Welcome To The New Dark Age

I am frequently surprised by the stupidity of people I meet.  Maybe it’s just me, but lately there seems to be an averse reaction to any sort of critical thinking.  Discussions involving any sort of hot topic will invariably devolve into conspiracy bullshit within minutes.  I hate to bring this up, but take for example the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.  I have known many people personally who ascribe to the belief that NINE ELEVEN WAS AN INSIDE JOB!!!!! regardless of mountains of evidence against it being so.

If you can’t trust Charlie Sheen with regards to metallurgy, physics, building construction and demolitions, engineering, or the basic fundamentals of science, who can you trust?

Of course, it doesn’t have to be 9/11.  There are plenty of stupid conspiracies out there that have been grabbing the public by the balls.  Take the curious anti-vaccine movement, for example.  Or Birthers.  Or people who believe we are currently being invaded by Reptilian aliens.

It doesn’t matter which one it is.  They are all equally stupid.  Well, not equally, although they are all stupid.

I suppose I don’t really blame people for being so paranoid about things.  We are currently living in the age when we have more information than we know what to do with, and largely, it is useless to us as individuals.  Don’t get me wrong.  I absolutely appreciate being able to access scientific studies within seconds, but for the most part, the knowledge that a lot of scientists are obtaining has no bearing on my day-to-day existence.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that most of what we have learned is useless.  The small, weird bits of information that scientists bust their asses discovering every day is immesurably valuable to humanity as a whole.  Though I might not ever need a heart transplant, I know that unquestionably its discovery has benefited mankind.  However, for all practical purposes, me personally knowing how to create black holes by colliding particles together will be of no good to anyone.  In fact, dare I say, should I ever learn how, the first thing I plan to do is kill everyone on the face of the Earth.

So with great knowledge comes great power.  And as one Uncle Ben so eloquently stated, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  But are we really using the knowledge we are obtaining with any degree of responsibility?  I would have to say no.  Sure, there are great blogs out there actually attempting to enlighten, but for the most part, we are inundated with a sea of opinion mixed in with minor hints of factuality to pass off any conspiratorial belief as truth.

Some people are so taken with their beliefs in conspiracy that any terrible thing which happens in the world is automatically written off as being part of some greater machination.  The tsunami and earthquake which rocked Japan recently was not a natural occurrence.  It could only have been the work of HAARP.  Every pyramid in the world is actually because of the Illuminati.  AIDS doesn’t actually exist and you can survive off of rays of the sun.

At best this misinformation will lead you into heated arguments with college kids who are too high for their own good.  At worst it will fucking kill you.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t at least attempt to be accepting of new ideas, be they stupid or not.  That is really the scientific method in a nutshell.  Without stupid ideas, we wouldn’t have things like penicillin or the smallpox vaccine.  Even germ theory seemed stupid at one point.  Now you can rest safe knowing that the reason why you got sick from eating tainted chicken was probably due to salmonella and not witchcraft.

Probably.

But there is a pervasiveness among this misinformation, and I don’t know what else to blame but the internet.  I remember a time when everything on the internet was bullshit.  Now people take the word of the internet as law ahead of far more credible sources.

Now for the scary part: yes, you can find credible information on the internet!  That’s the wonderful thing about the internet.  It is the one place in the world where theoretical mathematicians can voice their opinions alongside musicians, politicians can speak directly to the public, and celebrities can be taken seriously as journalists.

But the problem with that is that everyone wants to purport themselves to be an expert on something.  That their opinion matters as much as someone who has spent years studying a field.  The notion that someone could go online and watch videos of controlled demolitions and then consider themselves as equally skilled in determining just what a controlled demolition looks like is truly preposterous, really.

But it’s still something I hear it all the time.

I think people like to consider themselves as logical, for the most part, basing their reasons for beliefs on logic and reason instead of emotion.  When you hear Jenny McCarthy talk about how vaccines gave her son autism, there is a line of reasoning that makes sense.  She gave her son a vaccine and then he had autism.  Simple, really.  At least until you consider the myriad factors surrounding autism.  That autism is still largely a genetic disorder and the notion of it being triggered by mercury is silly, considering you probably get more mercury from eating fish, coal plants, or shoving thermometers up your ass.

Then again, I’m not an expert.

It’s this kind of misinformation that puts the average person at risk.  Doing something like avoiding vaccination puts you and me at risk.  More worrisome, it underscores the importance that science has played in the history of humanity.  Thanks to vaccines, we have eradicated smallpox and polio.  Thanks to advances in medicine and technology, we now live twice as long as we used to.

I suppose that I can understand where this belief comes from, though.  People have learned to distrust authority.  Any authority.  Governments.  Teachers.  Scientists.  Occasionally, with good reason.  Scientists have in the past done truly horrible things in the name of experimentation.  Governments have done some absolutely atrocious things.  But bearing that in mind, even first world governments have never needed to hide behind a veil of conspiracy when they want to invade a country or violate human rights.  They just do it.

I think that maybe there are some things that happen in the world that are so impossible to believe that the only way to rationalize it is to say that there must have been some guiding force behind it.  It’s likely the same belief that has kept Christian Creationism in competition with the evolutionary theory.  It all comes from something.  It has to.  The notion that 19 people could overtake 5 planes and then crash them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center is simply too unfathomable.  It so violates our notions of safety and security that to have accomplished such a feat, there must have been some Machiavelli who set the pieces in place or maybe pulled the strings himself.

People don’t want to believe the world is as chaotic and random as it is.  The human brain seeks out patterns wherever they might be.  Faces in toast.  Clouds that look like things.  And of course, the interconnectedness of newspaper headlines.

Now, obviously there are a lot of connections between each headline.  One event leads to another.  Patterns, patterns, patterns.  They really are all over the place.  It’s just that when it comes to recognizing those patterns, how do you determine which ones are real and which ones are bullshit?  For a lot of conspiratorially minded people, nothing is left to chance and all patterns are there because someone wanted them to be.

Therein lies the problem.

Love,
Aaron