Page 10 – Lovely County Citizen – November 29, 2012
Editorial A meditation on conspiracy theories “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” ~ The White Queen, “Through the Looking Glass,” by Lewis Carroll People believe in all kinds of crazy things. We are reminded of this by a remark made over the weekend about water fluoridation, a popular subject locally. Despite overwhelming evidence that fluoride properly used is a tremendous good, and despite lack of real evidence to the contrary (other than crap studies poorly done), people continue to believe that fluoride is not only bad for you, but that it is part of a conspiracy to harm us or keep us docile. Like cattle. “Chemtrails” are the subject of a similar belief-based conspiratorial movement. Jets create water vapor trails in the sky, just as, in the summer when it’s hot and you run the A/C in your car, water drips from the tailpipe. It is condensation, or “contrails,” when it happens up above. Believers in chemtrails say that our skies are being laced with harmful chemicals as part of a conspiracy to control or harm us, in the vapor trails of jets. Actress Jenny McCarthy’s ongoing battle against vaccinations in children, because she believes it causes autism, is another example of a situation where repeated scientific studies can find NO evidence linking the two things, and yet people who are on the “no vaccination” bus will remain on it, because that’s how people are. (Not vaccinating your kids, by the way, only works as long as the vast majority of people ignore your theories and go ahead and do get their children their shots.) To people of a certain age, the JFK assassination conspiracy holds endless fascination. Ask a young person nowadays to identify Lee Harvey Oswald and they’ll say, “Who?” And yet dozens if not hundreds of books, and surely thousands
of hours of television, have been devoted to who shot JFK and why. On one level, believing in conspiracies is a harmless way to spend some braintime. The internet is a blessing to anyone who’s interested in UFOs or even whether President Obama, despite a mountain of evidence saying he was born in Hawaii, was actually Kenyan by birth and therefore not qualified to run the country. On another level, however, believing in conspiracies can lead to immense tragedy. For centuries critics have accused the Jewish people of being secretly in control of big business, the banks, etc., as well as being the villains of the Christian story of Jesus’ death. As a result of this unreasonable hatred, millions of Jewish people have perished. Believing that the government is out to get us in one way or another has led to any number of paranoid pathologies. In addition to the ones mentioned above, there are dozens of websites devoted to supposed FEMA concentration camps for American political dissidents, as well as a growing survivalist “movement” involving real people with real guns playing a game in which the feds are coming to get us soon, and by golly these good ol’ boys are gonna be READY when that stuff hits the fan! (Hint: The stuff is called horses**t. Honest.) A false belief is not considered to be knowledge, even if it is sincere. A sincere believer in the flat earth theory does not know that the Earth is flat, although he might defend that notion to the death. Unfortunately, defending a notion to the death still doesn’t make it true. Apophenia means “the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.” It’s a part of how the human brain is put together. Even if the data does have some meaning on some other level, people attribute false meaning to it. Like seeing See Editorial, page 18
Citizen of the Week Someone out in the anonymous world sent us this candidate for this week’s CoW: “We would like to nominate prominent local artist Barbara Kennedy as Citizen of the Week,” they say. “Knowing that local pastel artist and Prospect Gallery owner Rebecca J. Becker had a serious medical problem and no insurance, Barbara single handedly set in motion a benefit at Caribe that eventually involved nearly a hundred volunteers and donors. The proceeds from the benefit on November 18th have covered the costs of two trips to a specialist at Duke University in North Carolina, the second of which Rebecca will undertake on Dec 4th. Her prospects for a complete return to complete health are excellent. There can be no greater gift from one human being to another. Thank you, Barbara.”