The strategy was laid out in a 1969 memo from a vice president of marketing for the Brown and Williamson tobacco company: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact which exists in the mind of the general public.” THE SOPHISTICATION of this disinformation process is beyond anything the world has ever seen. The irony is that the amount of information available and the means by which this information can be disseminated has made it easier to undermine scientific inquiry, not harder. Victory goes to the party with the deepest pockets.
Robert Proctor, Stanford professor of the history of science, notes that there are few, if any, examples of an industry more successful in the high art of creating doubt to create value. The tobacco companies have made billions of dollars in profits — and still do — and Mr. Proctor estimates that over 100 million people have lost their lives as a result.
But the story is not one confined to the tobacco companies. The creation of doubt has spread to other industries as well. Mr. Proctor has coined a term for the pursuit: Agnotology. It’s defined as the “art of spreading doubt.” The purpose being “to distort the skepticism of research to obscure the truth.”
This distortion can be found in everything from tobacco, to global warming, to food, to politics. Anytime a company has a lot invested in a product or a service, there is the perceived need to protect that investment. The greater the investment, the further a company will go to protect what it has.
What the tobacco companies did was to show others how to use science against itself. Doubt is the key element central to all scientific inquiry, the very lifeblood of the process. Nothing is accepted, everything must be proved. The public may not believe the corporations themselves, but they are susceptible to third-party reviewers with Ph.D.s behind their names.
What “agnotologists” understand is that there is an element of doubt in all scientific inquiry. As one scientist put it, “Risk assessment data can be like a captured spy. If you torture it long enough, it will tell you anything you want to hear.”
Simply put, the task then is for companies to find academics to create and then substantiate those areas of doubt, thus allowing the spinmasters to exploit them. According to Mr. Proctor’s research, often those academics don’t know what it is they are researching or what the “big picture” is behind the need for their research. Other times they do, and Mr. Proctor opines as to how easy it is to buy some of his academic colleagues.
As regards to cigarettes, he calls it a “calamity of global proportions.” There are 6 trillion cigarettes smoked each year, and we continue to do nothing.
True, it shows the power of addiction. But it also shows how easily duped the system is and how progress of any sort, on any fundamental issue, is so easily thwarted.
Scientists can determine that sugar contributes to obesity, but the sugar industry can find academics that say the science is inconclusive. The industry then uses the research to create the doubt necessary to allow consumers to continue their purchases.
The climate change debate has been influenced to an enormous degree by the use of “experts” on both sides of the debate. Where has it left us? Confused. And a confused public is one that is difficult to mobilize.
This “parallel disinformation environment” is as political as it is scientific. When Wall Street took us to the brink of the abyss, the question was raised as to whether the banks were too big. The big banks responded, but they did so by using academics to show the advantages of size and to warn that any disruption could make the country’s problems worse. They created doubt.
We can’t even agree that Social Security has a long-term funding problem, that planting corn fence post to fence post throughout the Midwest is a bad idea or that a politician born in Hawaii is an American citizen.
It’s not a problem attached to any particular political party. It’s a problem borne by both. It’s not a left versus right issue. It’s part of a system that, in no small measure, explains the growing dysfunction of Congress. The agnotologists have learned how to control the process.
If we can be lulled into thinking that it is acceptable to produce 6 trillion cigarettes each year, think how vulnerable we are to the disinformation being spread about other, less lethal issues.
— Emerson K. Lynn
St. Albans, Vt. Messenger
