Acceleration, cognition & the post-truth age

According to the german empirical sociologist Hartmut Rosa, modernity can be understood [1] and distinguished as the period of structural and systematic temporal acceleration. The high and ever-increasing pace of life in modern times is a systematic consequence of our social, economic and political structures.

This acceleration, which comes in technical, social, economic and communicative forms, is actually a self-feeding cycle [2] — a feedback loop between technological progress, social change, upheaval and life-rhythm acceleration. According to Rosa, this cycle especially picked up steam around the uptake of the (first) industrial revolution, but developed later to take on a life of its own.

The acceleration of the rhythm of life, in the sense of time becoming an ever-scarcer resource for large portions of the population, drives and accelerates technological change and upheavals, as many people try to save time in the hope of coming to terms with life’s increasingly hectic pace. Technological change in turn inevitably drives social change and upheavals, with major historic examples being the invention and development of train travel and the advent of the internet. Yet again, social change and upheavals and their acceleration inevitably cause a further compression of time for a large number of people, causing an acceleration of the pace of life. For example, as people become increasingly willing to move cities for taking on new jobs, this sort of change becomes not just more frequent but more systematic and actually expected, not least due to workplace displacement, job outsourcing and generalized changes in career path expectations, new settlement trends and their consequently accompanying lifestyles.

Practically speaking, this pace of life and its acceleration translate into an ever-increasing list of demands on people’s time and attention, and a full bombardment by relevant — and also very much irrelevant — information. This deluge comes with, and is simultaneously caused by, a newfound societal shift from outsourced services to self-handling things, for example the shift from relying on travel agencies for organizing trips to booking one’s own flight tickets and trips.

Simultaneously, there has been a societal shift towards instant, or at least very rapid, handling standards. This is what brought us the notification age: you nowadays get notified on your smartphone about all sorts of things (e.g. email and especially messages), because you are expected to handle them instantly.

Now, you probably might be thinking: why is any of this a problem? The reality is, given fundamental neuroscientific knowledge about the human brain and human cognition, these developments are alarming. The systemic acceleration of all areas of life overwhelms our neurological and cognitive capacities, and this inevitably leads to a post-factual world where conspiracy theories, stereotypes, and extremist thinking reign supreme.

It has long [3] been known from the field of neuroscience that human working memory, a.k.a. active attention, has a limit — the brain can only hold around 4 distinct thoughts or things [4] in working memory at the same time. While this exact number can vary depending on circumstances and contexts, it’s generally extremely limited. Unfortunately, the availability of working memory controls [5] how well, how accurately and how thoroughly a person is able to think, and it also controls [6] whether they can make good decisions and form accurate judgements.

The other part of human memory, long-term memory, only works via association. It uses triggers [7] and cues for remembering — getting stimulated or remembering something makes you remember [8] another, related thing. Unfortunately, this long-term memory is generally unreliable [9] for accurate recall, and it cannot be used to keep tabs on things.

On another level, switching mental contexts induces a high mental toll [10] for the human brain, because it uses [11] a lot of the energy (glucose) available to the brain. Unfortunately, constant switching is increasingly the norm nowadays, and is even encouraged due to the pace of life and given trends like multitasking and the notification age. For example: you’re focused on something, a notification appears on your smartphone, you open it, and often you find yourself handling something completely different, in a completely different mental context than what you were involved with previously.

Similarly, discipline, willpower and decision-making also have biological costs and limits in the brain. They therefore involve a mental budget, which can be and does get depleted — leading to so-called “ego depletion” (a.k.a. “depletion of the self”). This is because these behaviors also rely on the depletable energy resources in the brain — those same resources which are also depleted by mental context switching. Unfortunately, the supply of discipline and willpower also determines [13], and its absence can inhibit, certain behaviors such as self-control and deliberate thought.

This all becomes more worrisome once you read into the cognitive science behind thinking flaws and sloppy thinking. Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman, and his research colleague Amos Tversky, discovered [14] that humans basically rely on either of two but radically-different thinking systems.

The so-called “system 1” is the emotional, intuitive, largely unconscious thinking system. It generally involves light use of mental resources, it operates fast and is favored by a fast thinking pace.

On the other hand, “system 2” is the rational, effortful, conscious thinking system, but it requires a lot of mental effort, resources and energy in the brain. In contrast to “system 1”, it operates slowly and is favored by a slow thinking pace.

Humans use system 1 by default, as the brain attempts to save and skimp on limited energy resources to avoid depleting them. The bad news is, this is the thinking system that underlies [15] most sloppy (or let’s call it cognitively-lazy) thinking: cognitive heuristics, quick-thinking shortcuts, biases, stereotypes and prejudices. These mental shortcuts are one of the main reasons for misjudging situations, and they make people take bad or inappropriate decisions. The depressing reality is, however, that there is a pandemic lack of temporal and mental space and mental resources for people in our modern times — but this space and these resources are needed for performing thorough thought (using system 2).

Our modern social, economic and technological trends and standards are causing the post-truth phenomenon, irrational behavior and stymying action on existential issues like climate change. We are now effectively living in an age where we as a society can no longer agree on the basic facts describing reality. This post-truth era portends a grim future for individuals, for society, for freedom, and for the planet. To understand this, an overview of the current situation is in order.

First and most disturbing is the fact that logic, non-logic, and syllogism teaching is not part of the basic school curriculum in most countries. In contrast, technical skills like math, physics, chemistry and so on are taught, probably because they’re useful work skills for the economy and the job market. But the sheer infatuation with mathematics permeating educational and academic institutions, instead of serving as a conduit for the reverence and pursuit of rationality, instead hides a deep-seated confusion of priorities and ignores the fact that whereas math is logic, logic is most emphatically not just math — it’s instead a much more fundamental and broadly-applicable set of thinking rules and patterns. To the keen observer, it cannot be missed that the misplaced priority on technical skills and knowledge, and their higher-standing in the education system, is caused in turn by the systemic over-prioritization of the economy (and work/labor generally) above all else — this is one of the key aspects of the modern self-acceleratory socio-economic system, more familiarly known as the rat race.

On the other hand, the actual functioning of the brain — only the single most important tool we use in our lives — and human cognition and how it works (or often doesn’t work) are also not taught in school. Most people, even in educated circles, lack fundamental knowledge from those fields.

Consequently, under modern circumstances and in lack of fundamental neuro- and cognitive- science knowledge, the way most people behave nowadays runs against the very way the brain works. The most glaring example of this is that most people handle and keep track of almost everything mentally, inevitably using autopilot mode (system 1) in an increasingly complex world, but this has unintended and dangerous consequences.

First, this overloads attention and working memory, especially given today’s inputs, because the brain is simply not fit to handle such inputs live, on the fly at today’s speeds and frequencies. This is a source of constant mis-management and avoidable stress, a not just familiar but expected mishap. This is because the only other mental alternative — using long-term memory for mentally managing things — is precisely not a serious alternative, as long-term memory cannot be reasonably used to keep track of or pay attention to things.

Second, this overloads the aforementioned “mental budget” and mental energy of people, ultimately resulting in inaction, lack of discipline, bad consumer choices and eventually — but unavoidably — flawed and sloppy thinking.

Given the standard of handling everything mentally, along with the lack of logic education, we should not be surprised by the rise of conspiracy theories, the pandemic of flawed judgement and other issues like unabated and destructive consumerism.

More recently, the (mis)information age has grown two new tentacles: social media and smartphones. The first of these brought us the “attention economy” — tech companies making money out of selling people’s attention to advertisers. Facebook, Youtube and their ilk have a vested interest in attracting, keeping and mining people’s attention, and they have been increasingly doing so using pernicious tactics.

Social media relies and thrives on ever-more addictive [16] content and “social feed” algorithms. It promotes ever-more use of instant notifications delivered to always-on-hand smartphones to constantly keep part of people’s attention glued to its platforms, and this drives a feedback loop in our acceleratory socio-economic life. Again: by constantly notifying people about all sorts of things, people are increasingly expected to handle or reply to content (emails, messages, etc) instantly. Similarly, social media favors ever-more emotionally loaded content — often outrageous or revolting hate-based content. Emotions being a specialty of system 1, and attention being a limited resource required by system 2, enraging emotions and engaging attention inevitably drives people’s mental acumen downwards. Some NGOs [17] have already started ringing alarms in this respect.

Crises in consumption, the environment, the climate, (conspiratorial-)thinking and general judgement are largely due to these circumstances. They are caused by our self-acceleratory socio-economic system in the context of lacking counter-skills — information- and self- management skills.

Conspiracy theories, and populism generally, rely on suggesting simple (“cognitively-lazy”) answers to complex problems and realities. The grim reality is that most people in today’s world are ego-depleted. One mechanism causing this is workaholism, the protestant work ethic, and often accompanying lack of sleep (in the drive to keep up and compensate) resulting in decreasingly accurate judgement — which not surprising given that the brain relies on sleep to process memories [18]. In their free time, however, people simply revert to using social media which, along with the constant exposure to notifications, further drags them down this spiral.

The complexity of the world has reached such extents that an increasing number of people cannot keep up with it anymore; they prefer easy answers to problems and (over-)simplified depictions of reality. A study [19] from a research group at Cambridge University, for instance, showed that people with extremist views are less able to do complex mental tasks. This is all a sign of system 1 at play, and it’s unfortunately not surprising, because this thinking mode is inherently at odds [20] with nuance, doubt and uncertainty. System 1 naturally favors an oversimplification of reality to avoid these less-pleasant aspects of life.

The drive for simple answers can understandably reach and attract people well, as it saves them mental effort in actually analyzing & understanding (often complex) problems and realities properly. It’s indeed much easier to believe in a more comforting — or if not comforting than conspiratorial — reality: easier to believe that some small group of conspirators is pulling the strings, rather than to accept inconvenient truths. Such is an intriguing feature of human cognition: when reality is uncomfortable and does not live up to your wishes or expectations, instead of changing your wishes or expectations, you change your perception of (and relation to) reality — this is “cognitive dissonance” [21].

For example, it’s too inconvenient and too complex to accept that a virus or bacteria suddenly broke out (and maybe cost you your job) due to an interplay of coincidence and underlying systemic issues (like factory animal farming, antibiotic abuse and incessant encroachment on wild animal habitats). Instead, you (choose to) believe that a small group of people invented the virus or bacteria to impose lockdowns, restrict liberties or profit from vaccines and ultimately disenfranchise people like you. Rings a bell?

A good case study here is the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown and simultaneous rise of conspiracy theories. People have had to observe lockdowns, social distancing regulations and general leisure restrictions. Obviously, these restrictions are not something they enthusiastically chose, but rather something that was imposed on them by the danger of the situation, and which they had to live with in spite of themselves. This in turn understandably caused a widespread lack of motivation, a lack of replenishment of discipline and willpower, and consequently a depletion of people’s mental energy budgets. Additionally, many people had their very economic existence threatened or destroyed, leading many to revert consciously or unconsciously to conspiracy theories in an effort to delegitimatize the basis for their hardships.

Eventually, this leads to an increasing number of people living in a parallel reality constructed by their inability to accept and analyze the world as it actually is.

The drive for cognitive-laziness, due to these circumstances and to an inherent human tendency, involves all-too familiar thinking flaws. A notable one which especially fuels belief in conspiracy theories is the confusion between correlation and causation — a typical cognitive shortcut. But the fact that two events happen simultaneously or one after another — correlation — such as a person dying after getting a vaccine, does not necessarily mean that the one event caused the other. This confusion often underlies the thinking of conspiracy theorists causally connecting the dots when no such (causal) connection exists.

Such links between personal loss and disenfranchisement on the one hand, and conspiratorial thinking on the other hand, seems to be a recurrent pattern amongst covid deniers for instance. Based on on-the-ground reporting [22] by Samira Schackle, all covid-deniers she questioned reported suffering economically or psychologically from the pandemic. There is even scientific work documenting a statistical link between fast- (system-1-) thinking and conspiracy theories. In a talk to the institute of arts and ideas, Richard Bentall, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Sheffield, presented [23] research which suggests that the lack of ability to think slowly is a hidden variable which can explain belief in conspiracies, the paranormal, religion and even outright paranoia.

Disconcertingly, the frenzied modern pace of life is a factor pushing people into the hands of populism and far right thinking, often via the mediation of these very conspiracy theories. This is ripe terrain for exploitation by dictatorial regimes and totalitarian movements.

An anecdotal but insightful example here can be found in German far-right circles: the concept of “responsibility burnout” [24]. Essentially, ever-more demands are placed nowadays on an individual’s mental thought, due to an increasing number of needs and expectations given socio-economic acceleration: ever-more minority rights and sensibilities they have to pay attention to and respect, ever more actions they are implored to take (e.g. help the local charity, welcome immigrants and refugees, do something about climate change and so on). But since this pace of life has been historically accompanied by a decreased reliance on outsourced services by individuals, and by decaying social support networks, at some point, if managing input mentally with no other more solid information skills, a person becomes resistant to yet more change, and stops accepting any. Coupled with an underlying tendency for conservatism, this can be a toxic mix leading to and justifying far-right thinking, in the form of a strong desire to return to the good old times, where the world was more simple and understandable.

In essence, the mechanism at play in these tendencies is that mounting daily responsibilities, along with the ever-increasing speed and complexity of life, non-surprisingly make people avoid any mental effort when dealing with new information or new demands. People therefore revert to unconscious, intuitive and quick answers to these new inputs. Unfortunately, the unconscious and the intuitive is precisely what the cognitive science warns us against: it not only leads to thinking flaws in dealing with problems, but also favors stereotypical thinking, prejudices and biases. Such thinking patterns pair extremely well with extremist, black-or-white and generally simplistic thinking, and this can (and does) very well lead to scapegoating other population groups.

A german Historian, Norbert Frei, corroborated [25] the link between the speed of life, frenzied activity and extremist, far-right and dictatorial movements. He cited recurrent accounts from Germans who lived the transition into nazism, and who described it as a sort of constant noise and activity which “swept” over them, saying they did not even have the time to stop and reflect about what was happening. He noted that such stoking of frenzied activity is often a deliberate recipe of dictatorships. The lessons of history should therefore warn us of where such acceleratory trends can lead.

After the second world war, full employment and the economic boom might have benefited liberal democracy by keeping these mechanisms at bay. Most people were kept busy with work and consumption; they barely had time to think of other things, and they consistently rewarded and replenished themselves by consuming goods and services. But innovation, namely automation, made (and is still making) many common jobs obsolete, often without the benefit of creative destruction generating alternative jobs, and the unqualified strata of the working class increasingly became permanently unemployed or entered long periods of precarious employment.

As is palpable today, given the climate and environmental catastrophes, the former pipe-dream of the endless economic boom was and remains unsustainable — it simply used up natural capital for the short term while depleting it on the long term. And with the advent of the information age and the pace of life reaching historic records (a byproduct of the economic boom itself), this heavily backfired later.

At today’s frenzied speed of life, less-convenient aspects of living — inconvenient and worrisome news, major priority-shifts and similar inputs which touch people’s lives — are often pressing enough that they need to be handled and cannot simply be ignored. With the amount of information and news in circulation, however, and given the ever-shorter time people have for digesting it, the inevitable upshot is the widespread use of system 1 — reverting to mental shortcuts, cognitive laziness and sloppy thinking.

The systemic lack of time and the frenzied pace of life make it impossible for people to actually take individual action and change their individual behaviors on such important societal and political issues, or makes them unwilling to or lack the willpower for such change of behavior.

This is one of the main reasons people avoid confronting themselves with what they have to do about climate change: that would involve overwhelming re-thinking, behavior change, conscious mental effort and course-correction at their individual level, simply because tackling climate change involves nearly all areas of consumption and economic behavior (which itself mediates nearly everything else).

The current mainstream mode of life in the west — full-time and often mentally- or physically- depleting work — is set up as if designed to cause ego depletion and decision overload. It’s insightful, for instance, that death caused by bad and irrational decisions (e.g. driving while drunk) has increased [26] from 10% to 43% in the US in recent years. In a usual work day, by the time they finish work, most people simply want to entertain themselves, sleep and rest or just reward themselves with something. This sort of lifestyle leaves very little time and mental capacity or willpower for actual thinking on personal issues, let alone important topics like social and political behavior, consumption choices, and social, economic, environmental and political issues. Quite the contrary, this lifestyle makes people fall for tricks (e.g. advertizing driving consumerism) designed to appeal to their system 1 — which reigns free given their depleted system 2. The full-time work model consistently leads to such circumstances.

On the one hand, unemployed people, with comparatively ample free time on their hands, and who often have little skills and resources to manage and handle their lives independently, are susceptible to flawed conspiracy thinking due to their very situation. This is due to the relation between discipline, willpower, boredom and the skill of knowing how to use one’s time. Often, too much free time presents people with an overwhelming choice in terms of information consumption, behavioral choices and so on, to the point where they are not equipped to handle it. Paradoxically, too much choice is scientifically known to cause mental overload [27].

On the other hand, employed people, who overwhelmingly work full-time and therefore have comparatively little free time, are also falling prey to flawed thinking, due to the short-term attractiveness of cognitive shortcuts. Briefly put, avoiding thorough (and lengthy) thinking and mental effort is understandable from their perspective in light of their mental depletion after work and of their pressing need to save and gain time.

With the current convention of full-time work, there is very little between these two employment scenarios — most people are either unemployed or employed full-time. With very few exceptions, part-time work is almost entirely unavailable, systematically marginalized or underpaid.

Other recent economic developments only add insult to injury. For instance, increasingly high and unaffordable rents in city centers push less qualified (and therefore generally less well-off) workers outside of the city centers. Since most of their jobs remain in those centers, however, they have to commute for longer and end up with even less free time. It’s not surprising that system 1, stereotypical and biased thinking often takes root in these social strata. This is only one mechanism (among other similar ones) by which such worker classes are pushed into extremism — the hallmark of system-1 thinking.

Where does this all lead? I’m afraid this is landing our societies in all-too familiar and perilous circumstances. Here, it’s insightful to touch on what personally drove me to write this article: the relation between facts and liberty.

Facts are simply the chief determinant of the boundaries where the freedom of the ones stops and the freedom of the others starts. In my opinion, this is what George Orwell meant in his 1984 novel:

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

The post-factual society is the harbinger of totalitarianism [28].

More generally, democracy is a principle and system that can only properly and sustainably function provided a well-informed, rational citizenry. This was a basic premise behind the enlightenment — teaching people about the world, namely via encyclopedias, so that they are better-equipped to participate in public life and in the public decision-making process. Unfortunately, given the current structure and effectively-pursued purpose of the education system, we are producing good workers (and even better consumers), not good citizens. This is especially due to the mis-judgement of the centrality of mathematical education, as a way of increasing rationality, to the detriment of other areas effectively more essential to this end. After all, mathematics are primarily useful for solving technical problems, not general (societal, economic or political) problems.

These premises underline the importance of respecting truth, facts and defending both of them against abuse and manipulation. Malicious manipulation of facts and reality have long been relied on by people & groups with dangerous agendas.

A look at different junctures in history shows this evidently. The nazis used their theories of the “superiority” of the “Arian” race to legitimize rooting out whole populations and committing the holocaust. More generally, the misunderstanding, demonization and ensuing marginalization of jews, women, homosexuals and similarly positioned (effective-)minorities lead historically to systemic, structural and rampant discrimination and persecution. The historic denialism of scientific facts from industry interests, for the sake of their profit at the expense of the common good, lead to similarly rampant crises. Thus lead the tobacco industry’s denialism of the smoking - lung cancer connection to scores of avoidable deaths, and more recently the fossil fuel industry’s denialism of the fact of human-induced climate change to the still-developing climate catastrophe. More recently, the big lie of the “stolen” US 2020 election, propagated by former US president Donald Trump for holding on to power, culminated in the assault on the US capitol on January 6^th 2021. Similarly and simultaneously, the far-right is currently instrumentalizing the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic for stoking anti-system rhetoric and gaining electoral ground.

With impending and potentially-catastrophic crises, the consequences of such a slippery slope into the post-factual world are deeply disturbing. Dangers are posed by this social and cognitive climate in (non-)tackling climate change; indeed there is slim hope of affecting the broad socio-economic change required for tackling such a crisis under these circumstances. Similarly, dangers are posed that crimes against humanity will occur again. This latter danger is already materializing to an extent in the case of the Syrian regime’s war crimes, which were and are still justified and legitimized by a post-factual deflection of the discussion in the media — to make it focus on atrocities committed by ISIS and similarly-extremist groups, although the regime’s war crimes far outweigh those of others — and by sheer and outright propaganda.

How does a globalized society muddled in such a situation get out of this rut? The journalist Matthew D’Ancona fittingly wrote that [29]

“If distraction can be the enemy of truth, it follows that its protectors must engage in the battle for attention”.

There is no other way but to make people behave and manage themselves in a way that takes into account and respects how the human brain and human cognition work, so that they can behave more rationally and commit to much-needed behavior change. This is also Richard Bentall’s position: considering this situation to be a public health issue and consequently adopting a public-health approach to combating it. In short, we need to teach children (and adults as well) how to think. Our current education system teaches them how to work, not how to think.

On the foreseeable term, we need to start by teaching self-management skills [30] to people, so that they can snatch themselves out of the unconscious autopilot thinking mode, and so that they can empower themselves to handle life’s inputs better. Essentially, this is equivalent to extending our minds and ability to think using technological tools, an approach to tackle irrational decision-making also recommended by Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University [31]. This empowers people to better handle decision making and avoid decision overload and willpower depletion, and therefore free up their mental energy “budgets”. This empowers them to keep their attention well-managed and their mental space clear. All of this enables them to gather and protect the mental resources required to think thoroughly (and therefore properly) using system 2. Consequently, this also empowers them to hold others accountable for their statements, and to stand up to the spread of mis- and dis- information and fake news. The somewhat depressing conjecture, however, is that the alarmingly-large proportion of people living in autopilot mode are the least likely to take the decision to go out of this mode. System 1 makes bad decisions, and it’s not likely to make the decision to get out of itself.

On the longer term, we as a society need to include basic science about the human brain and human cognition, and teaching on logic, in the mandatory school curricula. Finally, we as individuals and as a society need to rethink our relationship to technology and curtail the self-acceleratory socio-economic feedback loop; we need to make sure technology, change, economic growth and acceleration serve our goals and visions, instead of pursuing them for their own sake.