Free Technopoly by Neil Postman Page A

do cure, radios do speak, and, as we know now, computers do calculate and never make mistakes—only faulty humans do (which is what Frederick Taylor was trying to tell us all along).
    For these well-known reasons, Americans were better prepared to undertake the creation of a Technopoly than anyone else. But its full flowering depended on still another set of conditions, less visible and therefore less well known. These conditions provided the background, the context in which the American distrust of constraints, the exploitative genius of its captains of industry, the successes of technology, and the devaluation of traditional beliefs took on the exaggerated significance that pushed technocracy in America over into Technopoly. That context is explored in the following chapter, which I call “The Improbable World.”

4
The Improbable World
    Although it is clear that “social science” is a vigorous ally of Technopoly and must therefore be regarded with a hostile eye, I occasionally pay my respects to its bloated eminence by inflicting a small experiment on some of my colleagues. Like many other social-science experiments, this one is based on deceit and exploitation, and I must rely on the reader’s sense of whimsy to allow its point to come through.
    The experiment is best conducted in the morning when I see a colleague who appears not to be in possession of a copy of
The New York Times
. “Did you read the
Times
this morning?” I ask. If my colleague says, “Yes,” there is no experiment that day. But if the answer is “No,” the experiment can proceed. “You ought to check out Section C today,” I say. “There’s a fascinating article about a study done at the University of Minnesota.” “Really? What’s it about?” is the usual reply. The choices at this point are almost endless, but there are two that produce rich results. The first: “Well, they did this study to find out what foods are best to eat for losing weight, and it turns outthat a normal diet supplemented by chocolate eclairs eaten three times a day is the best approach. It seems that there’s some special nutrient in the eclairs—encomial dyoxin—that actually uses up calories at an incredible rate.”
    The second changes the theme and, from the start, the university: “The neurophysiologists at Johns Hopkins have uncovered a connection between jogging and reduced intelligence. They tested more than twelve hundred people over a period of five years, and found that as the number of hours people jogged increased there was a statistically significant decrease in their intelligence. They don’t know exactly why, but there it is.”
    My role in the experiment, of course, is to report something quite ridiculous—one might say, beyond belief. If I play my role with a sense of decorum and collégial intimacy, I can achieve results worth reporting: about two-thirds of the victims will believe or at least not wholly
disbelieve
what I have told them. Sometimes they say, “Really? Is that possible?” Sometimes they do a double-take and reply,
“Where’d
you say that study was done?” And sometimes they say, “You know, I’ve
heard
something like that.” I should add that for reasons that are probably worth exploring I get the clearest cases of credulity when I use the University of Minnesota and Johns Hopkins as my sources of authority; Stanford and MIT give only fair results.
    There are several conclusions that might be drawn from these results, one of which was expressed by H. L. Mencken fifty years ago, when he said that there is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it. This is more an accusation than an explanation, although there is probably something to it. (I have, however, tried this experiment on nonprofessors as well, and get roughly the same results.) Another possible conclusion was expressed by George Bernard Shaw, also about fifty years ago, when he wrote that the average person today is about