Brandolini’s Law

It was the historian Salo Wittmayer Baron who coined the phrase “The Oy Vay version of Jewish history.” Only looking at the bad and ignoring the glimpses of good.

We are living through the most turbulent, challenging and frightening world that I have ever experienced. Rationally, I despair. Thank goodness I have a spiritual dimension that provides me with a non-rational dose of optimism. We have survived such a continuum of alienation and isolation, finding ourselves at odds with almost every world civilisation and power at some stage or another, that this present state seems more normal than exceptional.

We are living during an inflection point, a sea change on almost every level, and we are inclined to ignore all other perspectives. It was the Harvard academic Steven Pinker who reassured us with his book “The Better Angles of our Nature” that there is so much good in the world despite it all.  And many of us do indeed have better natures than those animated by hatred, ignorance and insecurity. But the amount of crazy conspiracy theories, downright lies and libels, fake news and staged photos, that we are having thrown at us by “social media” and the universal reach of AI, makes me realise that this new world order of childish mob rule and animus on the right and the left is frightening and dangerous. Only the natural process of cycles, thesis, antithesis and synthesis gives me hope that things may change. But when?
“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. And Winston Churchill said that “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

Don’t get me wrong. Of course, this does not apply to everything you see on your screens or read in the press. And there are other voices, other opinions and a lot of decent people. But if ideologies can be dangerous, so can religions and so can ignorance.

I have just come across Brandolini’s law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states that “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order vastly bigger than that needed to produce it.”
The challenge of refuting bullshit does not come just from its time-consuming nature, but also from the challenge of defying and confronting one’s community and what so many people around think is the truth. Young and not-so-young minds do not like being left out of groups.

Brandolini stated that he was inspired by reading the Jewish Nobel Prize-winning Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. The persistent false claim is sometimes cited as an example of Brandolini’s law. A perfect example is that in 1998, British anti-vaccine activist Andrew Wakefield wrote a fraudulent paper that claimed to find that vaccines cause autism. The article was retracted, and Wakefield’s medical license was revoked. Despite extensive investigation showing no such relationship, the false assertion has had a disastrous effect on public health, contributing to many people, including a lot of Charedi Jews, refusing to vaccinate their children, which led to a veritable pandemic of preventable infections. Years of research and attempts to educate the public have failed to eradicate the misinformation. Which is now still being touted in the USA.

Dangerous and ignorant voices in America are regurgitating the blood Libels, denying the Holocaust, spreading forgeries such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and claiming that cabals of Jews control every aspect of American life. Blaming Jews for Epstein’s crimes, Mossad for 9/11, and every assassination ever carried out and blaming Jews for causing Muslim antisemitism. And the more these infected minds succeed, the more we are hated and reviled.

It would be laughable were it not for the internet spreading such evil nonsense. But this virus has spread through schools, universities, political parties, the media and the world. If it were just a matter of pointing out our mistakes and our own criminals and crazies, I would not object. We are not short of wrongdoers and fanatics. With billions arrayed against us there is little we can do other than to defend ourselves almost everywhere, more than ever before in much of the world. We were regarded as aliens when we were scattered. And now we have a homeland to defend, we are aggressors.

“Hatred for no good reason,” says the Talmud “twists the mind.” And Brandolini has put his finger on the problem.

Rabbi Jeremy Rosen lives in New York. He was born in Manchester. His writings are concerned with religion, culture, history and current affairs – anything he finds interesting or relevant. They are designed to entertain and to stimulate. Disagreement is always welcome.