“False information need not be coherent to be effective, and the specters of vanished liberty and tyrannical government regulation are easy enough to conjure.” So wrote critic A.O. Scott in the New York Times in 2015 about Merchants of Doubt, a documentary film based on the book of the same title by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.
Merchants of Doubt chronicled climate-change denialism. Oreskes and Conway investigated “why intelligent, educated people would deny the reality of man-made climate change.” Why such people, predominantly men, some of them scientists, would wage a concerted campaign to cast doubt on settled science. Was it simply to obtain position and privilege and wealth?
Turns out the primary motivation was ideological. As the authors write in the introduction to their latest collaboration, The Big Myth, “these men feared that government regulation of the marketplace — whether to address climate change or protect consumers from lethal products — would be the first step on a slippery slope to socialism, communism, or worse.”