Information without criteria and the civilization of imbeciles.

 

Umberto Eco consistently warned that the true danger of modern culture is not ignorance itself, but the illusion of knowledge produced by an excess of unfiltered information. For Eco, conspiracy theories thrive not because people lack access to the facts, but because they lack interpretive criteria: the intellectual tools necessary to distinguish meaning from noise.

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Umberto Eco diagnoses the pathology of interpretation in works such as Foucault's Pendulum and shows how conspiracy theories arise from what he called overinterpretation, which is the compulsive tendency to connect unrelated facts within a grand and hidden design. 

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The creators of conspiracy theories start from certain assumptions: nothing is accidental, everything is connected, and appearances hide secret truths.

Eco did not see this as a form of critical thinking, but rather as a parody of it. Authentic interpretation requires limits; conspiratorial thinking, on the other hand, eliminates them entirely.

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Information overload and semiotic collapse;

Eco argued that the internet produces a semiotic crisis: an overwhelming deluge of signs without hierarchies of credibility. When all sources seem equivalent—scientific journals, blogs, memes, rumors—authority dissolves and meaning becomes arbitrary.

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In this environment:

Quantity replaces quality, repetition replaces verification, emotional resonance replaces evidence, and the result is not clarification, but confusion disguised as understanding.

This is how 'the cult of the imbecile' is produced.

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One of Eco's most quoted statements concerns the power, wielded by social media, of what he provocatively called imbeciles. His observation was not intended as elitist contempt, but rather as a structural critique: digital platforms erase the distinction between informed discourse and ignorant opinion.

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Previously —Eco pointed out— ignorance had social limits. 

Today anyone can speak to everyone, visibility is confused with legitimacy, and popularity is identified with truth.

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The now so-called influencer, to whom a large majority has access, lacks knowledge, but dominates the spectacle and is more persuasive than the expert who respects complexity.

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Conspiracy as a democratic illusion:

Eco did not reject democracy, but he feared its degeneration into epistemological relativism: the idea that all opinions are equally valid, regardless of the evidence. 

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Conspiracy theories thrive in this space because they offer simple explanations for complex realities; emotional certainty instead of ambiguity; and a sense of superiority—I know what others don't. In this way, conspiratorial thinking becomes psychologically gratifying and socially contagious. This leads to a decline in education and critical thinking.

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At the heart of Eco's critique lies the erosion of a humanistic education: training in logic, rhetoric, history, and semiotics. Without these tools, individuals cannot evaluate sources, detect fallacies, or recognize manipulation.

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For Eco, the antidote was not censorship, but critical literacy: learning to read, interpret, and question responsibly.

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In conclusion, Umberto Eco understood conspiracy theories and what are now ignorant influencers not as anomalies, but as symptoms of a cultural condition: a world saturated with information but deprived of critical judgment. 

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When criteria disappear, meaning implodes. The problem isn't that people know too little, but that they believe too much without understanding why.

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It's one thing for an ordinary person to Google a specific topic in medicine, engineering, or the environment; it's quite another for a doctor, researcher, engineer, or professional with years of study to do so. We cannot replace a scientist with decades of study and research with a charlatan who spends two minutes online. 

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So-called uneducated influencers benefit from the market of ignorance and contribute to electing deceitful and disastrous politicians.

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A clear example of the reflections of this profound thinker can be observed in members of the cabinet of the once most powerful country in the world, which spent two hundred and fifty years to build a model of democracy, now attacked by a brutal wave of ignorance that is difficult to imagine. 

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Publicly, high-ranking government officials ignore the meaning of the constitutional guarantee of the remedy called Habeas Corpus, which protects personal freedom, thus failing to recognize that it is a fundamental right of democracy.  

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They have dismantled the regulations that protect the environment and have endangered all of humanity because they do not believe in global warming caused by gas emissions, nor do they believe in vaccines that are the result of many years of scientific research; in other words, they do not believe in science.

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Ignorance in power is turning the great Western civilization into a civilization of fools.