Search This Blog

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Crying WOLF!

We all remember the story of "The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf" from our kindergarten days.  In the story a boy decides to cry wolf to get the towns people to run out to help him as a joke.  But after several "jokes", the towns people turn a deaf ear when the boy cries "wolf" for real and he is eaten by the wolf.

Today, conspiracy theories have run a muck in our country.   The JFK conspiracy made for a good movie by Oliver Stone in the 90's.   After 9-11, conspiracy theories arose that our own government ran planes into buildings to start a war with Iraq and Afghanistan. Then during the Katrina catastrophe, conspiracy theorists said that Bush ordered the dikes to be blown up to create a larger amount of destruction. 

Now we have Sandy-Hook conspiracy theorists saying that our own government sent agents into an elementary school to shook 20 children and 6 adults and blame the shooting on a mentally ill teenage boy and his mother (some theorists even want you to believe that it never even happened) all so the government could drum up support to remove the 2nd amendment.

To me most of these theories are from people who, like the boy-who-cried-wolf, desperately want attention and to get that attention they are willing to "fool us" any way they can.   They want to appear smarter and more informed than everyone else and thanks to the internet now, they can even get paid for it on YouTube by how many clicks they get.  We, then, are reinforcing their sickness by visiting their videos and passing them along to our friends.

Why do we want to  believe conspiracy theories?

We don't like random acts of evil
Because they help us make sense of the world.  We don't like random acts of violence in our lives.  It makes us feel uneasy about our world and what might happen to us.   We would rather believe there is someone behind the scenes pulling the strings because then it becomes less random.  While it does make our world more sinister on one hand, on the other hand it makes our life more ordered.  This especially becomes more necessary when dealing with situations in which people who are either mentally disturbed or influenced in a diabolical way such as the case with radical Islam.  We would rather think that "rational" people are behind the action rather than to accept the fact that not everyone in this world is "rational".  It's easier to believe that men in room somewhere are flying the planes like giant drones into the Twin Towers rather than 19 middle eastern men who had been living among us planning our destruction.

Reinforces our views
It also reinforces our dislike for those in power.  When Bush was in power, the left loved the conspiracy theories, because it reinforced their belief that Bush was evil and not to be trusted.  It provided "proof" to them that he as a "war-monger" and capable of great harm to the world.   Now that Obama is in power, many on the right are drawn by the Sandy-Hook conspiracy because it reinforces their belief that Obama is evil and willing to do anything to spark a revolution in the country. 

The sad thing is that these conspiracy theories will eventually jade us to such a level that we will not recognize a REAL conspiracy when it does occur and we will have lost ALL faith in our government officials in the end as well.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.