A study in misplaced confidence, ideological snake oil, and the few who escape the gravitational pull of groupthink.
Years ago, back when I still believed that adulthood granted people a sort of immunity against spectacularly idiotic mistakes, a friend approached me with a request. He wanted help performing a financial transaction — not your everyday “lend me twenty bucks for beer” transaction, but one involving a sum of money substantial enough to make any sensible stomach tighten. He lived in a country strangled by financial restrictions so Byzantine they made medieval canon law look like a kindergarten coloring book. The transfer itself wasn’t illegal. There was no risk for me. Objectively, I was the safest pawn on his chessboard.
And yet, something in my gut clenched. A quiet, pessimistic organ playing a little funeral march.
I don’t trust big numbers. Large sums of money, in my experience, behave like unstable isotopes: they may look solid, but give them a reason and they’ll decay explosively. The entire affair smelled off, like those emails from “Prince Obumbala III” promising diamonds in exchange for your bank details — only dressed up in more sophisticated stationery. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the whole thing, if illuminated from the right angle, would reveal itself as a scam so obvious it should be wearing a neon vest and a hat reading “HELLO I AM A FRAUD.”
So I did what any halfway functional adult with a conscience would do. I told him. I laid out my unease. I told him I wouldn’t do it if I were him. I told him the thing rang false. I rang every alarm bell I could find, short of hiring a brass band to blast cautionary music outside his apartment window.
He brushed it off. He assured me everything was fine. He knew what he was doing. He’d checked it all. He was confident. And so, because the transaction posed no direct danger to me, we went through with it.
A few weeks later, reality kicked down the door.
He came back to me completely shattered — voice trembling, face pale, staring at his own gullibility as though it were some monstrous apparition that had crawled up from the basement. He had indeed been scammed. The transaction was one cog in the larger machinery of a con. He couldn’t believe he fell for it. He couldn’t believe he’d dismissed my concerns so brusquely and with such confidence.
After explaining the situation to the police — a dull ritual that consisted mostly of talking to people whose job was to deliver bad news diplomatically — I had only one thing left to say to him: the money is gone. The abyss had swallowed it whole.
But the loss itself didn’t rattle me. Money is replaceable. I’ve had bad deals that cost me far more. Money has all the spiritual permanence of morning dew. It comes, it goes, it evaporates.
What rattled me was him.
I had known this man for many years. I knew the architecture of his background and biography. He was well educated — college degree, management position, international responsibilities. The kind of man who could sit in a boardroom and not ask what all the buttons on the table did. He was smart, worldly, experienced. The sort of person you’d assume had passed the immunity checkpoint against amateur scams.
And yet, he’d been taken by something so stupid it should have been printed on McDonald’s napkins.
To me, it felt like watching the CEO of a Fortune 500 company ship his entire retirement fund to the heir of the Nigerian cocoa-bean empire. Or like a Nobel laureate torching his savings and reputation in exchange for the companionship of someone he found on a particularly suspicious street corner. I’ve seen plenty of idiocy in my life — human folly is the one commodity guaranteed to be inflation-proof — but I genuinely did not expect someone I respected for his intelligence and sophistication to be conned so easily. If he could be tricked, then the implication was terrifyingly simple:
Anyone could.
The only consolation was that he survived the ordeal fairly intact. Emotionally bruised, financially dented, but not destroyed. He managed to mentally write it off and rebuild his composure relatively quickly.
Still, the story haunted me. It prowled the corridors of my mind for months.
One day I discussed it with my father — a man who seemed immune to most human nonsense simply because he had witnessed so much of it already. He told me that, years earlier, he knew a character who sold shoddy financial products and snake-oil insurance schemes. This greasy oracle had once confided a truth that stuck with him: the smartest people are often the easiest to fool.
Why? Because smart people — especially the officially anointed kind with degrees, titles, and impressive-sounding job descriptions — tend to believe they are unfoolable. They operate under the assumption that their intelligence is a kind of Kevlar against deception. That they’re too sharp, too seasoned, too informed to fall prey to ordinary trickery.
Which, paradoxically, makes them more vulnerable than the average person. Ordinary folks walk through life with a natural layer of suspicion. Smart people think suspicion is beneath them.
History is littered with examples.
Isaac Newton — the man who deciphered the mechanics of the universe — fell for the South Sea Bubble of 1720. He could calculate the motion of celestial bodies but not the madness of human greed.
Charles Ponzi structured his scam specifically to attract the well-heeled and the respectable; Bernie Madoff simply updated the wardrobe and used a more modern mailing list. It wasn’t the “little people” who lost their shirts — it was the pedigreed, the polished, the elite.
I made a mental note that day: academic pedigree and financial success offer no immunity against one’s own vanity. If you want to believe something strongly enough, no amount of intelligence, no stack of degrees, no neural horsepower will save you. Humans are credulous creatures. They are seduced by wishful thinking and terrified of missing out.
And the smarter they consider themselves, the easier they are to fool.
This pattern isn’t confined to financial fraud. It runs like a crack through the entire social foundation.
The Fools, The Foxes, and The Sages — Kirschner’s Old Triad
When I was a teenager — back when I was still under the illusion that self-help books contained wisdom rather than a carefully distilled essence of recycled platitudes — I devoured Josef Kirschner’s The Art of Being an Egoist. Kirschner had a very Austrian flavor of egoism. To him, an egoist wasn’t a narcissist but someone capable of defending his own boundaries regardless of social approval. A person who understands that one cannot help others unless they are first capable of helping themselves.
His central assertion was disarmingly simple: human beings fall into three behavioral categories.
1. The Fools — 80%
The vast majority.
Not necessarily unintelligent — I’ve met brilliant Fools, high-IQ Fools, PhD-holding Fools.
But, psychologically, they crave direction. They seek shepherds. They want someone to tell them what to think, what to fear, what to buy, even how to go to the bathroom if instructions were provided on a laminated card. They are the natural victims of scams, narratives, mass movements, and fashionable doctrines.
2. The Foxes — 18%
The manipulators.
Not necessarily intellectually gifted, but preternaturally street-smart.
These are the people who engineer schemes, invent scams, and design the bait. Some barely finished school; some possess no education worth mentioning. But they are attuned to weakness the way vultures are attuned to carrion.
3. The Sages — 2%
The smallest tribe.
Those who know what they know, admit what they don’t, and refuse to follow convention unless it suits their purposes. This group ranges from the serene and indifferent (your Diogenes types living contentedly in their metaphorical barrels) to the cantankerous truth-tellers who warn societies even as the mob sharpens the knives (your Talebs and other intellectual irritants).
Kirschner emphasized one thing: education does not meaningfully determine the group you belong to. Degrees merely decorate the packaging.
The hopeful twist, however, is that you can choose your group — and you can switch at any time.
The Green Ponzi — and Why the Smartest People Swallow It Whole
The same triad applies seamlessly to today’s grand narrative machinery — particularly Anthropogenic Climate Change as presented in mass culture, or what I tend to refer to as the Green Ponzi.
Why do so many believe it unquestioningly?
Why do so many scientists fall in line?
Why do people freeze in winter yet insist the planet is cooking like a forgotten pizza?
Why do apocalyptic predictions fail spectacularly, only to be quietly forgotten as new ones are rolled out?
Why do vanished-glacier predictions get removed rather than retracted?
Because the same old distribution holds.
The 80% — The Fools
They follow whatever narrative is handed to them.
Education doesn’t save them. Titles don’t save them. Intelligence doesn’t save them. Only skepticism does — and skepticism is in short supply.
If tomorrow ACC fell out of political favor and the fashionable apocalypse du jour became “global cooling” or “climate silence” or “the revenge of the mole people,” the 80% would shift seamlessly, proudly embracing the new worldview without so much as a blush.
The 18% — The Foxes
These are the beneficiaries.
Politicians building careers on green platforms.
Project developers selling “renewables” with risk-free returns.
Activists and scientists who enjoy fame, money, or ideological power.
Bankers who smell subsidies like sharks smell blood.
This group is small, aggressive, and ravenously self-interested.
They must create the illusion of consensus — because foxes require a herd to feast upon.
Thus: the magically recurring “97% consensus,” manufactured through selective data use, normalization, omission, intimidation, and the social herding instinct of academics terrified of exile from grant money and career progression.
As Stalin would say: useful idiots come in all flavors, but they behave the same.
The 2% — The Sages
Scientists who age out of fear.
People who stop caring what others think.
Individuals who choose reality over tribal belonging.
Sagehood isn’t genetic; it is forged.
Often through suffering. Always through introspection.
It’s a commitment to living in the unvarnished world — beige, unglamorous, and honest.
The 5th Wave — A Metaphor Too On-the-Nose to Ignore
In 2016 the film The 5th Wave stumbled into theatres. Not a masterpiece, but as a connoisseur of dystopian narratives I watched it to the end.
The plot:
Aliens invade.
Humanity is destroyed in successive waves.
In the fourth wave, alien-controlled humans abduct children — not adults — because the young are easier to manipulate. Their minds are still soft clay.
The children are trained as weapons.
They carry out the dirty work of eradicating the remaining humans.
Not out of malice — but because they are told a story.
A compelling, authoritative, peer-reinforced story.
Groupthink, peer pressure, and narrative saturation do the rest.
Sound familiar?
Modern psychological climate evangelism functions on the same principle. A coordinated symphony of fear, shame, and urgency played by Foxes for an audience of Fools. A few lone Sages raise objections, but they are drowned out by the orchestrated choir.
These movements don’t collapse because the Sages expose them.
They collapse because their internal contradictions become too heavy to sustain.
They implode under their own weight.
Just like every bubble, every ideological fever, every scam in human history.
The Choice
That’s the uncomfortable truth Kirschner left us with — and the truth my friend’s catastrophe drove home with brutal clarity:
You must choose your group.
You must decide whether you will drift with the 80%
— compliant, trusting, endlessly surprised when the world betrays you —
or join the 18%
— predatory, manipulative, and morally hollow —
or fight your way into the 2%
— skeptical, independent, detached from the approval of the herd.
Sagehood is not permanent. It is a discipline.
You maintain it by asking questions — relentlessly.
By looking behind the curtains — not to change the machinery necessarily, but to understand it, to dance with it instead of being consumed by it.
The world is full of foxes selling illusions and fools buying them in wholesale quantities.
Your only real defense is the refusal to be either.
Choose accordingly.
