In 2020, the US Department of Defense elicited research that “would look at audience vulnerability to suasory discourses, as delivered by a variety of authentic and inauthentic actors and at methods to improve audience resilience to malign and deceptive information attacks” (DoD 2020, 48). This chapter argues that malign and deceptive information fosters pathological belief systems. Why are pathological beliefs still a modern problem after centuries of the Enlightenment project?

Enlightenment thinkers, such as French Revolutionary leader Nicolas de Condorcet, predicted that progress would lead to reason's triumph, benefitting all humanity. Condorcet claimed that human beings would perfect their reasoning abilities and abandon their prejudices (Condorcet 1795). But the Enlightenment project fell short for two reasons: (1) it contained significant blind spots; and (2) It didn't go far enough.

Condorcet's most significant blind spot was his belief that human progress was a natural law. He wrote, “that no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; that the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the controul of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.” He added that human progress was not only inevitable, but also irreversible; “The course of this progress may doubtless be more or less rapid, but it can never be retrograde” (11–12).