Yes, the world has problems, but they're not part of an over-arching conspiracy. Know how I know? Because throughout history, one aspect of the human psyche has shone through time and time again, making it virtually impossible for conspiracies of any significant magnitude to survive. It boils down to one simple fact:
People can't keep their damn mouths shut.
Everyone loves to be the first to deliver important information to people who aren't in the know. It's what some people live for. It's the "gossip" gene that lives in all of our hearts. It's not an evil impulse... after all, where would we be as a global society if people didn't pass along important information, keeping their friends and loved ones abreast of all the things that they might not have time or connections to find out for themselves? I don't know how many times I've heard someone volunteer information that they had entirely no reason to, other than to say to me, in effect, "Here's something that I know that you don't". I’ve even done it myself from time to time.
With the amplifying effect of social media, this sort of thing can run rampant. Unfortunately, what seems to get passed around the most is stuff that sounds sensational but should probably be held up to more scrutiny or even a quick smell test (basically, the kind of stuff that I talked about in the first paragraph of this essay). Assume, for example, that 9/11 really was an inside job, and that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers was brought about by demolition charges discreetly being placed inside -- because, of course, it couldn't only be because their central supports had been degraded by jet fuel burning at a thousand or so degrees for an hour and a half, right? It would have taken a staff of hundreds to engineer such a feat of interior demolition, but no one has ever come forward to say anything of the sort, nor has any of the buildings’ survivors ever said, "You know, I did notice that there were a lot of extra people hanging around doing some wiring work a few weeks' before." I guarantee you, if someone had made the effort to perpetrate such a thing, literally thousands of people would have had to know about it, and at least one of them would have come forward to say so. But none have. Because the only way it’s easy to keep your damn mouth shut is when you don’t have anything to say.
I know, it's hard to tell reality from falsehood these days. For every wild claim made, there's some official-sounding organization saying that it's not true, then a retort saying that said organization is in the pockets of Big Business or Big Government, etc. But I have to defer to my main man Carl Sagan again, who said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Unfortunately, some think that "extraordinary evidence" comes in the form of a .jpg of black text on a white background with bad grammar and excessive caps and exclamation points, saying that the US government is lying about what happened at Roswell. Then people can pass it along with a click, just as easily as passing along a legitimate news article from a legitimate news source.
And, by the way, legitimate news sources are getting fewer and further between these days as well. But let’s just assume that if a website’s livelihood depends on that what they’re saying is actually true, then you might be reading someone who has a bit of bias. A cheap and easy cancer cure that “they” don’t want you to know about, outlined in an article from Bigpharmownsyoursoul.com, really should merit a second citation before you hit “share” and pass it to everyone you know.
I've just read Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, and it actually sort of ties into what I'm talking about here. Remember him? He's the guy who predicted with an astonishing amount of accuracy how individual states were going to go in the last presidential election. And here's the shocker... he did it by actually aggregating the results of polls! Asking people how they're going to vote is the best way to figure out how people are going to vote… who knew? But the point is that he didn't let his preconceived notions get in the way. Most people who are making predictions, he says, are always trying to find the secret, to boil the future down to one or two telltale signs, and there just aren't any. The only way to be totally objective is to expand your awareness into all the data being presented, instead of being beholden to one "story" that you want to be true and looking for the data that supports it.
Where this ties in to my rant about conspiracies is that it seems like this is what people are doing... looking for one thing that's causing the problems they face. And believe me, I get it. When people feel powerless, they look for a reason. As humans, that's just what we do. In fact, a psychological study recently showed that, when people feel like they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re more likely to “see” pictures in random static than folks who feel competent. If there's a problem, we try to identify the source of the problem so we can fix it. And if there's nothing clearly standing out as the main obstacle, we'll take something minor and turn it into the only thing that's keeping us down. Usually, that's the government, or big pharmaceutical companies, or the military/industrial complex, or something.
Do I believe that these institutions are flawless and blameless? Of course not. But following the principle of Occam's Razor, where the simplest answer is the most likely, I think the truth falls somewhere well in the middle. Now, a lot of people seem to think that the simplest answer to the problem means "The government's doing it to keep us in line!", but most big problems are complex, and instead of dealing with that we look for one simple answer, something we can comprehend and fixate on. This kind of thinking disregards the fact that the government is made up of people who get up and go to work every day just like we do. Even if the main policy makers were a close-knit cabal of evildoers sitting around wringing their hands and thinking up new ways to oppress people, the fact remains that they would have to enact these ideas through a huge network of tens of thousands of people. And, like I said, that many people are just not able to keep their damn collective mouths shut.
Going back to Nate Silver again, we live in an age where information is being generated and collected in terms of petabytes an hour. That's a lot of noise to sift through before you get to the signal. There are a lot of blind alleys and misleading data that might feel right, but just aren’t. There's a now-famous graph that shows how the rise in autism in children almost perfectly matches the rise in consumption of organic food in this country. So this fact has just as much merit as the idea that vaccines are causing it, but it never gained any traction. Why? Because it doesn't make psychological sense, and we don't want it to be true.
We live in a world where you get a lot of incendiary stuff thrown at you daily. I've sometimes thought about boycotting Facebook for a while, just so I can calm down from the outrage I feel about all the difficult issues it brings up incessantly. And then there are times when I find myself tipping the other way, getting cynical even about causes that I know are well-meaning and I should care about more. A sure-fire way to get me not to share something online is either tell me "Please share this" or "I bet people won't share this". And it's something I've just got to start working on, I know. I've got to be able to shrug off other people's wrongheaded beliefs and just focus on what I know to be right and true. But if that means that every now and then I've got to sit down and write 1500 words about how you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet, then maybe that's the price we'll just have to pay.
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