The Card of the Day: The Fool Reversed.

Today, when I saw the Fool come up reversed, I immediately thought of credulity: an out-of-fashion word these days that indicates a belief in something without proof. Although often confused with the more popular “gullible,” there is a distinction to be made between the two. The gullible are duped by someone else. The credulous just dupe themselves by not doing their own research.

A good example of credulity is the illusory truth effect. When something gets repeated enough times, we accept it as true just because we have heard or read it so often we have stopped to question its veracity. A wikipedia article sums it up nicely:

New research published in Public Opinion Quarterly reveals a correlation between the number of times President Donald Trump repeated falsehoods during his presidency and misperceptions among Republicans, and that the repetition effect was stronger on the beliefs of people who consume information primarily from right-leaning news outlets.^[21]

The credulous run around celebrating the attack on the Capitol of the United State of America on January 6, 2021 as if it were an event worth commemorating. But to outsiders looking on, the attack did not amount to much outside of some tragic deaths and property damage. The joint session of Congress still counted the electoral votes that confirmed Joe Biden as President-Elect.

Are the believers then gullible, for being duped by the Big Lie of Trump and his supporters? Or are the credulous for not bothering to examine the facts of the events?

How free is freedom if you demand someone else give up theirs for yours?

Once you give power to an authority to remove a freedom from someone else, how long will it be before they come to take yours?

In their recklessness abandonment of skepticism, what other impossibilities can now be believed?

The reversed fool is a difficult and uncomfortable place to sit and think.