Credulous Babbling Idiots

January 12, 2008 · Filed Under Non Sequitur · Comment

The tendency is that you believe what your parents say when you are a small child. You soon learn, however, that they do not really have any more of a clue than you and so start to look for more credible sources of knowledge.

This should be a continuous process in which we do not meekly accept any old drivel which is foisted on us from people who appear to hold positions of authority. If that were true, we would all believe the nonsense spouted by intellectually challenged fantasists like George Bush and Tony Blair as if it had even a remote connection with reality.

One problem is that we can look at precedent and say that the vast thrust of general opinion has been wrong plenty of times before. Before Galileo, we thought the sun revolved around the earth, so there seems to be forever room for crackpots to ponder the mysteries of the world in the hope that they might come up with some enlightened theory which has eluded all the other great thinkers hitherto.

Except, of course, that this is not what happens: they just come up with harebrained ideas which only appeal to other mentalists and nutters, but aided by the fact that the internet acts as a magnet for all these other delusionists to congregate, somewhat in the manner that governments always attract the dross of society to coalesce together.

So, over at The Telegraph, Damian Thompson runs through some of the conspiracy theories regarding 9/11, Creationism and Aids and how credulous people absorb some of this nonsense willy-nilly, as if by osmosis and the fact that it then dilutes real science and real knowledge and leads to people being unable to make rational and intellectually rigorous judgments.

Once the wonder of the internet wore off, we all saw that it is mainly a massive pile of doo-doo and nobody sensible takes it very seriously. It is a bit like the old illusion that financial institutions were run by incredibly clever and honourable people, when we now know they are controlled by psychopaths with a lemming mentality, whose only intellectual ability is doing sums quickly in their head.

The problem, though, is that we get stuff like this, from Damian Thompson’s ‘Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and False History’ :

The fingerprints of the alternative medicine lobby are all over the worst British health scare of recent years, in which thousands of parents denied their children the MMR triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella following the dissemination of flawed data linking it to autism. In that case, distrust of orthodox medicine increased the danger of a measles epidemic.

But that is nothing compared to the impact of medical counterknowledge in underdeveloped countries. In northern Nigeria, Islamic leaders have issued a fatwa declaring the polio vaccine to be a US conspiracy to sterilise Muslims: polio has returned to the area, and pilgrims have carried it to Mecca and Yemen. In January 2007, the parents of 24,000 children in Pakistan refused to let health workers vaccinate their children because radical mullahs had told them the same idiotic story.

These incidents cannot be dismissed as examples of medieval superstition: these people are not rejecting life-saving vaccines because they reject modern medicine, but because their leaders are spouting Islamic takes on Western conspiracy theories. Counterknowledge, with its ingrained hostility towards a political, intellectual and scientific elite, appeals to anti-American, anti-Western sentiment in the developing world.

My father used to say, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” and he was speaking from experience. I say, “Never believe what you are told”.

Tags: conspiracy, credulous, delusions, idiocy, lies, stupidity