While It Is Day: American Gullibility

A gullible person or society is one “easily persuaded to believe something; easily deceived.” Synonyms include words like “naive, exploitable, and dupable.”  If you are gullible, it means that you are easily fooled.  The word gullible might be derived from the verb gull, which means “to swallow.”  That’s interesting, because gullible describes an overly trusting person (or group) who tends to swallow the stories he hears whole.  Gull can be used as a noun, “don’t be such a gull!” or as a verb, “you can’t gull me into believing that!” Wikipedia defines gullibility as a “failure of social intelligence in which a person is easily tricked or manipulated into an ill-advised course of action.  It is closely related to credulity, which is the tendency to believe unlikely propositions that are unsupported by evidence.”

A charlatan is a person who makes false claims that are believed by gullible people.  Synonyms for the word charlatan, include:  “quack, fraud, imposter, hoaxer, deceiver, mountebank,  and con man.

Now this is all I’m going to write in “my own words,” because I don’t want my words to be distorted by a "dishonest media" and I don't want to get “carried away” (on a stretcher or have my head accidentally bumped).  But I do want to share some quotes about gullibility, a prevalent and contemporary malady in American religion and politics.

“Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind.  With such persons, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck” (Thomas Jefferson). 

“Gullibility is a knife at the throat of civilization” (David Wong).

“Faith never means gullibility.  The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything” (Aiden Wilson Tozer).

“Extreme skepticism and extreme gullibility are two equal ways of not having to think at all.  And I don’t think I’m the first to say that” (Neil deGrasse Tyson).

“On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones” (Carl Sagan).