine then served on an FDA advisory committee that judged the drug!(6)
The close financial ties between these 'impartial' and 'respected' organizations and large companies that benefit greatly from the low-fat, low-cholesterol paradigm may explain why the are reluctant to come to the only conclusion one can come to after a thorough review of the relevant literature: namely, that this paradigm is utter garbage.
It was government meddling in the nutrition arena that allowed the low-fat, high-carbohydrate theory to really kick off in America and, by default, the rest of the Western world. Along with the AHA, the U.S. Government's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (a division of the NIH) was a key player in winning acceptance for the anti-cholesterol hypothesis, while the USDA's geometric nutritional absurdity, the 'Food Guide Pyramid', influenced millions of folks into believing that a high-carbohydrate grain-based diet was the epitome of healthy eating. The end result of this scientifically baseless stupidity is the unprecedented levels of obesity and type 2 diabetes we now see around us.
If you want to be an Easily-Brainwashed Sucker, believe with all your might that governmental and private authorities are competent, benevolent and bipartisan folks that are always acting in your best interests. When they screw up in spectacular fashion, blame it on the weather!
4. Place great emphasis on formal credentials
If someone has presented a plausible and intriguing argument, then that argument should be assessed on its own merits, not on the glowing qualifications--or lack thereof--of its author.
When the Easily-Brainwashed Sucker reads or hears something that he is not sure about, does he jump on the Internet or drive down to his local library in an effort to obtain first-hand the data that would help him ascertain the validity of this information? Hell no! That would be too much work and would cut into valuable TV time!
The Easily-Brainwashed Sucker is too lazy to expend the effort required to verify the facts. Instead, he relies on the opinion of people who might have already done this for him; people with lots of fancy initials after their names. After all, you have to pretty smart and have spent a lot of time at university to have all those titles, right?
Some pretty wise individuals do indeed emerge from the university system--as do an incredibly large number of unthinking twits who couldn't tell a donut from a hemorrhoid cushion.
To illustrate my point, let me again cite the case of two of modern medicine's favorite whipping boys: saturated fat and cholesterol. Four decades' worth of clinical trials have completely failed to show that dietary saturated fat restriction or dietary cholesterol-lowering can reduce CHD mortality(7). Of the 23 long-term prospective studies that examined the relationship between dietary fat and CHD, you could count those that found even desperately weak associations between saturated fat and CHD on one hand--with a couple of fingers missing (8-30). Even statin drugs, the alleged saviors of the lipid hypothesis, don't even work by cholesterol-lowering; these drugs are now well known to exert a host of biochemical effects beyond mere cholesterol-lowering (effects that were not exerted by their largely ineffective cholesterol-lowering predecessors, the fibrates), and clinical trials have repeatedly shown a dissociation between the mortality benefit of statins and the level of LDL cholesterol-lowering they induce.
Despite a complete lack of corroborating evidence, however, 'highly-educated' researchers the world over still believe that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease!
Extensive education does not in any way impart a monopoly on intelligence or the ability to think critically. In fact, it often does just the opposite. Modern education is aimed overwhelmingly at inculcating students with rigid, often outdated, and sometimes downright erroneous curricula.
This last century has seen an increasing reliance by universities on funding from 'benevolent' foundations, the largest of which are little more than tax-exempt mechanisms for extending the influence of their wealthy corporate creators. In more recent decades, there has also been a dramatic increase in direct corporate sponsorship of universities. If you believe that these financial 'gifts' have come with no strings attached, you would be well advised to read the disturbing revelations in Foundations: Their Power and Influence by Rene Wormser, a member of the Reece Committee that conducted a congressional investigation of tax-exempt foundations in the early fifties. The Reece Committee discovered that foundations frequently used their financial power to determine the curriculum and research conducted at the universities they sponsored.
And when you are done with Wormser's book, be sure to read Unhealthy Charities: Hazardous to Your Health and Wealth by James T. Bennett and Thomas J. Dilorenzo. You will learn how health charities such as The American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society spend much time and money on things that have nothing to do with research and aid to disease victims--like crying poor and pleading for donations when they are in fact hoarding hundreds of millions in money, real estate, cars, stocks & bonds, paying their top staff 6-figure salaries, holding 'conferences' at luxurious hotels, and enlisting government support to drive out smaller competing charities in order to ensure that their monopolistic reign continues unchallenged.
You may also like to consider the findings of a recent review published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in which researchers analyzed data encompassing a total of 1,140 original studies that had addressed the association between industry sponsorship and research outcome. When the results of all these studies were pooled, they showed that industry-sponsored research was 3.6 times more likely to produce favorable findings than studies with no financial ties to the industry. The study also found that: "Approximately one fourth of investigators have industry affiliations, and roughly two thirds of academic institutions hold equity in start-ups that sponsor research performed at the same institutions."(31)
If you want to be an Easily-Brainwashed Sucker, however, please do not consider the information provided by these commentators--you might just learn that our education system has many flaws. This will mean that you'll have to get up off your weak-willed butt and start thinking and researching for yourself! Such a scenario is clearly unacceptable--no self-respecting Easily-Brainwashed Sucker would be caught dead engaged in such a frivolous activity as the independent and uncompromising pursuit of truth!
5. Be swayed by the ad hominem attack
One sure-fire sign of intellectual bankruptcy is reliance on the ad hominem attack. This is when someone seeks to discredit another person's argument, not by rationally and systematically addressing the key points of that person's argument, but by instead attacking that person's personal character. To call someone unqualified, uneducated, disreputable, or a conspiracy nut, or to claim that they are a pug-ugly loser whose mother engages in the paid distribution of sexual favors, while failing to intelligently refute their arguments, is akin to placing a huge flashing sign above one's head--one that screams "I cannot intelligently refute this person's argument to save my life, so I am trying to divert attention to his alleged character flaws instead!" To maintain a robust Brainwashed Sucker state, ignore this warning sign no matter how brightly it flashes!
Ignorance is Bliss
Follow the tips in this article and you will be a welcome and easily-manipulated member of the worldwide family of Easily-Brainwashed Suckers, a group whose membership is in no way restricted by geographic, racial, cultural, gender, socioeconomic, or professional barriers!
[Ed. Note: Anthony Colpo is an independent researcher, physical conditioning specialist and author of the acclaimed The Great Cholesterol Con and The Fat Loss Bible]
References
1. Center for Science in the Public Interest. Lift the Veil report: Professional associations, charities, and industry front groups. Available online:
http://www.cspinet.org/new/pdf/lift_the_veil_guts_fnl.pdf (accessed August 18, 2004).
2. American Heart Association. Current Heart-Check mark products. Available online: http://216.185.112.90/productlist.aspx (accessed August 18, 2004).
3. Mondics C. Charges of ethical misbehavior stagger U.S. health agency. San Diego Tribune, Jun 1, 2004. Available online: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040601/news_1n1nih.html
(accessed June 9, 2004).
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5. Willman D. NIH Directors No Longer Drug Firm Consultants. Los Angeles Times, Jan 23, 2004.
6. Cauchon D. FDA Advisers Tied to Industry. USA Today, Sept. 25, 2000.
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