We could use the ramp up to the Iraq war as an example. Why did people trust the claims of the United States government leading up to the war? Well, we had the president, his cabinet, the Pentagon, Congress, and mainstream media sources all reporting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Was that true? No, it wasn’t. However, most people believed that it was.

What I am getting at here is that the Iraq war period in America shows that people blindly trusted the official agencies of the government and official news sources. What people did not have was a means of investigating these claims for themselves. What other explanation do we have for why the campaign to convince Americans that the invasion of Iraq was justified other than that Americans blindly trusted these agencies? The reality is that Americans’ trust was gained through the same cheap signals as its gained right now. Our ability to find truth in general has been unstable for far longer than the last ten or fifteen years.

Cheap signals work, but I don’t think that the reason they work is because something changed in us; rather, they work because nothing changed.