Wednesday, September 20, 2006

WTC Paranoid Theory: Barnum Was Right

Is there a sucker born every minute? With TV, it might be faster.

Conspiracy theorists allege that the events of 9/11 are not adequately explained by the "official story" fingering Osama bin Laden and his network as the culprits. What really needs explaining, though, is not 9/11, but the existence of such conspiracy theorists themselves, whose by now well-known speculations about what "really happened" that day are - not to put too fine a point on it - so mind-numbingly stupid that it is mystifying how anyone with a functioning cerebrum could take them seriously even for a moment..."We The Sheeple? Why Conspiracy Theories Persist", Edward Feser, TCSDaily.com, 9/10/06

Feser goes on to spell out the truly fantastic convolutions required for 9/11 theories to approach the truth. And it's not unique to that story. A Pope is misquoted in a lecture to a university and a million Muslims start screaming about a Catholic Hitler. A document describing a wacky theory about Jews, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is written by the Czar's Secret Police in the 1890s, is published by their press, and by the start of the 21st century, half the world starts blaming the Jews for trying to rule the world. Like the Czarist Cheka, though, Feser has a pretty good idea why these hallucinatory, transparently false, and, in his words, "mind-numbingly stupid" stories are seized upon by the press, by gang leaders, by religious fanatics, by Art Bell listeners, as the secret truth. It's not surprising. Why?

The world's an intricately complicated, mysterious place, even with the advent of mass media (perhaps even more so because of MSM). A lot of us, maybe most of us, would like to believe that all of the amazing complexity of even a single event is explicable by a simple answer. Human beings are astoundingly smart, but on this, we are depressingly, mind-numbingly stupid; and politicians and terrorists exploit this relentlessly.

Wise up!

Luther

No comments: