THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN’S MAIN CAMPUS IS SITUATED ON TREATY 6 TERRITORY AND THE HOMELAND OF THE MÉTIS.
THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN’S MAIN CAMPUS IS SITUATED ON TREATY 6 TERRITORY AND THE HOMELAND OF THE MÉTIS.
This will look entirely reasonable if you're a crazy bastard.
“Like what?” I would ask. Then they would start listing things.
“Do you know aliens are coming in 2012? And the world is a run by a satanic cult. And the government’s poisoning us!”
Conspiracy theorists are often filled with passion, but their ideas lack two crucial components: credible sources and basic reasoning. It’s like their brains were altered by certain things — things that make you paranoid.
Here’s the truth about truth: it’s less amusing then the uneducated or drug-addled will tell you. Thinking “there must be a reasonable explanation” sounds cliche, but it’s true.
Take, for example, the belief that the world will end in 2012. People who believe this cite a remarkable coincidence: 2012 is the year the Mayan calendar ends. It’s also the year Sumerians predicted a planet would collide with the Earth.
The truth is less remarkable; 2012 marks the end of a Mayan “long-count period,” not their calendar. What’s more, academics don’t know what year Sumerians predicted a collision to occur. Only one pseudo-scientist conceived a “2012” collision. It’s a myth made for the Internet — where no one notices twisted facts or phony credentials.
People starting conspiracies only see the sides of the story that fit their theory. They have what psychologists calls a “confirmation bias”: where you favour information that proves your theory, disregarding the rest. I see this in the people who claim the Moon landing was just a Hollywood production.
They point out the Hollywood mistakes: Photos taken from the Moon have no stars. The silhouettes of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin suggest two lights sources (not just sunlight).
In the end, missing stars are the result of bad camera exposure and the weird shadows are caused by bumpy terrain.
To confirm such a stupid myth, people will ignore piles of evidence to the contrary. For instance, telescopes tracked Apollo 11 as it hurtled through space. We collected Moon rocks. Thousands of geniuses behind Apollo attest to the landing’s validity.
Then again, a conspiracy theorist can always just say “Don’t you see? It’s all part of the cover-up!”
Conspiracy theorists have the mentality that media and science are out to trick us. Wait, weren’t both fields kind of developed to spread the truth? I’m reminded of people who doubt climate change — a debate that should be dead by now.
Thousands of scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the largest group studying climate change) unanimously say that:
Even so, a 2011 World Public Opinion poll found 60 per cent of people watching Fox News daily think “most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring.” These are Americans who trust their gut over time-tested science. I have heard similar ignorance from Canadians. We’ll say things like “We could use a little global warming up here.”
This conspiracy, like so many, relies on “radical skeptics” who doubt you can prove anything. They will doubt climate change till the day the Earth freezes over. In philosophy, this can be a fair stance. But isn’t being that paranoid a bit unwieldy?
A world that trusts strangers on the Internet more than media and science professionals is in big trouble. Call it college preppiness, but I find that most conspiracy-types I meet read the random blogs on the Internet in place of textbooks. Maybe one day some sketched-out Internet user will uncover a real conspiracy. But for the time being, lets leave the “mass-government conspiracies” to science-fiction writers.
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image: robnwatkins/Flickr
