Just over 75 years ago, Orson Welles caused a national sensation when he broadcasted a radio adaptation of HG Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. Welles’ dramatic performance was taken as fact, and left as many as 30 million Americans trembling in their boots. Others offer a lower number of around 1.7 million anxious citizens, while the most skeptical critics isolate the hysteria to only a few hundred thousand rubes.
It’s tempting to look back and laugh at the people who fell for Welles’ act, just as it’s tempting to chuckle at the first movie-goers who fled from an “on-coming” locomotive. After all, the first four decades of the 20th century brought with them a slew of discoveries about our world and its inhabitants: the Titanic shocked and awed, as did the Great War’s searing, graphic horror. The World’s Fairs broadened scientific comprehensions and rationality was prized above all, if for no other reason than reality seeming beyond intransigent.
Did the memory of the Hindenberg Disaster or the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge, two contrasting examples of a changing world, catalyze people’s frenzied reactions toward the fictional disaster? Perhaps the fire was fueled by a new astronomical understanding, like the 1930 discovery of then-planet Pluto? All analyses and explanations of listener reactions rely on the presence of an essential element: gullibility.
The word’s late 16th century etymological origins, “cull” or “dupe”, suggest a particular disdain for this type of ignorance. “Cull” was the linguistic grandchild of the French “couillon”, meaning testicle, dickhead or even “fucking stupid”. Cullible became gullible and that is something you obviously don’t want to be.
Gullibility as we know it officially dates to around 1793, after the Age of Enlightenment, a time when men and women the world over widened their political, mental and cultural horizons and wanted more. Statesmen like Thomas Jefferson proclaimed the importance of universal — or at least relatively universal — education and individual citizens set up schools for the new nation’s children. Ignorance had always been a subject of scorn. The fool, always a reliable foil, was derided afresh. Some religions even equated, and still do, credulousness with sin. Learning was tops and knowing all was even better, but people were still expected to be able to tell truth from tall tales.
That’s not to say that gullibility is merely a quaint trait of an ignorant past. In 2009, the Heene family and their high-flying balloon boy tale convinced millions that their six-year old son had been pulled into the stratosphere. Gullibility allowed writers like “JT LeRoy” and James Frey to pull one over on Oprah, resident cultural oracle. Or even the sporadic celebrity death hoaxes, like the one a very-much alive Morgan Freeman denied last week. The age of information only broadens the deception’s scope and quickens its pace, just as the radio widened Welles’ reach and impact.
The question of culpability in gullibility was examined in Craig Zobel’s recent movie Compliance, based in part on the true story of a man who spent a decade calling Wal-Marts, fast food chains and other franchises while pretending to be various authority figures. He would then order employees to harass or otherwise victimize their colleagues in ways that were as diverse as his reasons. The final 2004 incident, the one that inspired Compliance, saw three people aid in the strip search of a female employee “suspected” of stealing. The final act of manipulation was getting the victim to perform oral sex on a co-worker’s boyfriend.
“It’s an essential parable of human gullibility,” Frank Bruni wrote of Compliance. “How much can people be talked into and how readily will they defer to an authority figure of sufficient craft and cunning?” Did the people want to believe they were being ordered around by an authority figure, thereby “allowing” themselves to do heinous things? That argument worked well enough in the Nuremberg trials.
Though taking to such extremes taints the trait’s inherent purity: it’s not sympathy-inducing simplicity; it’s a willingness to believe in the unexpected. Of course gullibility can be misused or taken advantage of, like on shows that intentionally scare the bejeezus out of people for the viewer’s entertainment. I, for one, would be a perfect sucker for Scare Tactics: if suddenly confronted by what appeared to be a mutant rat, no matter how unlikely its existence, I would have the exact same reaction as this poor sap.
But if we over-rationalize, if we approach everything with cynicism and disbelief, we nullify surprise. Reason can whittle away magic, leading to the bane of German sociologist Max Weber’s existence, disenchantment. “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’,” he said. Paraphrasing Leo Tolstoy, he went on, “Civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become ‘tired of life’.” And that’s a fate worse than alien overlords.