Watching American (or any) television recently, I’ve noticed a trend in daily life. Most humans are woefully limited in information on just about everything. Comprehending the world in this context is monumentally difficult. So difficult, it seems, that most people aren’t tasked with even filling in the gaps of information with their own assertions, sophistry, and wrongheadedness. These dirty jobs are left to the brave, frightened, manipulative, arrogant, and brash, such as politicians, clerics, the press, popular culture, talking heads, and conspiracy theorists.
Balancing absolute stupidity with an assertion of a complete and correct worldview is a rare skill coveted by all populaces. Without Apostles, Evangelicals, Democrats, Republicans, Beatles, Adolph Hitlers, Oprah Winfreys, Karl Marxes, Bill O’Reillys, Michael Moores, Aleister Crowleys, Keith Olbermanns, Hannas and Barberas, MTVs, Daily Shows, New York Times, and the like, humans would be quivering, lost children.
The Bible, particularly, is so accessible because, for as cruel, contradictory, and useless as it is, all you have to do is read a few hundred pages or so to comprehend the whole world and know what you’re doing here. I highly recommend a read if you’re into that sort of thing.
I recently spoke with a young Pakistani man who explained to me that, not content with controlling all Western governments, the Jews also orchestrated 9/11. He assured me that there was ample evidence. It was all over Youtube and the conspiracy website circuit. Who is he to distrust such sources? When we consider what little extra information and reason we have over such extreme cases of dangerous misguidedness, it casts a disturbing shadow over our conceptions of the world.
I’ve spent the last four years studying politics, conflict, terrorism, Islamism, Third World states, and the methods we use for making sense of it all. I’m so used to the “War on Terror” denoting the overtly nonsensical and liberal experiment that turned two destroyed buildings into a completely destabilized Middle East, weakened US military and diplomatic strength, and an explosion in the scope and severity of terrorist attacks, that it came as a shock to me to hear the media still speaking of it with a straight face. We may be better reasoned than my Pakistani acquaintance, but by how much?
I happen to know enough about a very specific subject (in this case, the War on Terror) to know how misguided the majority is about just that issue, and it’s pretty scary to imagine all the things I don’t know enough about to know we’re wrong about. When you can’t trust the only institutions available, the only recourse is to take every opinion and assertion you hear with a grain of salt, because we’re living in candy land.
