When A Society Is Highly Skeptical and Gullible At The Same Time

It has been said that people online are as jaded and skeptical as they have ever been since the dawn of the internet.

I’ve been using the internet since 1996, and I can confirm that this is indeed the case. No one trusts anything anymore.

If you give advice, people immediately assume you’re selling something… even if you aren’t.

If you point out the dangers of AI, you’re “part of the grift.”

If you make strong political opinions, people accuse you of being a paid shill for one political party or another, or of being a CIA agent.

If you make a claim, even an obvious one, people assume you’re making it up and demand to see your sources.

So yeah, people are really untrusting right now.

This stands to reason, since most of them are living in the middle of a collapsing, left-wing empire where the bad guys won a long time ago. And the vast majority of these people refuse to leave the collapsing empire and just sit there and continue to take it as it gets worse and worse every year.

But then, we have the opposite problem at the same time.

These exact same hyper-skeptical people will instantly believe anything a charismatic politician on their side tells them.

If Donald Trump says he’s going to build a wall, 50 million of these hyper-skeptical doubters instantly believe him. They’ll even start celebrating as soon as he says it like it’s already a done deal.

It’s the same if he says he’s going to bring the jobs back to America or he’s going to have Elon/DOGE cut trillions of dollars in spending. Instant belief and 100% unwavering trust from millions of unbelievers who are normally very skeptical about everything else.

WTF?

This isn’t just a right-wing thing either (though it’s worse on the right than the left these days).

Obama promises to close Guantanamo Bay and end all the wars and millions of people instantly believe him.

Zohran Mamdani promises universal free childcare, rent freezes on a million apartments, communist-like government-owned grocery stores, and a bunch of other crazy shit that will never happen, and millions of people instantly believe him, like speaking the literal word of God.

And these are the same people who are instantly skeptical as soon as they watch any YouTube video or Instagram reel.

Isn’t that weird?

I know what you’re going to say:

“Caleb, they believe these politicians because things are so bad they’ve become desperate, so they’ll believe anything these people will say to help them.”

Yes, that’s correct, but why are they compartmentalizing this unquestioning belief just to politicians yet still remain skeptical about 100% of everyone else?

In other words, why do 50 million people instantly and effortlessly buy Trump or Mamdani’s obvious bullshit promises when those same 50 million think Grant Cardone or Dan Lok’s promises are total lies?

Seriously, with this level of societal gullibility, Dan Lok and guys like him should be high-end billionaires by now and should be selling tens of millions of courses (at all price points, including his really cheap ones for poorer people).

If you answer that Dan Lok looks/acts like a scammer, then are you saying that Trump and Mamdani don’t like/act like scammers? Ha!

Because they obviously and clearly do.

I knew Trump was full of shit in 2016, just like I knew Mamdani was a few weeks ago. Go look back on my blogs what I wrote about it at the time.

So there’s something deeper going on here.

Collapsing empires are interesting.