WHITEWATER REGION (LaPasse) — Conspiracy theories! Jonathan Cainer once said, “Why do we love the idea that people might be secretly working together to control and organize the world? Because we don’t like to face the fact that our world runs on a combination of chaos, incompetence and confusion. In a world full of manipulation, half-truths and lies, the conspiracy theory is often a safer bet than the official story.”
Conspiracy theories, Facebook, Twitter and all the other time wasters are a perfect vehicle for folk posting some of their strange and wacky ideas. We have to be careful that we don’t allow social media to run and ruin our lives. And this is coming from somebody who has his phone with him basically all the time. Yet, I like to think of myself as someone who has at least some control over his social media activities, compared to some who seemed likely to be hunched over their computers or staring at their phones almost 24/7, in many cases reading all kinds of weird and crazy stuff.
We are in danger of generating into a polarized society helped along by falsehoods on Facebook and other social media and their constant barrage of stories and false news. Anybody can basically rant on Facebook, throw out a meaningless and sometimes silly as well as offensive comment and propose a conspiracy theory. It is a different matter altogether to get active and be involved in a cause and also to dig and research some of these claims, which can take time.
Social media fosters, unintentionally, the whole issue of conspiracy theories. Now, don’t get me wrong, some conspiracy theories can be fun. For example have we been visited by UFO’s? I love that idea, as well as time travel!. But unfortunately some of the conspiracy theories that float around on Facebook are not only completely crazy but also dangerous and in many respects very inflammatory and simply hateful. Astonishingly 61 per cent of Americans reject the explanation of Kennedy’s assassination.
Here in Canada and elsewhere we still have a huge number of people who believe that vaccines cause autism. Highly dangerous. Then there have been a whole host of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus. For example, the news photos of the hospital being constructed in China in a hurry with all the heavy equipment was claimed by some to be in fact machines digging mass graves! Also there are some so-called cures for the virus floating around that are dangerous, and then there is a televangelist who claims he can cure people as they watch him on TV. No, I am not making this up. Who actually believes this stuff?
Here closer at home there is a very real belief that Ontario power generation have conspired to cover up a mistake that they made which resulted in the severe flooding in the spring of 2019. Some are saying, if you can believe it, that the flooding was intentional in order to sell the Federal Government’s climate change plan! Can you imagine how many people would have been involved to have concocted such a scheme? And some on the right are saying that it’s all Justin Trudeau‘s fault, mind you they would blame him for the weather!
Now, whether the Federal government could have done more to prevent the flooding in terms of their policies is another matter altogether. Then there are some on the left saying that we shouldn’t be living on the river anyway, it’s really only for fish and wildlife. In the middle are some worthwhile comments and then a whole bunch of conspiracy theories some of which are quite wacky. Where’s the science behind some of these statements, answer, there is none. So again, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? In some cases it is much simpler to feel that somebody is concealing something from you rather than to except the actual facts as provided by science or logic.
Maybe travel could help some folk put things into a wider perspective, and I don’t mean to Florida or to a Caribbean Island. Reading a wide variety of different news sources including possibly international newspapers could perhaps help the cause too.
Conspiracy theories lack public, objective and verifiable proof. Good investigative journalism thrives on exposing conspiracies. That applies to the Panama Papers, the Flint water crisis, the Edward Snowden revelations about domestic surveillance, the CIA’s role in the cocaine epidemic in the 1980s, or President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Many of those events started as conspiracy theories until their underlying evidence was discovered and made public.
So think about it carefully when somebody makes a statement. Where is the proof? Where is the science behind the claims? It pays to be cynical. It pays to use critical thinking skills. Sadly, it also pays to realize that you will never change some people beliefs in certain conspiracy theories, however crazy those theories my be.
