America’s Gullibility

A gullible person or society is one “easily persuaded to believe something; easily deceived.” Synonyms for “gullible” include “naive, exploitable, and dupable.”  If you are gullible, you are easily fooled.  The word gullible is derived from the verb gull, which means “to swallow.”  A  gullible person is an overly trusting person (or group) who tends to swallow whole the stories he or she hears.  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 practices quackery or some similar confidence trick or deception in order to obtain money, fame or other advantages via some form of pretense or deception.”  Synonyms for the word charlatan, include:  “quack, shyster, faker, fraud, imposter, hoaxer, deceiver, mountebank,  and con man.

If you are convinced the Coronavirus is a hoax, or that it is contained, or that the virus can be minimized with hydroxychloroquine, or that Bill Gates is responsible for it, or that it is just the flu—you have been “gulled” and become a victim of charlatans.  “Don’t  allow yourself to be such a gull!”  

“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).

“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.” (G.K. Chesterton)