Ellipse said:Perceval said:Not at all, and the only reason people at your work are talking about terrorists is because the US gov. has programmed them over the last week to believe that "the terrorists" will want revenge. I tell ya, it's absolutely horrible to see the extent of the madness. It's almost literally unbelievable to me.
I think the fundamental problem is the fact that people are accustomed to trust the gov. I mean, it's very hard to accept the idea your gov do not want the best for you and so for the country. It seem so logical. And if you open the eyes your world collapse.
Here's a reason why. It's a take on the Right Wing Authoritarian personality
The Gullible Mind Explained
In light of the string of the blatant falsehoods being announced by the U.S. government these days (FDA, DHS, White House, etc.) it's interesting that so many people still believe whatever they are told by "official" sources. It brings up the question of the functioning of their brains: How could a person swallow official information so gullibly and so completely without even asking commonsense questions about the reliability or factual basis of that information?
These people, it turns out, are operating from what I called The Gullible Mind. It is a psychological processing malfunction that filters out information based on its source rather than its integrity. People who operate from The Gullible Mind tend to have misplaced trust in governments, institutions, mainstream news networks, doctors, scientists or anyone who wears the garb of apparent authority.
Whereas a normal, intelligent person would raise commonsense questions about information they receive from all sources, the Gullible Mind wholly accepts virtually any information from sources that occupy the role of apparent authority in society.
Governments never lie
But how does this work inside their heads? It's an interesting process. Gullible Mind people do believe it is possible for a government (or institution) to lie; but they believe that governments, institutions and doctors choose NOT to lie even when it would serve their own self interests to do so.
Follow this carefully, because this is the fascinating part. These Gullible Mind people effectively believe that even though a government official could lie about something, they would never actually do so. And why wouldn't they? Because, ultimately, the Gullible Mind crowd believes that governments, institutions and mainstream media outlets operate from a sort of honor code. So even if it were in the interests of our own government to lie to us, it would never happen because that would violate this imaginary honor code.
Where does this honor code exist? Where is it written down? Nowhere, of course. It is imaginary. But to The Gullible Mind, it seems real. Interestingly, even though this "honor code" only exists in the imagination of The Gullible Mind person, they project this honor code onto sources of authority, imagining that they abide by it.
Extreme gullibility
This is how The Gullible Mind person believes that network news always reports the truth. The news networks have a sense of "honor," they believe, and this sense of honor requires them to always report the truth and never manipulate the news for any nefarious purposes. So news networks never "shape" the news and they only report what is factually true without any consideration whatsoever of politics or advertiser profits.
This view of the world is, of course, laughably naive. And yet it is the core belief system of at least half the population -- the Gullible Mind half that believes everything it is told by its own government, media or authority figures.
Interestingly, the Gullible Mind is also inwardly gullible because it does not recognize its own gullibility. Instead, it believes it is operating as a Rational Mind. This false Rational Mind believes it functions as a critical filter of incoming information, but even this is self deception. In truth, this false Rational Mind is on "auto filter" so that it filters out any information that conflicts with the information it is receiving from official sources.
This is the key to understanding the Gullible Mind -- it isn't the quality of the information itself that matters; it is the confirmation of the story from official sources that "makes it real" in the Gullible Mind.
The Easter Bunny killed Bin Laden!
For example, let's say a Gullible Mind person comes across an announcement that says the Easter Bunny has killed Osama Bin Laden. The report claims that colored eggs were found near Bin Laden's body, and there was evidence of feathers being left at the scene, which proves the Easter Bunny was there.
Now, an intelligent, rational mind would have a lot of questions about this. For starters, rabbits don't have feathers. And the Easter Bunny is a piece of fiction, too. On top of that, how could the Easter Bunny kill Osama Bin Laden? An intelligent person would, upon reviewing the holes in the story, be forced to conclude the story is fiction. The only logical conclusion from that is that the government is lying to them.
A Gullible Mind person, however, would not ask whether rabbits have feathers, or whether the Easter Bunny is capable of conducting a military raid. Instead, the Gullible Mind person would first look to other confirming news sources in order to determine the reliability of the story. They would turn on the TV or surf the internet, looking for the news to be repeated through "official" sources.
Once they found CNN, or Fox News, or some other "official" source reporting that the Easter Bunny killed Osama Bin Laden, then that news report would instantly become "real" in their minds. Suddenly it has shifted from their mental processing queue to the "absolutely truth" part of their brain, and from that point forward, no one can question that reality in their heads.
Don't bother arguing with a Gullible Mind - they are immune to facts
At this point, their rational mind is completely shut off on the topic. No accumulation of facts can, at that point, rattle their "reality." For example, a person who believes the government's story of 9/11 has already embraced the Easter Bunny version of terrorists flying airplanes into the World Trade Center towers. So how did this act cause the WTC 7 building to collapse in a demolition-style free-fall a few hours later, when WTC 7 was never struck by airplanes? How can a steel and concrete building suddenly and magically collapse in perfect structural synchronicity merely from being on fire?
The answers don't matter to The Gullible Mind, you see. There is no room for facts inside their heads, because all the space has been taken up with what is essentially a cult-like belief in institutions of authority.
We saw this in the Heaven's Gate cult in California a few years back. The leader of that cult, a man named Applegate, positioned himself as the one and only source of authoritative information among the cult followers. So HE became the authoritative source whose information was wholly accepted without questioning or skepticism of any kind. At that point, he was able to quite easily convince his followers that an alien race was going to land a UFO on the far side of a comet, and that if they killed themselves, they would be transported onto the alien ship (or something like that).
The belief in such a story may seem silly... until you realize that the governments of the world use the exact same cult-like tactics to get their own "followers" to believe everything they say, without question. So if President Obama announced that an alien race was going to land a mother ship on the White House lawn, and that people who voted for him would have their consciousness transferred to an immortal alien body, the remarkable truth is that millions of people would believe that. Perhaps tens of millions. They would even worship him as an interstellar saint.
Remember Orson Welles' radio program that announced aliens had invaded the Earth and were destroying our cities? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wa...) Huge numbers of people believed it was really happening... and not because it made any sense, but because the information came from the source they trusted. To those people, the alien invasion was just as real back then as Bin Laden's official death is to government followers today.[...]
