What makes bad ideas so attractive?

It can be productive to treat ideas as products. Carl Jung's observation that "people don't have ideas, ideas have people" means we need to be willing to apply critical thinking to ideas-as-products which may be toxic when adopted and broadcast uncritically by media or by what we assume are high-status groups or individuals.

 Firstly, it's all about us as consumers and our need for simple ideas.

John Holt's (1965) "How Children Fail" introduced the concept of 2 types of learners (based on his observation of how children learn math) as being "thinkers or producers" (thinkers who keep asking why, and producers who just want to capture the how or the trick to working on a particular problem and move on to the next task). 

I would qualify this dangerous dichotomy to say that this learning strategy is contextual (in other words, we are all thinkers or producers in different contexts).

 

Secondly, bad ideas work with people locked into producer-specific contexts because of the need to reinforce or gain primacy through identity-acquisition or reinforcement, itch, repetition and false-consensus:

1) The primacy-identity perspective is where we buy into a simplistic rationale that elevates and reinforces personal primacy (I am good and you are bad), if you disagree with me you are evil. Thus I (always) win: even when I am wrong. The is about virtue-signalling status and reinforcing the politics of mimicry.  This primacy effect leads to adoption by low or marginal-status participants in order to elevate themselves socially. When undergoing resistance to interrogation training I remember being intrigued by the observations of survivors of both German and Soviet prison camps. They both commented on the tendency of some prisoners to gravitate toward mimicking the language, attitudes and even body-language of their guards. This included persecuting their less-compliant fellows when the guards weren't around.

2) The false simplicity trick and the rise of the adult toddler: with the diminishing attention-span of generations X, Y and Z, reductionist ideas (single variable root-causes) work because they fit low attention-span levels of critical thinking. Thus everything is "systemic" and yet also mono-causal (the contradiction is always ignored).  Bad social outcomes are sold as the product of society, and not bad choices driven by social contagion or embedded culture. Gender pay differences are down to misogeny and not due to different, logical choices involving calculations of costs and benefit made by both sexes. Ironically this includes demands for equal representation in high-status, symbolic work roles, but not in essential, laborious, potentially dangerous working environments. 

The adult "toddler" of false simplicity is complemented by the adoption of victim status, itself the product of the triangle of victimhood based on 3 complementary and self-reinforcing performative behavioural messages: This begins with “I’m unhappy it’s your fault” (signal) which leads to “look what you made me do” (I am not responsible for myself) and then “when are you going to make me happy?” (make it better by giving into my "feelings" and pay reparations for my bad behaviours or I will continue to act up).

Adoption of false simplicity is made attractive by mimicry of what is assumed to be high-status "priestly" or social-hygienic, low-contagion signals,. Thus the simpler an idea (for some) the more attractive it becomes. Uncritical adoption  involves becoming superior to everyone else who doesn't know about it or doesn't care.

Thirdly, bad ideas possess an "itch" or vacuum of internal contradiction that allow it to adhere and stick to the surface mind without triggering a sufficient level of irritation that would involve decomposing the bad idea or critiquing it to identify the contradictions or flaws. We just cannot be bothered to take it apart because we are doing something else. 

Here are three examples: 

The UK National Student Survey (NSS) at a surface-level seems to indicate the relative performance of higher education institutions through aggregating and comparing satisfaction metrics from students to rank universities within a hierarchy. It assumes that students are a uniform population and their ratings are not the product of culture or previous pedagogic experiences and environments. In reality, the student population needs to be decomposed into learning style preferences, and all participants also need to have a shared baseline experience of different teaching environments in order to have a generalisable view. There is little examination of teaching strategies in terms of structure, sequence, reinforcement, etc. 

The NSS completely ignores the possibility that high-status HEI students will tend to rate their universities higher because they gain primacy of identity through denoting high status by marking satisfaction up. This is like the McKinsey status-reinforcing logic of charging high daily-rates for high-status work, and thus the brand becomes associated with high-status because it has to be initiated at CEO level and thus the product must be good. Round and around we go.

Similarly, the College of Policing policy upon non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) is another example of false or superficial simplicity. NCHIs are based on the attractive idea of identifying and intervening at a “pre-crime” level to prevent (inevitable) escalation to a "hate" crime. This idea is based on a superficial understanding of system dynamics and
Gordon Allport's (1954) "pyramid of hate" implying that failure to intervene at first manifestation will lead to genocide. Sadly Allport]s evidence is anecdotal and does not attempt to duplicate similarly problemmatic laboratory experiments a'la Milgram, Hawthorne or Zimbardo. There has been no attempt to integrate data on interventions with a reduction in hate crimes. The possibility that the rationale is attempting to conflate apples with oranges has not been considered. NCHIs elevate policing toward an apparently "systemic" level and thus high status, but sadly ignore the multivariate elements involved. 

Finally, let's examine "Critical Race Theory" (CRT) objectively as consumable product by its packaging. CRT is the product of linguistic inversion at several levels as a rhetorical device: firstly, its authors are suggesting "critical" in terms of importance; whilst secondly, suggesting that it is the product of critical thinking, thus elevating its devotees and suggesting primacy within a hierarchy of knowledge. Thirdly, it is not a theory: it is an hypothesis or idea which does not survive logical, critical examination, but uses the term "theory" to suggest that it is an hypothesis that has survived experimental validation and thus is the product of expert consensus, replicable and could be the basis of policy. CRT adoption implies high status and by implication, a critical potential consumer who unpacks the contradictions in the idea-product packaging is therefore of low status and contemptible.

David Mamet observed with conscious irony that educated people are the easiest to fool, because being educated inevitably involves learning lots of stuff; and it's easier to learn lots of stuff when it complements your role, enhances status, and when it is communicated with triggers involving three-letter-acronyms for simple ideas to make them memorable. Thus packaging, stylisation and placement are key to adoption for consumers with low attention-spans and low intellectual energy. 

Surviving bad ideas involves the conscious use of relatively high energy levels for critical thinking (as per Kipling's Six Honest Serving-men: who, what, why, when, where and how) and a willingness to explore the possibility that the all ideas are potentially bad, flawed or of limited use as intellectual products. 

Beware of being possessed by bad ideas: caveat emptor.