Alphatuosity: July 2012

Friday 6 July 2012

My hero

If anyone can produce a more succinct, penetrating and devastating comment on Britain's political priorities than this, I will give up alcohol. For a week.

'We've spent more on bailing out the banks in one year than we have on science in Britain since Jesus...and look what we did with that. We invented the industrial world.'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18736011

What is alphatuosity?

Have you ever wondered what it's all about? Have you ever stared numbly out at the world during your daily commute and thought 'there must be more to life than this'? Have you ever felt you were meant for something more? If so, you have probably bought Rick Warren's book 'The Purpose Driven Life' or considered attending the Alpha Course. These wildly successful phenomena are examples of what I call alphatuosity: flim-flam masquerading as insight.

Alphatuous ideas lock on to various evolved modules in the human mind and produce an illusion of insight. They take advantage of the fact that common sense is both a wonderfully reliable guide to the behaviour of things on human scales and speeds and also woefully misleading on smaller or grander stages. They can be nonsensical, absurd and funny but also dangerous and I believe that they ought to be hunted to extinction.

The scruffy mongrel Toto in the Wizard of Oz pulled back the curtain hiding a charlatan who had been posing as a powerful magician, shocking Dorothy and instantly breaking the spell. Unlike the Wizard of Oz, who claimed to be 'a very good man...just a very bad wizard', alphatuists are often good wizards but very bad men (they are usually men).

My aim in this blog is to play the role of Toto, exposing the tricks used by the unholy alliance of charlatans and fools behind the contemporary deluge of alphatuosity. I shall also be exploring the science of belief and trying to discover why minds are so vulnerable to it. I shall show that there are satisfying answers to the deep questions we all ask ourselves, answers that follow from evidence, not revelation, tradition or authority.