The phenomenon known as “Gell-Mann Amnesia” is named after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. One day, Gell-Mann read an article on particle physics in a mainstream news publication and was aghast at how wrong it was about a subject he knew intimately. He was reading another article, on foreign affairs (which he knew little about) and nodding along with its sage words, when it occurred to him: if he already knew they were completely wrong about something he knew well, why was he trusting them about things he didn’t know about?
The list of things the mainstream media are not just wrong, but willfully lying, about grows by the minute. Hunter Biden’s laptop, “Very Fine People”, the Covid lab-leak theory, Joe Biden’s mental decline… Why would anyone trust them not to lie to us about other things?
But – and here’s the biiig “but” – just because you know they’ve lied about one (or a dozen) things, doesn’t mean they must be lying about everything.
Nor does the fact that one thing is a lie, mean that everything else must be true.
HIV denialism, Shakespeare denialism, Moon landing hoaxes, Flat Eartherism, “chemtrails”, 9/11 “Truthers”, Holocaust and October 7 denialism…
Unfortunately, an increasing number of people on the right are making these kinds of flying leaps into the lunatic fringe.
You know that old adage about, Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see? (A saying, you might be surprised to learn, originating from Edgar Allen Poe.) Well, it applies to the things independent media tell you, as well as the mainstream media (and, yes, that includes me). It applies to the things you want to believe, as well as the ones you don’t.
Part of the problem is that most people aren’t good at running reality checks on theories they hear. This extends up to many prominent individuals.
Who, after all, hasn’t had a good chuckle at Naomi Wolff having the entire thesis of her forthcoming book demolished, live on air?
Let’s do basic reality checks on the theories mentioned above:
AIDS isn’t caused by HIV. Dr Duesberg began pushing this in 1987, at which point it wasn’t ridiculous. I saw him give his spiel in 2009. It was quite reasonable-sounding…except that by that point, orthodox medical researchers had made enormous progress against AIDS, and they’ve made much more since then. Meanwhile, Duesberg has not.
Shakespeare or Bacon? For 200 years after the Bard died, nobody disputed that he’d written his own plays. Not coincidentally, for most of that time, there would have been people for whom Shakespeare and the Globe were living memories. But long after Shakespeare and everyone who knew him had gone to the grave, a failed American playwright and literal nutter by the name of Delia Bacon totally just reckoned that a bunch of elite contemporaries of the boy from Avon were the real authors.
As for the Moon landing, well, you’d think America’s bitter rivals in the Space Race, the Soviets, would have been pretty quick to mention it. After all, they not only monitored American space flights as diligently as vice-versa (and it’s very hard to hide things in space), but had spies in NASA as well (their crowning achievement was, perhaps, stealing the space shuttle plans).
The idea that the Soviets would let the Americans humiliate them in the Space Race by faking it, and not say a word, is pretty far-fetched.
Very few events in human history are as exhaustively documented as the Holocaust. The sudden extermination of most Polish Jews during the second half of 1942 was so historically bizarre – many people down through human history had been murdered en masse in hot blood after battles, and many others have been worked to death in cold blood, but virtually nobody had been murdered en masse in cold blood rather than be enslaved and get some labor out of them – that even few Jews believed what was happening to them until late in 1942, after most Polish Jews had already been massacred.
And 9/11? Well, that was a conspiracy. Just not the one the Truthers fixate on.
Like several other conspiracies, such as Lincoln’s assassination, it’s not clear just how high up the conspiracy went. Who knew within the Saudi regime? Who in Pakistan gave Osama refuge a mile from the Pakistani military academy? But nobody seems to care much about those questions, instead preferring to emphasize genuinely stupid theories such as that jetliners didn’t actually crash into the WTC.
Takimag
You might almost think “Trutherism” is a psy-op designed to provide cover against anyone investigating the genuine, if much less satisfying, conspiracies, or at the least, cover-ups.
OK, that’s a conspiracy theory, sure. But the fact is that you don’t have to believe in an actual psy-op to acknowledge that the obsession with obviously loony conspiracy theories is at the very least a handily convenient distraction from keeping an eye on what the bastards are really up to.
Be suspicious and sceptical, by all means. Just don’t be a useful idiot.
