}
I've been reading a lot about this online lately. There's an
actual scientific theory that conspiracy theorists suffer from a form of
cognitive dissonance. I even heard one person on the radio describing
how they like to argue with conspiracy theorists by bringing up critical
thinking and then suggesting that they should think critically about
conspiracy theories themselves. What do you think about all this?
Leave a comment below.
Personally, I think it's a conspiracy (of course). First of all
"cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds contradictory beliefs,
ideas, or values" (from Wikipedia), and for the people who actually do
think about conspiracy theories, it's really just a way of detecting
lies. Because let's face it, humans can lie. A certain percentage of
the population is just statistically going to lie a certain percentage
of the time. And no matter how good and virtuous you may think you are,
there's always going to be other people out there who don't care about
goodness or virtue, who most certainly can and will lie to you if they
think it'll benefit themselves or their group.
Would a thief steal? Of course they would, that's what thieves do!
They'd probably even lie about it too. What's so bad about considering
the possibility that someone may have lied to you? After all, that's
what thinking about conspiracy theories does for people. Some people
even call it their BS Detector. It used to be called Critical Thinking,
back when Common Sense was actually common and made sense.
But nowadays it's so easy to spread a rumor about about how people react
to rumors. Honestly, I think it's very rude to tell people not to
question the validity of other people's statements. It makes me wonder
if all these people who put-down on conspiracy theories actually believe
everything they hear, because that would actually be a real source of
cognitive dissonance. Sort of ironic, isn't it? I bet the irony wasn't
lost on whoever started the rumor that conspiracy theorists were crazy
(who would benefit from starting a rumor like that anyway?), but what's
really crazy is how many people actually believed them.
You don't need to be a psychologist to use a search engine and find out
the definition of "cognitive dissonance", that's when the logic in that
rumor/theory starts to fall apart; they say it was a scientist to came
up with this theory, but a real scientist probably wouldn't have
mislabeled the type of mental illness in their root argument so
carelessly. Not to mention that real scientists usually don't like to
use terms like 'cognitive dissonance', because that's a psychology term,
only a psychologist can legally diagnose someone with a mental illness
in the USA, and psychologists don't call themselves scientists (no
matter how badly they may want to believe that psychology is a real
science, they still don't call themselves that).
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that one of the main reasons why some
people don't like conspiracy theories in general is because some of the
alternative explanations in certain conspiracy theories are even more
bizarre and unbelievable than the original stories that some people were
trying to analyze. But isn't that just part of the process of
unraveling a lie? The trick is to keep thinking.
If your entire opinion of conspiracy theories is just all about one
small aspect of what you heard about them, or even worse, if your
opinion is just a copy of someone else's opinion, then how accurate can
that opinion really be? Could you have maybe been a little bit wrong
about it? Possibly misled by a rouge faction of the shadow government??
(cough) Or maybe you were just raised to believe-in and respect your
elders; like your teachers, your religious leaders, the people who
raised you... But those are supposed to be the 'good-guys', right?
Well what about politicians? If you believe everything that politicians
say then you would definitely suffer from cognitive dissonance, because
politicians don't agree on anything!
If you really want me to believe that it's crazy to wonder if a
politician ever lied, then please tell me how to get to the nearest
mental hospital, so I can rush you there for your own good! See what I
just did there? I debunked the debunkers, you should leave a comment
and try to debunk me. It'll be fun!
