Sheeple vs Conspiracy Theorists
When trust no longer exists in a relationship, who would you say is at fault for the disconnection? The person (or organization) responsible for the initial lie? Or the person/people who have been lied to? And these are lies I might add, that are continuously and purposefully mixed in with honest and reliable doses of legitimate and well-proven truths, which in essence, pretty much sums up both media and government in our modern day generation.
At some point after getting lied to so much, wouldn’t you just stop believing in just about anything that you might hear from any one particular news source (or politician), regardless if they occasionally said something truthful or not? It’s a bit like the little-boy-who-cried-wolf scenario. And yet so many people (labelled as Conspiracy Theorists) are made to feel guilty (or insane) for ever daring to question the motives of political and/or media celebrities (commonly disguised as authority figures), or to the other extreme, for not questioning them at all (labelled as Sheeple).
Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with being a natural sceptic towards new information, regardless of the source. What’s the big deal about asking questions, anyhow? When did that become such a heinous act? Or questioning motives? Or demanding transparency? Or holding people accountable for their history of lies? How does any of this suddenly make you the bad guy? Or worse yet . . . a thought terrorist?
Is it any wonder why people don’t know who or what to believe anymore? Especially since everything these days has some sort of a hidden financial agenda attached to it. Therefore, the safest bet is the more obvious choice – don’t trust anything or anyone. However, society’s self-imposed and conveniently alternate solution seems to be to simply let the citizens blame each other for having bilateral brainwash-like thinking functions. That’s how back-asswards we all are in our perceptions right now, but I’m here to say . . . it’s not your fault.
The solution for most people is to simply rely on what they consider to be their “common sense” (something that isn’t as common as they’d all like to think) to help them sort through the oceans of misinformation that their senses are constantly being flooded with in today’s technology-addicted world. Rightly or wrongly, people instinctively trust their own intuitions over those of anyone else’s (it’s a survival function), so to many, this is their best and only option. What makes sense to them is often what they consider to be the absolute truth, and if you dare to disagree with them . . . well then that makes you a frickin’ idiot (in their mind) regardless of what side of the fence you happen to be sitting on. It’s the disagreeing that they can’t tolerate. The more intelligent a person perceives themselves to be (they likely excelled at the aforementioned miseducation), the less likely it is that they think they’ve been brainwashed. It is this exact frame of thinking that truly indicates the opposite.
If anyone out there is familiar with the term “Stranger Than Fiction” than they’d know that in order for something to be considered as the most likely scenario, people would first have to ask themselves if it makes sense – if it coincides with their own belief system. If it does, then it MUST be true. If it doesn’t . . . well then everyone else is clearly stupid because they obviously heard it from a very unreliable source based on their own highly skewed measurement of credibility. Well sorry to burst your bubble, but attacking someone else’s belief system (attempting to shame others) simply because it doesn’t agree with your own, does not make you superior or more enlightened. And no, there are no exceptions.
And here’s another problem with that process – most great lies DON’T make any sense. That’s what makes them so beautifully undetectable in the first place and why people get away with them. Because they DON’T MAKE SENSE! Not to us, anyway. So people rationalize certain events as being “unlikely” because they don’t believe in the unproven motivation – the theory.
So I will ask . . . do you really think that we, as a society, are in the know?
When people rely on specific news sources that have a proven track record of mixing the truth with lies all together into one big potpourri, they will often piece together the perceived truth based on what they feel makes the most sense or resonates with their personal belief system (BS for short), and then ignore the rest of the facts (lies) altogether. It’s a flawed system to say the least, where people only believe in what they WANT to believe. And nobody ever wants to believe that they are being played for a fool.
James Ryan @safeisdeath