Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Conspiracy Theories And Nutjobs

If you've been tuned in to the news the last couple of days, chances are that you've heard about how the whole narrative that was promoted by the Obama administration regarding the Benghazi murders was completely fabricated.

No freaking way. Nobody saw that coming, right?

Our own nation has a tremendous track record of events where the government or powerful private interests have lied to people or engaged in conspiracies to further an often less-than-virtuous agenda. That's just our nation; it doesn't even bring into account the history of the rest of the world.

What amazes me is how, in the face of how ubiquitous this phenomenon is, people are so unwilling to consider the possibilities of such events. Just taking the Benghazi thing as an example. If the President's cohorts would lie about this, why wouldn't they lie about other things? Notice that I'm not taking the step of implicating the President as a party in this.

I use the Church as an example as well. We know how widespread the abuse scandal was. Is it so difficult to imagine that there was a group of prelates actively involved in shepherding those responsible? J. Edgar Hoover denied the existence of the Mafia. The average Catholic denies the existence of the Lavender Mafia. Both in the face of significant evidence to the contrary.

To be clear, this isn't about people who are presented with this kind of information and then simply disagree with the conclusion. This is about folks who listen to the info and then immediately label the presenter as a lunatic for no other reason than "Well, I just can't believe that" or "The (insert government/private interest) would never do such a thing." For an example of this latter scenario, consider anyone voicing fears that our current government is hostile to religious interests and actively seeking to undermine Christianity, specifically Catholicism. I am amazed at how these fears are met with such incredulity.

There are two kinds of crazy: thinking everything is a conspiracy and thinking nothing is a conspiracy. I suggest that the vast majority of our electorate have slouched into the second camp.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The problem is that there are a significant number of conspiracy theories and that these get advanced without any evidence; it's more a case of the stopped clock being right twice a day. If I remember right, Benghazi was thrown out within the same day and by the same people claiming that he's a homosexual Marxist bigamist atheist Muslim bent on destroying 'MURICA.

Throwback said...

I must have missed that one. There have always been conspiracy theories. My difficulty is with people dismissing them simply because they are theories that involve conspiracies, as though such things never happen.