Why we believe in charlatans

And a lack of culture of critical thinking

There is a quote that is attributed to Albert Einstein that goes like this: “There are only two things that are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. I’m not so sure about the former.”

Whether or not Einstein actually said that, this quote holds true. And the fact that this quote is repeatedly attributed to Einstein without much evidence, not even so much as a reference, proves the point.

As far as human stupidity is concerned, I am sometimes appalled by how gullible we are and how easily defrauded as a nation. Local newspapers are stuffed with dubious claims, from advertisements promising “mardana kamzori ka khatma” and “aapka mehboob aapkay qadmon main” to would-be medicine men guaranteeing “sugar ka yaqeeni ilaj” and “high blood pressure ka mukammal khatma”. The fact that hordes of people flock to these places and spend hundreds of thousands of rupees speaks volumes about our mental state.

We have been swindled by charlatans over and over in the past decades. And I am not even talking about politics here – common quacks are able to make fools of us and yet we never learn.

The dust has long since settled on “our honourable Agha Waqar”, the “scientist” who invented a way to run cars using water as a fuel (yet was curiously reluctant on using the same technology to run an electrical generator). Some of you will recall how he made rounds on national television for months. He spouted spurious and unscientific claims. He shamelessly denied established scientific principles. He insulted respectable physicists like Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy on live TV.

In reward for such debacles, he not only received approval from the likes of Pervez Rasheed and Khursheed Shah, but was allegedly given a CNG station in Rawalpindi. Even our “national scientist” Dr Abdul Qadeer fell for the scam, and bolstered the man’s credibility.

And yet the aftermath was predictable. The man promising us free energy disappeared, save for some tiny news reports and a reopened robbery case involving him from 2008.

Agha Waqar was deliberately exploiting an obvious weakness: the energy crisis. But there have been other cases where the frauds didn’t even need a crisis. In the notorious case of Double Shah from Wazirabad, the simple driving factor was human greed. Double Shah’s claim was simple — he offered to double your money, in just 15 days, no questions asked. How he proposed to do that was also a question nobody asked, and apparently nobody cared about. He spent a grand total of eighteen months at large, and robbed people in excess of 70 billion rupees. During this time, he styled himself a “peer”, and the legends of his supernatural money doubling power spread far. After robbing numerous people blind, the person was eventually arrested, tried and convicted. But it just goes to show.

Now the majority of impostors swindle knowing full well the limits of their capabilities, and in that respect they are relatively harmless. But there is a second kind of fraud, one of who actually believes in his own swindle, and they are a different cup of tea entirely.

One such case is making the rounds these days. Dr Affan Qaiser is a gentleman whose claim to fame is that he is a “world record holder in IELTS. The only person to get a 9 band in the reading module of academic section of the test.”

Anyone who has ever attempted the IELTS knows that this is a laughable claim. The IELTS is not a competitive exam. It is scored on a percentile scale, meaning that if you get a 9 in one section, it just means you were better than everyone else in that particular section in that particular exam. Furthermore, not only is 9 a score that has been achieved from Pakistan, it is achieved repeatedly, for the simple reason that in a percentile based test somebody will always be on the top and be assigned a 9 band.

The above hasn’t deterred Dr Affan from spamming the local newspaper and visiting all the local TV channels, promoting himself as a “record holder”, once claiming on TV that he was to be featured in the 2013 Guinness Book of World Records. And he seemed to believe absolutely in the truth of his own claim. With the amount of media exposure he was getting increasing exponentially (he had been featured on PTV programmes as a prodigy) the worrisome trend of people idolising showy charlatans with nothing to their name is becoming increasingly clear.

But what makes us so susceptible to repeated swindling by tricksters? To put it simply, it is a distinct lack of the capacity of critical thinking in our nation. We create educated people by making them memorise everything while barely asking them to understand. Any capacity for independent thinking is squashed out from an early age by actively discouraging questioning and promoting belief in authority. Couple all that with rampant illiteracy and you have a situation where nobody is safe from the swindlers and the charlatans. Not the uneducated majority, nor the literate minority.

The believers of Agha Waqar included educated and respectable people. The victims of Double Shah included educated and respectable people. And the supporters of Affan Qaiser include many members of the medical community in Multan.

If we are to stop being cheated out of our health, wealth and peace of mind, then there is only one solution. We have to learn to stop and think about things. And that can only be achieved by proper education and proper teaching of critical thinking skills. Otherwise, we will keep facing new Agha Waqars, new Double Shahs and new Affan Qaisers.