We Need to Stop our Minds from Being Hacked

Over the last four decades, we have found that human rationality is not what it was cranked up to be. For three centuries, it was generally held that humans employ their mind to the merits of the issue before them, weigh the pros and cons, and then decide accordingly. From this understanding followed the idea of the primacy of the individual, the importance of human rights, the morality of liberal democracy and of free markets. We also constructed the academic disciplines of economics, sociology, philosophy and politics based on the rationality of humans. Liberal democracies must move to reduce the vulnerability of their citizens’ minds to being ‘hacked’.