Other People’s Thoughts in Your Head

In 1864 a Sicilian baron, Nicolò Turrisi Colonna, published a book about a “sect” that kept the countryside around Palermo in fear. Nobody was writing down the word “mafia” yet. The baron described the sect’s rule: anyone who went near the carabinieri, spoke to them or so much as said good morning to them was a villain and deserved death. Such a man had committed a terrible crime against “humility”.

Humility in Italian is umiltà. According to one theory, that’s the word the famous omertà, the law of silence, came from. Dickie draws his conclusion: omertà, it seems, began life as a code of submission.

Look at what happened. A rule of submission, don’t talk to the police or you’ll be killed, was called a virtue. Humility. Then honour. And a hundred years later people who knew nothing of the baron and his sect thought of silence as their own value. Someone else’s thought, dressed up as a virtue, became theirs. So when you’re told that keeping quiet, putting up with it or doing as you’re told is a matter of honour, ask who thought of it first. And who’s still doing well out of it.

How Other People’s Thoughts Get In

Much of what you believe, you didn’t work out yourself. It came from people who mattered, from repetition, from frames, from strong stories. Nothing wrong with that: you can’t check everything yourself. What’s wrong is not knowing which thoughts are yours and which were put there for you.

A borrowed thought travels. It passes from head to head and learns along the way not to get caught by a check. In 1976 the biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” for ideas that pass from head to head. Scientists still argue over whether the word is any use. But the observation is sound: a thought survives not because it’s true but because it’s easy to pass on.

The roads it comes by are the same tricks we’ve taken apart in this book. Repetition. Authority and “our own people”. The frame. Feeling instead of argument. A ladder of little yeses. Hurry and scarcity. A debt after a gift.

There’s a separate experiment on repetition. In 1977 American psychologists had people rate how true the same statements were, several times over, mixed in with new ones. The statements that kept coming back were rated a little truer each time. Whether they were true or not. Repetition works like an argument, though it isn’t one.

A Novel Instead of a Rulebook

Gambetta tells how the Mafia planted someone else’s fiction in people’s heads as their own history. Leonardo Vitale complained that he’d been lured in with stories of a Mafia that fought thieves and helped the weak, like the Beati Paoli. At his initiation Calderone was told that Cosa Nostra was born during the Sicilian Vespers, the uprising of 1282, at the same time as the Beati Paoli.

Who were the Beati Paoli? The heroes of a serialised novel that the Palermo writer Luigi Natoli published in the early twentieth century. A secret society of noble avengers. There’s no evidence it ever existed. But in 1986 an estate agent advised Gambetta to read the novel if he wanted to understand Palermo.

The organisation took an adventure novel and passed it off to its own people as a family tree. And the people believed it. Gambetta compares this to the corporate spirit of big companies: every institution likes to trace itself back to a fine old tradition.

A Myth That Suits Everyone

Dickie shows another myth like it. In the 1860s the Italian authorities thought the Mafia was a relic of the Middle Ages that would disappear on its own. One optimist even claimed it would vanish at the first whistle of the locomotive. And the mafiosi were happy to keep up this belief in their own antiquity. Tommaso Buscetta, according to Dickie, sincerely believed the Mafia had been born in the Middle Ages as resistance to the French occupiers.

The myth suited both sides. The authorities could skip the fight: it would disappear by itself. The mafiosi got a noble pedigree. Dickie shows that the Mafia is in fact the same age as the Italian state. But the myth lived for more than a century, because it was convenient for everyone to repeat.

The hardiest borrowed thoughts are the ones that suit both you and the man who put them there.

How to Test a Thought

The signs of a borrowed thought are simple. You can’t explain it from your own experience. You react sharply when someone doubts it. And you feel uneasy checking it.

The test is simple too. Three questions. How do I know this? What could change my mind? Who gains if I think this way?

Scientists call it inoculation. Back in the sixties the American psychologist William McGuire showed that if you first expose a man to a weakened version of the other side’s argument, along with its rebuttal, he’ll stand up better to the strong one later. Recently British researchers turned this into a game: people wrote fake news themselves and afterwards were better at spotting other people’s. Once you know a trick from the inside, it’s easier to see from the outside.

One last thing. Many people get it wrong not because they’re biased but because they can’t be bothered to check. Psychologists in Canada and the United States found that the people most likely to believe fake news are not the most partisan ones but those least inclined to stop and think. A slow thought is the best defence.

Borrowed Doesn’t Mean Bad

You can’t build your whole head yourself, and you don’t need to. Half of what I know about washing I took from an old presser. I never once checked it and I don’t regret it. The trouble isn’t that a thought came from outside. The trouble is when you’ve forgotten where it came from. A thought whose owner you remember works for you. A thought with no owner works for whoever put it there.

What This Book Is For

This is why I’ve told you about all these tricks. Not so you’d use them against people. So you’d see them when they’re used against you. And so that, seeing them, you’d never once stoop to them yourself.

Don Vincenzo used to say, “A Family that puts other people’s thoughts into people’s heads lives as long as it has the strength to guard them. A Family that people come to of their own accord lives a hundred years.” Baron Turrisi Colonna described a sect that lived on other people’s silence. It’s still alive. But look how many people it has to kill so the silence doesn’t end. And people came to the Don of their own accord for forty years. Not a single shot.