I Want To Believe

 

People want to be fooled.  The fun ways include April Fool's jokes,  magic acts, haunted house attractions, and movie magic (heroes, fantastical superheroes and action-adventures).  Other situations are dangerous, morally ambiguous or just a waste of money:  carnival sideshows,  patent quack medicines, mass scams and speculative bubbles like the South Seas and tulip hysterias, and more recently the 1920's stock market and the 2008 real estate blowup.  And many do fall for telephone and e-mail frauds because it just may be that this time you win and get something for little or nothing.  

Shamans and priests throughout history have leveraged knowledge of mysteries, herbs and hallucinogens to gull generations.  People really want to believe that sort of thing.  Psychopaths are highly skilled in fooling and manipulating others; even the educated and savvy can fail to detect one in time, or at all.  They can take a lot more than your money, as any viewer of Dateline is aware.

Psychopathic dictators and strongmen can fool masses of people to reach for their guns and act completely against their own interests.  Such people want a strong leader in total control who will defend them from imagined enemies and allow them to escape mundane reality by roiling in emotion.  Easy to fool people consumed by fear and absolute conviction. 

  They hate educators and "experts" (after they're told to) because they do not want their dreams, hopes and beliefs to be discredited by the facts.   They badly want to be fooled.

As another blogger advised so well:  Act rationally in an irrational world.