The Design Works

You notice it if you’re paying attention: the economic collapse, the refugees, the conspiracy theories filling in what people can’t understand otherwise. Someone offers simple answers and someone to blame. People take them. The pattern’s obvious enough that it feels stupid to point out, but here we are.

What disturbs me is that it’s not stupid people doing this. It’s people who can think, who read, who have some literacy about the world. They still fall for it. They want to believe something that makes things comprehensible again. They want to feel part of something larger. They want someone to blame. And the message is designed—carefully, skillfully—to make all of that easy.

I can see the craft in it. The rhetoric, the messaging, how it simplifies complexity into simple terms. It’s well made, which is the disturbing part. Someone knew what they were doing.

The 1930s parallel is impossible to escape. Economic anxiety. Institutions that don’t represent you. Refugees. An enemy. A promise of restoration. It’s the same formula, and it works because people are the same. They want to believe, and if you design the belief carefully enough, they will. Even intelligent people. Maybe especially intelligent people, since they’re better at justifying things.

I don’t know what to do with this except notice it. Notice how it works. Notice that intelligence isn’t protection—sometimes it’s the opposite. Notice that we’re not smarter than we were eighty years ago. We’re just more comfortable with certain kinds of lies.