What do Brietbart, Stormfront, Joe Mercola, and the Food Babe all have in common? Their sites are sources of social pollution. This is my own label for irrational, illogical, and counter factual thinking, you know, the stuff that critical thinking is supposed to help us resist. Defense against social pollution boils down to a combination of critical thinking and public education campaigns against propaganda and nonsense.
What is Social Pollution:
An opinion you don't like is not a form of social pollution. It has to go deeper than mere disagreement. It the opinion is illogical or contradicts known facts, then it probably counts. If that opinion would undermine widely-held values or human rights then it most definitely counts as social pollution.
How Pollution Starts and Spreads:
Social pollution comes from all parts of the social environment. As faith leaders, politicians, culture critics, documentary film makers and activists provide us with good information, they also feed us illogical and irrational ideas and opinions. Add to this the natural biases we all have in thinking and evaluating evidence, and you have the potential for trouble.
Conventional advertisers are part of the problem, but only part. Will that sports car really make you more appealing to the ladies? Will a crystal on a chain really balance your energies? Advertisers know how to play with our emotions and perceptions to make their products or services appeal to people. They are only a small part of the problem, except in a couple of cases.
1. Advertisements for scam products and services - Can you really get rich buying foreclosed properties? No. Will a nutritional supplement sold on late night television really slow the aging process? No.
2. Political advertising - Many advertisements dealing with politicians, social problems and laws use traditional advertising tactics and outright lies to move viewers to action.
The abuse of fact and logic illustrates what social pollution is, and what it leads to - opinions, behaviors, a worldview divorced from reality that have real effects on peoples' lives.
Individual and Social Causes:
Social pollution spreads because both society and the human mind help. This is a subject for a book, but in brief, several elements of modern society and of the human mind make it easy for social pollution to spread.
Our Unreliable Minds - Everyone is prone to cognitive biases, errors in thinking, that cannot be overcome by education or by intelligence either. Modern societies spawn people with an interest in selling lies and nonsense. Some of those individuals have political or religious motives, while others only care about the money. Either way, they are selling ideas that do not benefit the individual who hears them.
People Selling Fear/Division/Disorder - There is a special type of propaganda peddler, called an availability entrepreneur, who makes sure we have plenty of biased information on whatever threat or problem or crisis they want to promote. Those issues may indeed be serious ones, but the availability entrepreneur only cares about advancing their own worldview and making money.
Fighting Back Against Social Pollution:
This fight has two fronts - each individual's mind, and the social environment - that need to be attacked in different ways. Defending one's mind begins with learning to evaluate arguments and evidence. Better education is the best defense. Lesson plans and public education campaigns need to target specific issues, to prevent the resulting programs and policies from becoming contaminated with patent nonsense.
An educated mind is the best defense for the individual. Being smart or having common sense helps, but is not enough. Having a properly trained mind means having training in:
Social pollution is a social problem that can be fought through advocacy and public education efforts. Many such efforts exist now, to address a range of problems:
More needs to be done, of course. The world needs campaigns against other forms of social pollution, some with a more-direct impact on daily life. Myths about violent crime come to mind.
There needs to be a Social Pollution Prevention Initiative. At the very least, we can re-brand critical thinking as Social Pollution Prevention and use exercises related to social and environmental issues. There needs to be wider awareness of sites like the National Center for Science Education and TalkOrigins, to stick with natural sciences.
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