Do you believe in so-called “conspiracy theories”? Have you been mocked for this? Have you lost credibility with family, friends? Have they said you’re irrational? You’re not alone.
Here’s the simple truth. You believe in “conspiracy theories” after examining evidence. You’ve studied it, examined it, contemplated it, and even fought against it, but eventually, you had to concede what you knew must be the truth. That’s not irrational, it’s rational.
To be rational is to be reasonable. To be reasonable is to have reasons for your conclusions. It’s that simple.
Let’s take 9/11 for example. Maybe you don’t believe that those two planes took down the World Trade Center, especially since building 7 wasn’t even hit and fell anyway. And when you mention this, people say you’re crazy. They say you’re a tinfoil hat wearing nutjob. What’s wrong with you? Nothing is wrong with you. You’ve examined the evidence and come to a logical, rational conclusion.
So you say to your friend or family member that you’ve examined this evidence. Maybe you give them this link: www.ae911truth.org/ And you point out that over 3,000 architects and engineers have examined the evidence and publicly signed their names, risking their credibility on which their very careers depend, saying that they think the gov’t report is full of it, and that a controlled demolition is what actually happened.
And how do they respond? They refuse to even look at it. They write it all off as quackery. They insist you’re wrong and that the evidence you’re pointing to is all fake. They get all worked up and say that the conspiracy would have had to have been too big. Too many people would have had to know about it. There’s no way that “the gov’t” would do this. It’s just not possible.
Do you find their response astonishing? No matter how much evidence you present, they ignore it. No matter how damning the proof, how high the quality, no matter how obvious, they still insist in towing the line. Why?
Most people believe what they want to believe. They want to believe that the US and the West are the good guys. It’s like when you watch sports on TV. Your favorite team is usually from the city where you grew up. You root for them because they represent where you come from. You identify with them. They’re the “good guys” and the other team is the “bad guys”. This is human nature, and it also applies to countries and to war.
All people reconstruct reality in their heads. There once was a philosopher named Immanuel Kant. In philosophy, you can really talk about pre-Kant and post-Kant. Anyway, he said we don’t really have cognitive access to reality as it actually is. Rather, we have access to reality through the mediation of our senses. That’s a fancy way of saying that the sky isn’t actually blue, it just appears blue in our perception because of the way the light reflects off of it. When we see the sky, we reconstruct it in our minds according to our perception of it and our interpretation of it. Then what we interact with cognitively is not the sky itself, but our reconstructed perception of it, the idea we form of it in our minds.
Those who reject our evidence and our rational arguments do so because it clashes with their reconstruction of reality in their minds. In their minds, “the government” couldn’t possibly be capable of such enormous evil. They’re the good guys in their mind. Ironically, they also know that the government is run by politicians, and almost all people everywhere will acknowledge that literally every politician lies every time they open their mouths. Why would the good guys lie all the time?
When someone’s reality is threatened, they will reflexively get defensive. They can’t allow their reality to be shattered. We who have had our naive versions of reality shattered over and over again are used to it. It no longer causes us pain. We’ve learned to keep an open mind and don’t cling so closely to our ideas. We are far less certain. But most people are blissfully unaware of how little resemblance their reconstructed reality has to actual reality. That reconstruction has been nurtured and fed by the media and by their social media echo chamber.
They cling to these illusions like children clinging to their mothers. When their illusions are threatened, they scream and cry like a baby whose mother has left the room. Their security blanket has been taken away, and they are frightened of what could happen, of what could be true.
So let’s review. You’ve come to believe in conspiracy theories based on careful, rational examination of evidence. You’ve spent a lot of time looking into it and you can’t deny the painfully obvious truths that confront you in that evidence. They think you’re crazy. They refuse to examine the evidence. They have a purely emotional, knee jerk reaction to your claims.
Friends, fellow conspiracy theorists, we are the rational ones living in an irrational world. Don’t get mad. Don’t feel hurt. Just pity the poor bastards who are still living inside Plato’s cave.