The New Heretics by Andy Thomas

Author:Andy Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786786029
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2021-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Choosing Truths

Selectiveness and a dearth of nuance and subtlety are major weapons in the conspiracist’s arsenal. Flagrant shock-and-awe tactics to support a cause are common, with lurid and often gory images of terrible events (the ones that are accepted as having really happened) ubiquitously shared around or shown in presentations, albeit in a spirit of not wanting them to happen anymore. Sometimes, an opinion will be driven to an opposite extreme to put more distance between the alternative and the mainstream; when questioning manmade global warming, for example, some truthers claim that as they believe CO2 is not the harmful driver of climate change we are told it is then even more CO2 would therefore be good for us. In attempts to call attention to causes, there is a tendency always to go to the maximum. Fears are reinforced with capital letters: an event NEVER happened; TOTAL martial law is about to be declared; EVERYONE will die of a vaccine; Donald Trump will arrest ALL of the world’s bad people, and so on. The quietness that descends if nothing happens is ignored and, after a pause, the gloomy prophecies move on to the next excitement.

In child psychology it is said that a baby sometimes refuses food because that is the only power it has. In this, there is a resonance with the more ardent truthers refusing to believe in any establishment source, no matter what is offered or how verified it is. The continual badgering, harassment and silencing they have received over even reasonable areas of contention have understandably pushed them to their limits and maybe the power of refusal is all they feel they have left. Once disbelief in authority becomes a medal to be worn proudly, no boundaries of convention are respected – even when this becomes self-defeating.

Without personal expert knowledge, in these times of fake news, fake fake news and alternative alternative facts, it is often impossible to be sure whether claims and findings regarding anything at all are true or not. We frequently find that some (genuine) experts claim one thing, while other (genuine) experts claim something else; each can seem equally qualified but sometimes even the weight of probability doesn’t decide things and consensus opinion counts for nothing when it may have been shaped by sly conditioning. Oddly, truthers will often defend the veracity of a source that supports their stance when there is no more definitive evidence for its accuracy than a mainstream story. If real discernment isn’t quickly applied, selective fragments can be cherry-picked and pigeonholed without verification, logic or continuity with the wider picture because they happily appear to fit a preconceived prejudice. This risks joining the wrong dots together; fragmented thinking is a recurring stumbling block among truthers, although everyone practises it to some degree.

As a conspiracy example, when COVID began to subside in the West in spring 2021 and India began to suffer huge casualties instead, allegations quickly circulated that the Indian problems were directly due to the introduction of the antiviral vaccines, which were said to have some nefarious purpose.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.