2

Fake wisdom

In the Age of Opinion, you can say whatever you like and
expect to be taken seriously, as long as you assert your
opinion confidently enough and no one in the room has any
actual evidence to the contrary. (‘As everyone knows . . .’
or ‘I recently read something . . .’ are favourite rhetorical
devices.) In the Age of Opinion, weirdly, there’s a suspicion
of experts who might actually know what they’re talking
about—‘Why should their opinion carry more weight than
mine?’—especially when the internet can provide ‘evidence’
for practically anything.
If you know where to look, you’ll find support for whatever
crazy theory you might want to propose—though, given the
number of conspiracy theories being floated every day, even
the word ‘theory’ has a bit too much gravitas to be appropri-
ate. There’s also a plethora of ‘research’ available in the mass
media and on the internet—some of it rigorous and reliable,
some of it decidedly flaky—so you can usually back up an

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opinion with ‘the research says’. In the Age of Opinion, no

one is likely to question you too closely about the integrity of
the research you’re quoting. After all, you’re only called on to
express your opinion, not to justify it.
Easy answers, instant explanations, quick solutions . . .
there’s no shortage of demand for any of that and no time for
a more thoughtful, considered approach. In my own field of
qualitative social research, I used to insist that no findings be
discussed with a client until at least a couple of weeks after
all the fieldwork had been completed, so there was sufficient
time for rumination, reflection and careful interpretation
of the data. Today, clients expect to have so-called ‘top-line
findings’ delivered as soon as the fieldwork is done—or, pre­
ferably, to sit behind a two-way mirror so they can observe
the data being gathered and draw their own conclusions
on the run.
As the world becomes a more uncertain place, with the very
survival of our species now in serious question, our appetite
for certainty is as strong as ever, or perhaps even stronger. We
are so desperate for answers that even uninformed opinions,
unsubstantiated theories or reckless generalisations will do.
The problem is that once we’ve been exposed to that
un­informed opinion, unsubstantiated theory or reckless gen­
eralisation, we’re at serious risk of simply accepting it at face
value. If we have no prior knowledge to test it by, and if it sounds
plausible, we’re likely to take it on board, become attached to it
and possibly even be prepared to defend it.
Here’s an unfortunate quirk of human psychology: the
flakier the proposition we’ve accepted and the more we lack
solid evidence for it, the more likely we are to cling to it.

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This is known as the Dunning–Kruger effect, after Justin

Kruger and David Dunning, who reported in a 1999 journal
article that being ignorant of our own ignorance causes us to
overestimate our competence. As Charles Darwin had long
ago remarked, ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence
than does knowledge.’ And Bertrand Russell was scathing
about people whose confidence in their views exceeds their
qualifications to hold those views: ‘The fundamental cause of
the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure
while the intelligent are full of doubt.’

***

Our attitudes, beliefs, convictions and prejudices are remark-

ably resilient (‘notoriously resistant to change’ is a less
charitable way of putting it). Once an attitude—or even a
piece of information, true or false—takes up residence in
our mind, it’s very hard to dislodge. Adolf Hitler’s arch-
propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, understood this when he
wrote in his diary that ‘experience shows that whoever speaks
the first word to the world is always right’. In other words,
our minds are highly receptive to new information, as long as
it doesn’t contradict a view we already hold.
Replacing something we ‘know’ with information that
appears to contradict it is a different thing altogether. That’s a
real challenge for us, even when it’s a relatively trivial matter.
‘But I’m sure you pronounce your surname Mack-eye—I was
told that a long time ago,’ a man once said to me when he
was about to introduce me to speak at a conference. He only
mentioned it because someone else had just told him it was

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‘Mack-ay’ to rhyme with ‘okay’. I assured him that it is indeed

pronounced to rhyme with ‘hay’ (except when I’m in Scotland,
where such a pronunciation would simply be mocked), but my
words fell on deaf ears. Moments later, clinging to his convic-
tion, he introduced me as ‘Hugh Mack-eye’. (Better, by far,
than the MC who once introduced me as ‘Hugh Grant’.)
Or it can be more serious. Having been told that a person
you’re about to meet is untrustworthy and unreliable, it’s very
hard to ignore the filter that has thus been imposed on your
perceptions of that person. Everything she says and does will
raise questions in your mind about her sincerity, her integrity
or her real intentions.
If you know the world is flat, or that the sun goes around
the Earth, it will seem ludicrous for anyone to suggest other-
wise. No wonder Copernicus ran into so much trouble! It
took nothing less than a scientific revolution to dislodge those
ideas from the popular mind.
Intuition is often admired and given credit for perceiving
‘truth’ in the absence of any other evidence. But intuition can
be a trap, too: once you’ve convinced yourself that something
is the case on the basis of nothing more than a hunch, even
evidence to the contrary can be dismissed as unconvincing.
Early religious upbringing, too, can create certain prejudices,
expectations and dispositions that may take a lifetime to
modify in the light of personal experience—the idea that ‘bad
things won’t happen to good people’, for instance, or that
prayer is a way of persuading God to do things to please you . . .
make it rain, perhaps, or let your side win a war.
Conventional wisdom can be a bit like that. Things that
‘everyone knows’ can still be wrong: it’s just very hard to

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convince people of that, once they ‘know’ what they’ve been

told, or even what they’ve intuited because ‘it’s so obvious’.
Let’s reflect on a few opinions that have achieved such
widespread currency that they amount to conventional
wisdom. Unfortunately, that ‘wisdom’ turns out to be fake.
A few lines of argument in this book are unlikely to change
many people’s minds . . . but let’s see how we go.

Fake wisdom: There are distinctive ‘Aussie values’.

On 25 April 2006, the Beaconsfield goldmine in Tasmania
collapsed. Of the seventeen miners who were underground
at the time, fourteen quickly escaped and one, Larry Knight,
was killed. The other two, Brant Webb and Todd Russell,
were trapped almost one kilometre below the surface. Five
days later, contact with them was established and they were
finally rescued on 9 May, two weeks after the collapse.
The unfolding drama of the contact, the laborious drilling
of a rescue tunnel and the ultimate rescue were widely covered
on television—and, incidentally, brought Bill Shorten, then
the national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union, to
national prominence. A huge media contingent remained at
the mine site as preparations for the rescue proceeded, ready
to capture the moment when Webb and Russell would emerge.
It was a remarkable rescue that attracted international
attention—as have similar rescues, in assorted settings, in
many countries. But one of the features of the Beaconsfield
saga was the way in which Australian politicians, journalists
and other commentators kept insisting that the rescue was
a wonderful example of ‘Aussie values’, ‘Aussie courage’ and
‘mateship’ on display, as if Australians would be uniquely

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concerned about rescuing their trapped miners—unlike, say,

Russians or Canadians or Welsh.
Do we imagine that, faced with a crisis like the ­Beaconsfield
mine collapse, people in other countries would have said, ‘It
looks as if there are a couple of fellows trapped down there.
Seems pretty hopeless. Let’s call it a day and maybe come
back and check the situation in the morning’?
Really? Haven’t we seen extraordinary footage of heroic
Italians rescuing people from the catastrophic mudslides of
2022 and 2023? Haven’t we been moved by the sight of Turks
and Syrians struggling against the odds to locate survivors
of the 2023 earthquakes? Or Ukrainians desperately search-
ing for people in the wreckage of apartment buildings hit by
Russian missiles?
Rescuing the victims of a disaster. Caring for the sick and
the wounded. Responding to the needs of the disadvantaged
and marginalised. Feeding the hungry. Offering a bed to the
homeless. These are things that, throughout human history,
human beings have done for each other because that’s how
members of a social species behave when the need arises.
Rescuing trapped miners—even going to the most extra­
ordinary lengths to do so—is an example of human nature
on display. These are human values, not specifically (and
certainly not exclusively) Australian values.
We do ourselves a great disservice when we try to per­
petuate the myth that ‘Aussie values’ are exceptional or even
unique, or when we try to appropriate to ourselves the human
qualities and values that make this a wonderful species to
belong to. Yes, there are other less attractive features of human
behaviour—like violence, exploitation, prejudice, neglect of

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people in need—we might not want to be associated with,

and you’ll notice we never try to claim them as uniquely ours,
even though they are as much in evidence here as elsewhere.
It’s a great temptation, when nationalistic zeal is upon us,
to make all sorts of outrageous claims about how uniquely
good we are. Our soldiers are the bravest, toughest and most
courageous! No, they’re not. Many of them, like many other
soldiers, including those we have sometimes regarded as
enemies, have been brave and tough, and sometimes cour­
ageous. But, as with every other country that has ever fought
wars, there are plenty of dark episodes in our military history,
including our recent ill-judged military involvement in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Our medical system is the best in the world! No, it isn’t.
It’s extremely good, but so are lots of other country’s medical
systems. (The Netherlands’ system is wonderful. America’s is
probably the best, if only you could afford to access it.)
We’re more passionate about sport than any other nation!
No, we’re not. Try telling that to English, Argentinian or
Spanish soccer fans.
We always punch above our weight! No, we don’t. We
sometimes do, and we’ve cracked the formula that says if you
put enough money into a particular sport, you’ll probably
win some medals in international competition. And, like most
countries, we’ve produced some outstanding people who have
done outstanding work in science and the arts. But when it
comes to human rights, we’re hardly a shining example to
the world: you wouldn’t want to examine our treatment of
refugees and asylum-seekers too closely, nor the treatment
of our First Nations peoples. And we punch way below our

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weight when it comes to carbon emissions reduction. (We’re

still selling our coal to other countries and then accusing
them of polluting.) Nor could we claim to be anywhere near
the Scandinavian countries when it comes to social welfare or
public housing or a commitment to true equality.
And the famous Aussie ‘fair go’? When you examine it
closely, that doesn’t look too flash, either. Until quite recently,
we didn’t even give women a fair go, let alone our First
Nations peoples.
What are these unique Aussie values, then? Surely we’re
not going to claim some version of liberté, egalité, fraternité,
are we? The French were onto that as long ago as 1789—you
may recall they had a revolution about it—and our devotion
to the concept of ‘mateship’ is not only unacceptably blokeish
in the twenty-first century but is no more than a rough trans-
lation of fraternité.
Beware of hubris posing as patriotism! Beware of assuming
that our noblest qualities are uniquely ours! Most of the
values we claim as cornerstones of our way of life are simply
the touchstones of any modern liberal democracy: respect for
persons, regardless of age or sex; respect for democracy and
its institutions, including the rule of law and the principle of
parliamentary representation; the rights to freedom of speech,
assembly and religion. All such democracies claim to discour-
age the exploitation of the weak by the strong, and to abhor
prejudice that leads people to make judgements about each
other based purely on some category they represent—whether
defined by ethnicity, gender, religion, politics or otherwise.
All such democracies condemn the oppression and abuse of
minorities.

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We’d sign up to all those values, wouldn’t we? We even

manage to adhere to some of them, but we’re a bit half-hearted
about others. And when we say we aspire to live by those
values, we could scarcely claim them as uniquely ours without
offending every other liberal democracy on the planet.
What about our allegedly distinctive brand of humour? It’s
just as derivative as everyone else’s. There’s actually a very small
pool of ‘core’ jokes that keep being refined and recycled and
adapted to suit different contexts and cultures. Even our his­
torical practice of saving our vilest jokes for Indigenous people
can be matched by other countries with Indigenous popu­lations.
Shame often shows up as humour.
You know that ‘quintessentially Aussie’ joke about
the Texas rancher who visits a cattle station in Far North
­Queensland? Bragging to the Australian owner about the size
of his own ranch, the Texan says, ‘It’s so big, I can get on
my horse on the eastern boundary, ride all day, camp over-
night and ride all the next day, and still not reach the western
boundary.’
‘Yeah,’ says the Aussie. ‘We used to have a horse like
that . . .’
Quintessentially Aussie? Precisely the same joke pops up
in Belgium but it’s about slow trains, not horses.
Even the suggestion that there’s a unique or ‘authentic’
Australian spirituality looks a bit thin when you examine
it. When we examine the concept of ‘spirituality’ detached
from its religious moorings, we’re not talking about anything
uniquely Australian:
• the sense of our interconnectedness with all creatures and
with the earth that sustains us

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• the need for kindness and compassion in all our dealings

• the urge to create myths and metaphors and tell stories that
express our deepest yearnings, and that capture our most
appealing visions, dreams and beliefs about the world and
how to live in it
• the need to honour our ancestors and respect their
heritage
• the value of quiet contemplation and deep meditation upon
the meaning and purpose of our lives.

You can find those themes everywhere from the Aboriginal

Dreaming to Christianity, from Hinduism to Buddhism and
from Baha’i to Humanism or SBNRs (spiritual but not reli-
gious). Different practices, different myths, different words,
but essentially the same yearning for meanings that will help
us make sense of our life in this world, and perhaps even in
some unimaginable world to come.

***

To say that our values are not distinctively our own is not to
denigrate them. On the contrary, we should draw comfort
and even inspiration from knowing that our culture has so
much in common with others, that our foundational values
are shared with like-minded societies around the world, and
that our spirituality taps into universal themes.
‘Aussie values’ are distinctive is not only fake wisdom.
Clinging to the idea of Australian exceptionalism might
actually weaken us by blinding us to the larger truth about
the common humanity we share with people of every colour,

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creed and culture. It might also blind us to the truth about

ourselves, including our shortcomings.
When you consider the diversity of the Australian popu-
lation and the many cultures we now incorporate into our
national ethos, any references to ‘Aussie values’ seem glib.
Even references to ‘Indigenous and non-Indigenous culture’
seem absurd—as if there were just one of each—when we
know there are, and have always been, many distinct First
Nations with their own language and their unique cultural
beliefs and practices.
We are arguably the world’s most successful multicul-
tural society, with people having come here from about 200
different birthplaces around the world and half of our present
population either having been born overseas or having at
least one overseas-born parent. It would simply be foolish to
try and synthesise all that diversity into some recognisably
distinct ‘Aussie values’. But some people continue to try, even
to the point of declaring some things ‘un-Australian’, though
that term generally means nothing more than ‘unacceptable
in a civilised society’.
No—our values are not distinctly or uniquely ours. They,
like our culture, reflect our complex interdependence with
all those cultures that continue to shape our socio-cultural
evolution.

Fake wisdom: Humans thrive on stability.

In Australia in the 2020s—a time of constant change and
the threat of more upheavals to come—it’s tempting to yearn
for stability. How often do you hear it: ‘I don’t want to move
because the kids would have to change schools and that would

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be too disruptive.’ Or, ‘We’re all so resistant to change, aren’t

we? Why can’t things stay the same!’ Or, ‘Uh-oh, we have a
new CEO. Here we go again—it’ll be yet another reorgan­
isation. More chaos.’
Here’s one of the great paradoxes of the human psyche:
we want to be left in our comfort zone and yet we thrive
on the experience of being taken out of it. We do tend to
resist change—and our highly filtered, self-protective view of
the world helps protect us from changing our minds about
things—yet too much stability turns out to be bad for us.
What we humans actually thrive on is instability—and just
as well, given the inherent uncertainty and unpredictability
of life.
It’s a weird piece of fake wisdom, this one. It’s as though
we dream of achieving the very condition that would be least
productive, least stimulating and least satisfying for us. The
calm, untroubled state we claim to want is likely to lead to
feelings of restlessness, anxiety and, ultimately, boredom—
unless you happen to be a monk or a mystic who has
withdrawn from the fray to devote your life to prayer and
meditation.
Even the much-vaunted peace of mind we all crave—with
some justification—can easily be misrepresented. It doesn’t
refer to a detached, antisocial state of being ‘left in peace’,
undisturbed by too much disruption, too many challenges or
too many people making too many demands on us. (We’re
humans, remember: our gig entails people making demands
on us.) Peace of mind is a highly desirable psychological/
spiritual state that can not only coexist with the demands of
normal human life, but is actually one of the most precious

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resources we need for dealing with life’s uncertainties. A

clear sense of our life’s meaning and purpose, for example,
can help sustain us through all kinds of upheavals along
the way.
If we are to flourish, we need to change. And not just to
change, but to be open to the prospect of constant change.
It can easily feel like the opposite, and yet we know how
desolate it sounds when someone says nothing ever happens
to me. As noted in ‘The Context’ my book What Makes Us
Tick identified the desire for something to happen as one of
the ten psychological desires that drive us.
That’s why it’s a paradox: we seem to want two apparently
incompatible things at once: constancy and change.
The big name in this field is Jerome Kagan, a professor of
psychology at Harvard, who died in 2021. Kagan introduced
the idea of ‘nodes of uncertainty’ in human development,
claiming (with strong evidence) that learning to deal with the
unfamiliar is such a huge part of our cognitive and social
development that it is more influential than the libidinous
factors described by Freud in shaping our personalities. Kagan
asserts that children are most powerfully influenced by the
puzzles that confront them, demanding to be solved.
Kagan’s views have been supported by neuroscientists
such as Professor Mark Johnson, associate director of the
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck
College in the University of London. Johnson notes that as
children develop, they help to further their own development
by actively seeking out novel information from their environ­
ments. In other words, we have an innate urge to expose
ourselves to the shock of the new.

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From our earliest years, it’s the strange, the new, the
surprising—the discrepancies and uncertainties—that most
intrigue us and have the biggest effect on the development of
our personality. And throughout our lives, it’s the unusual
events, both pleasant and unpleasant, that we tend to remember
most vividly. We note exceptions. We focus on the unusual.
We’re intrigued by the unexpected.
And we often exaggerate our account of things to make
them sound more exciting or dramatic or unusual than they
were. The car crash we nearly had; the bout of flu that nearly
put us in hospital; the storm that nearly wiped out our street.
Traumatic events in our lives are often recounted with a kind
of relish—as if we can’t tell the story often enough, because
it’s a reminder that something was happening to us. In a
sense, we felt more fully alive because we were dealing with
a challenge.
No one welcomes disasters—fires, floods, droughts,
pandemics, depressions, wars—yet the almost universal
human response to crises and catastrophes is that they bring
out the best in us; they remind us of what it means to be
human. We don’t need to be told to be kind to each other
when the going gets tough; we are naturally kind. We don’t
need to be told to make personal sacrifices for the common
good when a fire or flood has swept through our town;
we just do it.
Here’s an extreme case: I recently met a retired American
academic who had worked in London in the early 1950s.
He told me he was initially shocked, and then intrigued, by
the number of Londoners who said to him, ‘You know, we
really miss the war.’ When he looked incredulous, they added,

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‘Oh, of course we don’t miss the bombs, the death, the destruc-
tion, the terror of it. What we miss is the solidarity.’
Even the worst cases of instability have their positive
side: they shake us from the complacency that stability can
induce. If we were slipping into a self-absorbed state, more
concerned with our own comfort and pleasure than the
needs of our neighbours, a crisis would soon knock that out
of us.
Perhaps we were ill-equipped to cope with the demands
made on us by the COVID epidemic—lockdowns, masks,
keeping our distance from each other, working from home,
home-schooling the kids, abandoning travel plans—because
life had been too stable in the lead-up to the pandemic.
Twenty-eight years of uninterrupted economic growth, and
the assurance that it would continue, may have lulled us into a
self-absorbed torpor. Perhaps that’s why our patience ran thin
so quickly; perhaps that’s why some people protested at the
need for any sacrifice—even the ‘sacrifice’ of having to receive
a potentially life-saving vaccination.
My parents’ generation, by contrast, had lived through
World War I, the Spanish flu, the Great Depression and World
War II. Members of their generation often looked back and
were grateful for hardships and privations that had clarified
their values and ordered their priorities: ‘It was the making
of us.’ They had no experience of sustained stability, nor any
reason to expect it.
I still love this passage from P.G. Wodehouse’s Summer
Lightning, the gentle irony disguising a serious truth about us
all—that we are only made strong by having to deal with the
vicissitudes of life:

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When some outstanding disaster happens to the ordinary

man, it finds him prepared. Years of missing the eight-forty-
five, taking the dog for a run on rainy nights, endeavouring
to abate smoky chimneys, and coming down to breakfast
and discovering that they have burned the bacon again,
have given his soul a protective hardness, so that by the
time his wife’s relatives arrive for a long visit, he is ready
for them.

Given the facts, why do we cling to this fantasy that what we

thrive on is stability and certainty? Obviously, there are times
when we feel we’ve had quite enough drama for the time being,
thank you—times when we do wish for a little calm before the
next storm, when we’d like to be able to report that everything
is ‘steady as she goes’, precisely because we know those periods
are the exceptions. It’s more normal to be dealing with chal-
lenges and setbacks—in the family, at work, with our health,
among our friends. Instability is the stuff of life.
Not entirely, though. Most people in a loving relationship
would prefer that it went on as it is, without the threat of
inconstancy. Most of us yearn to be securely loved, rather than
having to live with the uncertainty of unresolved tensions or
half-hearted commitments.
A stable, loving, committed relationship is like a shelter
in a storm. A safe place. When so much going on around us
seems to point to instability—from relationship crises among
friends and family, to the threats posed by climate change—
we cherish that one piece of stability all the more.

***

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