One of my favourite stories from the 20th Century has to be the reaction to Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of War of the Worlds in 1938. Basically, folks thought it was the news, and lost their shit.
Do listen to the radio play if you ever get the chance. It does sound like a radio broadcast. It starts with an announcer from an authentic sounding station introducing an orchestra, some music, briefly interrupted by a report on some meteorites, followed by more music, then more newsflashes, until, well, the Martians are marching on New York and it's the end of civilization as we know it. It's great entertainment, and it sounds authentic.
It was a convincing pastiche of radio news programs at the time.
Listeners could be forgiven if they thought it was the real thing (especially in those tense, pre-WWII days). If they seemed incredulous, well, loads of people today in the internet age believe far stupider things.
George Orwell addressed the phenomenon in 1940. More specifically, he addressed a
The first interesting bit he addressed was the extent to which people on both sides of the Atlantic tended to trust what would now be called the “Mainstream” or “Legacy” media. People thought they were hearing the news, and assumed what they heard on the news had to be true. He suggests that had the story appeared on the front page of one of London’s papers, the British public would have believed it as well:
"It is known that newspapers are habitually untruthful, but it is also known that they cannot tell lies of more than a certain magnitude,”
God knows Orwell was no fan of the papers. But he kept things in perspective, and he knew there were rules to the game. For all its flaws, I’ll still take the legacy press over the post-apocalyptic swamp of meme-land, which has fostered wide-spread climate-change denial, vaccine skepticism, Russian pseudo-history, and even bloody flat-earth theory. The papers weren’t that bad.
Even so, the listeners are not entirely let off the hook for their credulity:
“So few of the viewers attempted any kind of check. . .It appears over two thirds of them attempted no kind of verification: as soon as they heard the end of the world was coming, they accepted it uncritically.”
It seems our lot. People don’t check. They don’t verify. They don’t investigate. They don’t stop and think “hey, wait a minute. . .” They click “like” and repost. And base their world view on that, and vote based on that. And so here we are.
Maybe no one’s believing in Martian invasions, but they are panicking about immigrant invasions, woke hive minds, and big pharma. They’re terrified that George Soros will implant microchips in their heads, but think it cool when Elon Musk actually does it. They rage at phantasmagorical Q Anon Pizzagate child-sex rings which don’t exist, while ignoring the child victims of school shootings, who do. They will even torment the parents of Sandy Hook victims. These self proclaimed guardians of exploited children care not a whit that their messiah was buddies with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The President of the United States can make stuff up off the top of his head, and every word is taken as Gospel.
Our civilization has no business lecturing anyone about gullibility.
As interesting, and no less relevant to us today, were the apparent backgrounds of the believers. “The evident connection between personal unhappiness and the readiness to believe the incredible is [the survey’s] most interesting discovery.” I will quote the last bit in full:
People who have been out of work, or on the verge of bankruptcy for ten years may actually be relieved to hear of the approaching end of civilization. It is a similar frame of mind that has induced whole nations to fling themselves in the arms of a Saviour.
