been led to believe. A 2020 book by the cognitive
scientist Hugo Mercier, Not Born Yesterday, pres-
ents a mountain of evidence “against the idea that
humans are gullible, that they are ‘wired not to
seek truth’ and ‘overly deferential to authority’,
and that they ‘cower before uniform opinion’,”
quoting Jason Brennan in his book Against Democ-
racy. In fact, Mercier reveals through both labora-
tory research and real-world examples that “far
from being gullible, we are endowed with a suite
of cognitive mechanisms that evaluate what we
hear or read.” And far from defaulting to believ-
ing everything we hear, Mercier notes that “by
default we veer on the side of being resistant to
new ideas. In the absence of the right cues, we re-
ject messages that don’t fit with our preconceived
views or preexisting plans. To persuade us other-
wise takes long-established, carefully maintained
trust, clearly demonstrated expertise, and sound
arguments.”^21
Mercier begins by showing why evolution
could not have created animals that are so gullible
as to be routinely exploited by others, as that
would ultimately lead to reproductive failure and
the extinction of extreme gullibility. The balance
in communication between belief and skepticism
led to an evolutionary arms-race between decep-
tion and deception detection, along with cogni-
tive mechanisms “that help us decide how much
weight to put on what we hear or read.” Mass
persuasion, for example, is extremely difficult to
pull off, and most attempts at it fail miserably,
because when scaled up from two-person com-
munication to large audiences, trust cues do not
scale up accordingly. Most preachers, prophets,
and demagogues fail, but because of the avail-
ability bias we only remember the biggest names
in the genre, such as Jesus and Hitler. But even
these examples fail upon further inspection.
In his own time Jesus was a disappointment at
starting a new religion (which might not have been
his mission in any case), and even the apostle Paul
barely got Christianity rolling. It wasn’t until the
4th century that Christianity began to number in
the millions, which sounds impressive until we
consider the power of compound interest, in which
a small but steady growth can yield an enormous
figure given enough time. Invest $1 at a constant
yearly interest rate of 1% in the year 0, if the divi-
dends are reinvested by the year 2020 the invest-
ment would be worth over $2.4 billion. Mercier
cites statistics compiled by the sociologist of reli-
gion Rodney Stark, who estimates Christianity’sgrowth rate at 3.5% over the centuries. If each
Christian only saves a few souls in a lifetime the
religion could easily compile tens of millions in a
matter of a few centuries, and over two billion by
today. Perhaps this is why the dismal conversion
rate of, for example, Mormon missionaries on
their two-year missions, is not a concern for the
church, as the success rate can be small if the
process goes on long enough (coupled to high
birth rates, of course, which most religions en-
courage).
As for Hitler, Mercier presents compelling
evidence revealing that most Germans did not
accept Nazi ideology, nor most of the planks in
the regime platform, and even the anti-Semitism
so famously on display in Hitler’s writings and
speeches was only effective on Germans who
were already anti-Semitic. The euthanasia of the
handicapped in the 1930s was resisted by most
Germans and got so much bad press that the
Nazis made the program secret and issued orders
to never speak of it, a policy carried through the
Final Solution and the Holocaust, which was
shrouded in secrecy and mostly carried out in
Poland, far from the prying eyes of German
citizens. Hitler’s anti-communism appealed to
right-leaning Germans but was rejected among
industrial workers. By 1942, most citizens did not
believe the declarations of victory issued by the
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, instead re-
lying on secreted BBC reports of how the war was
really going for Germany (not well). As the Nazi
intelligence agency Sicherheitsdienst (SD) re-
ported: “Our propaganda encounters rejection
everywhere among the population because it is
regarded as wrong and lying.”^22
To the commonly asked question “How
could so many highly educated, intelligent, and
cultured Germans become Nazis?” the answer
is: “Most didn’t.” The entire regime—not unlike
the Soviet Union and North Korea—was held
aloft on pluralistic ignorance, in which individual
members of a group don’t believe something but
believe that most others in the group believe it.
When no one speaks up—or are prevented from
speaking up through state-sponsored censorship
or imprisonment—it produces a “spiral of silence”
that can transmogrify into witch hunts, purges,
pogroms, and repressive political regimes. This is
why totalitarian and theocratic regimes restrict
speech, press, trade, and travel, and why the
route to breaking the bonds of such repressive
governments and ideologies is free speech, free4 6 S K E P T I C M A G A Z I N E volume 25 number 1 2020