I have a challenge for you. A simple one. Find someone close to you—maybe a family member, maybe a friend—who is an enthusiastic member of the ever-growing club of climate true believers. You will find one easily. They are far more common than most people are willing to admit. Then ask them, calmly, what they think of this.
I can tell you the outcome in advance. Almost without exception, they will declare it fake. If pressed, they will escalate. You will be branded an extremist, a Nazi, a baby killer, a heretic, or some other fashionable moral monstrosity of the week. What they will not do—under any circumstances—is admit that they have been repeating falsehoods for years. That they were wrong. That they helped sell a lie.
Facts mean nothing to a member of a cult. Nothing. Only the narrative counts.
This is not new. It is as old as humanity itself. Ever since humans began forming groups, compelling narratives have been used to bind them together—and smarter manipulators quickly discovered the immense utility of the useful idiot. A person who believes sincerely, defends aggressively, and never asks the wrong questions is a force multiplier of astonishing power.
The useful idiot is not a modern invention. It is not even a cultural one. It is likely semi-biological. The mechanism has been with us since the dawn of humanity—and probably since the dawn of any consciousness resembling our own. You can observe similar behavior in primates. I would wager good money it exists in all animals with sufficiently complex brains.
Here is the bad news: you cannot eliminate the idiot inside you. None of us can. The mechanism is baked in. All we can do is tame it. Muffle it. Lock it back in the casket where it belongs. And that takes work.
Real work.
Not the fake work of scrolling headlines or outsourcing your thinking to whatever algorithm flatters your priors—but the tedious, unglamorous labor of building your own view of the world from conflicting sources, hostile facts, and uncomfortable data. That kind of work is exhausting. Which is why useful idiots are so plentiful. Laziness is their natural habitat.
If you are one of the rare people who actively disciplines the idiot within—who questions narratives even when they feel good, even when they grant social status, even when they promise moral superiority—then congratulations. You are a statistical anomaly.
And you are going to feel very alone.