Americas first revolution was apparently also powered by conspiracy theories. It would be hilarious, if the second one does the same :D :D *** In the 1950s, a study showed that about 75 percent of Americans said they trusted in their government to do what is right “all or most of the time,” according to Robert A. Goldberg, a professor of history at the University of Utah who has published numerous books and papers on conspiracy theories. By the 1990s, the percentage of Americans who answered “all or most of the time” in response to the same question about trusting their government had dropped to 25 percent -- and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America it fell even further. This distrust of authority continues a long tradition of American skepticism that has its roots in the run-up to the Revolutionary War, during which Goldberg said many patriots believed they were victims of a nefarious plot by their British overlords, represented by the Tea Act of 1763 and the Stamp Act of 1765. ..... Conspiracy theories are “closed-system in the sense that they are constructed in such a way that they can’t be falsified, that is, if you show a believer in a particular conspiracy theory evidence that seems to contradict that theory, they say that it was planted by the conspiracists to deceive you,” Barkun said. “With the click of a mouse, you enter the world of conspiracism, and you never have to leave that world,” the University of Utahs Goldberg explained. “You get a situation where you are confirmed, and you don’t have any information that advises you to look in a different direction ... There’s an inner core of people who are committed.” And not only are these people stuck in a feedback loop of confirmation bias and groupthink, but they are actually being radicalized in the process as well, Goldberg maintained. “Psychologists are finding that the more conforming data you get in these echo chambers ... the more aggressive you get in proclaiming ideas and also holding on to them,” he said. ..... But experts also contend there is no connection between belief in conspiracies and mental illness or psychological disorders -- or even between such a belief and simple demographic factors such as class or ethnicity. “There is absolutely no evidence that believers in conspiracy theories differ from the general population,” Barkun said. “I have not seen any evidence that that’s the case.” ..... “The Internet provides the means by which people with ideas that would normally be considered fringe ideas can potentially reach a mass audience and can do it in ways that those ideas can then be picked up by other means of communication,” said Michael Barkun, a professor emeritus of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, who has written a number of books on conspiracies. And if a particular theory -- such as the Birthers theory that maintains that Obama was born abroad or the “truther” conspiracy that posits the 9/11 terror attacks were an inside job -- gains enough traction, it can then filter upward through a range of quasi-partisan outlets such as the Fox News Channel or MSNBC, which often grant such alternative views airtime, but stop short of endorsing them outright. “Twenty to twenty-five years ago, ideas like those the ‘birthers’ are associated with would never have made it into mainstream political discourse,” Barkun explained. He added, “The ideas get sanitized as they go upward ... so it doesn’t completely eradicate the distinction between the fringe and the mainstream, but it allows ideas that would have never reached a mass audience to do so. (By Connor Adams Sheets) ***
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 19:00:25 +0000
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