I know that if I came upon this thread, I’d be sorely tempted to fire off an amusing drive-by and move on. I’m asking in all seriousness that folks post answers that go beyond that, if possible.
Last night at work, a colleague started talking about the upcoming 9/11 anniversary. He stated that the Pentagon was never hit by an airplane. There have been threads on this very topic here lately, a Search will reveal their location. Let’s try not to make this become another one of those threads.
The man went on to tell us that the Moon landing in 1969 was also highly suspect. I watched his face as he spoke. He was thoroughly serious and got angry when I or someone else tried to explain the whys and wherefores of the events he was discussing.
I wasn’t rude to the guy, I just let him go on after a while. it struck me that there was something unique happening there. It felt akin to talking to someone who has been born again ( into any flavor of profound religious believe, not just Christianity ). Or, someone who has had a near-death experience. His emotional investment in trying to prove his points and convince those of us at the table was so high as to be faintly unnerving.
I didn’t blow him off, it was clear that would upset him more. Without going into a debate one bit on the specifics of either the Pentagon/ airplane event or the Moon landing event, how do you go about handling someone who is so overwhelmingly convinced that they believe something that you do not?
And perhaps more to the point, that they believe something that many many other people think to be patently misguided. He also talked about Flight 800 that crashed off of East Moriches, Long Island all of those summers ago. He was sure it was shot out of the sky by the military by mistake.
I think the term I seek was that he was a “zealot”. How do you handle zealots when you come across them?
Unfortunately, I know a few of them. I just nod. I pretend to listen, and I nod. It’s not my job to shoot down their worldview or point out where their idiocy becomes almost exponential - I just pretend to listen, I nod, and I let it go in one ear and out the other. I don’t have the time nor the inclination to invest anything else in it.
I’m like Missy2U in that I just let it go mostly. I may offer a mild rebuke but I don’t bother arguing. I remember the assassination of JFK and for many years I was a conspiracy believer. Then I read Posner’s Case Closed and realised that I had been tricked by other conspiracy theorists. I imagine the same is true here.
I like to talk to them when I’m in the mood. Egg them on, see if they can trip over their own plot holes and such or see if I can identify the underlying source of the craziness. When I’m in the mood.
Otherwise I feign ignorance over then entire matter so I come off as a less than worthwhile person to discuss it with so they hopefully drop it.
I know a lot of people who believe in that crap, e.g. they believe the Pentagon was not hit by an airplane, they believe the WTC was actually brought down by a controlled detonation, the believe Flight 800 was shot down by a missile, etc. etc. etc.
Why do they believe this stuff? I dunno. Some possibilities:
They’re paranoid
They do not know how to think critically and rationally
They’re a bunch of easily led automatons
They have overactive imaginations
It’s fun… a conspiracy is a lot more fun than the boring official reason
I used to argue with them. But then I realized it’s a religion to them, so I no longer do so. And guess what? They get mad when I refuse to argue with them! I’ve even had one person tell me that they didn’t trust anyone who did not believe the WTC was actually brought down by a controlled detonation. :rolleyes:
I have had to deal with conspiracy theorists in the course of my profession. I dealt with so-called “Freemen,” so the conspiracy was not something specific like a faked moon landing, but rather a more generalized black-helicopter Illuminati government take-over. I learned it was better not to engage them. On a person level, I think they’re at best credulous idiots and at worst posers who use some crackpot theory as the excuse for their own misbehavior. On a professional level, I found the issue on the table was never advanced by discussing their whacked-out theories. If I didn’t agree with them – well, I was part of the conspiracy. (I was pretty much part of the conspiracy anyway, as part of “The Government.”)
I don’t meet a lot of conspiracy theorists in my personal life, or even in my professional life anymore. But if I did, I would take the same attitude. If I did not have to talk to them, I would walk away. If I did have to talk to them, I would listen politely and then return to the relevant topic of conversation, without question, comment, or engagement on the “conspiracy”. If people believe these sorts of things, I frankly prefer not to know because my first thought is almost always “I cannot believe you are so stupid as to think that.”
I let myself get dragged into a contrail discussion once. This guy made claims that were self-contradictory, logically inconsistent, and just flat out scientifically impossible. I find that the biggest hindrance to challenging their beliefs is that they are just not willing to admit they are wrong, which you have to be able to do, at least if you are going to debate honestly about something.
And since many of them accept things they read as facts, without any actual evidence, you end up basically arguing against faith, which, in my experience, absolutely never works.
Some people want to believe something and they don’t want to be the only ones and so they try and recruit people to their camp. Small time practitioners are called crackpots, more successful ones are called politicians, masters of the art are called religious leaders. All, I feel, are equally credible when they approach me with the intent to convince me of something.
I am very strongly of the opinion that we all live in intractably different universes, completely cut off from one another with regard to any first person sensory experience, and only able to partially and imperfectly communicate our own very unique experiences with one another. Your choices, then, are to admit that you are truly emotionally and intellectually alone in your own world (which I believe to be true) or to have fun and pretend to interact with what you believe to be other people. Successfully pulling that off is a marvelous feat in my mind. Expecting complete parity in experience and opinion is unrealistic. For some people Kennedy was killed by someone other than “some guy,” 9-11 was orchestrated or at least “allowed” by the Bush administration, The Moon is still unsullied by human presence, if it even exists at all. For others, those ideas are ludicrous. Like supersonic travel, flight, vaccines and iron.
So when I’m confronted by a conspiracy theorist I listen. And I hold what they say against what I think I know. If it doesn’t jibe, I simply take note that what they’ve said doesn’t work for me for now. But it might someday.
I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m tempted to describe the person, in detail, to my wristwatch as soon as they get started. “Subject is male caucasian, mid 30’s, approximately 5’10”, slim build…"
Does it seem to anybody else that there’s a lot more conspiracy theorists around these days than there used to be just a few years ago? It certainly seems to me that I’m running into them a lot more often.
(And does anybody else think it’s a little ironic that Mel Gibson would have starred in a film called *Conspiracy Theory * … aw, never mind … )
I was horrified and then deeply disappointed to discover that my youngest son, a 24-year-old Navy petty officer, has bought into the idea that something other than a hijacked airliner crashed into the Pentagon, and he has some doubts about the World Trade Center and Flight 93. Fortunately, I was at his home when I learned this and was able find several very good debunking websites using his computer.
If you really want to take 'em on, make sure you know what you’re talking about. This can be hard to do because CTs come up with some really flakey shit sometimes. But start with Snopes.com or just Google whatever conspiracy theory you want to bone up on (be sure to add “debunk” to your search string.) Don’t try to “reason” with 'em, just hammer on the facts, especially the ones that don’t fit into their theories.
Conspiracy theorists desperately need their world to be ordered, planned and credible. Randomness and chaos (think 9/11) cannot be a factor in large scale tragedy. I don’t know where the idea came from that the moon landings were staged. It made a really good movie, but it just doesn’t hold up as reality.
Here’s a reality/conspiracy test you can use. Ask a series of questions about the WTC – did you ever actually see the towers before 9/11; that is, walk up and touch them, ride elevators to the top of them? If not, how do you know they existed at all? Have you been to Ground Zero since then? If not, how do you know they really fell down? How do you know it wasn’t actually a sophisticated hoax? How do you know anything exists or happened if you don’t witness it personally? CTs can no more argue with that kind of illogic than you and I can, except to say, “Well, that’s ridiculous!” It doesn’t prove anything, but it foists upon them the frustration and confusion they foist upon the rest of us with their ridiculous theories.
If you don’t want to go to that much trouble then **eleanorigby ** has the best answer – talk about the food and the weather.
Or I’ll be very earnest and listen to their halfassedness, and then ask them if they have seen the reports on Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie that support whatever halfassedness they are spouting. After they leave to go get on their computer and hit that site, I laugh at them. A lot.
My favorite batch of whackos these days are the people who so blindly hate the USA in general and Bush in particular that they advocate that the US government, under Bush’s direct order, murdered 3000 people on 9/11 just so Bush could go steal Iraq’s oil. They provide me with much amusement.
