One thing which winds me up is conspiracy theories. When I say "conspiracy theories" I mean big conspiracy theories: chemtrails, illuminati, vaccines etc. Not "small" conspiracy theories such as the assassination of a particular important person. Why do they wind me up? Because in my opinion most of them can be shown to be redundant when a greater understanding of society and economics is shone on the subject at hand. Most of the theories are overly complex solutions for the goal the theorists are claiming that the government / establishment / George Soros is trying to achieve.
Chemtrails / fluoride / vaccines to poison the air / water / blood so as to make people dumb and easily controlled for example can easily be done by underfunding the education system. Those things would also affect everyone, regardless of class, and other countries would detect things like chemtrails in the air and go ballistic.
The illuminati, the secret society that is controlling everything, is completely pointless when rich people don’t need to do anything in secret. They can do it out in the open and get away with it, so why would they bother hiding things? The things that go on in secret are just examples of corruption.
Not only do these conspiracy theories waste a lot of man-hours on witch hunts, they also detract from the truth, which is nearly always in-between what the conspiracy theorists are saying, and what the news is saying. Sadly there is now a multi-million dollar media industry which is based on fake news and conspiracy theories. This has become relevant quite recently. These sites which claim to be helping you and informing you of the truth, are just as fallacious as the main media broadcasters, and in fact making it more difficult to fix the problem.
By making people think everything that the main news channels are saying is wrong, they are polarising the narrative and just creating a huge argument between the believers and the conspiracy theorists. All the meanwhile the truth is in the middle and gets ignored. The division is helping no one.
Let me give you an example of a typical conversation seen on Facebook between the divided people of this world:
“Black lives matter”
“All lives matter!”
“Yes but black people are being killed more than whites so we need to protest.”
“That’s not true, I read on alternative-news-site.com that you have your facts wrong.”
“But if you look at the statistics on other-site.com you will see the truth!”
The truth? Nobody should be getting killed.
It usually deteriorates into insults and these days protesters can even be accused of being paid to be there. The alternative news sites are accused of being setup by conspirators and the people do that accusing are accused of being conspirators by someone else, or even by the newly elected president, who can now just claim any news he doesn’t like is fake news.
The solution? I believe it to be an education that doesn’t come from any news site, but in fact comes from economics and politics books. Even these will be biased in one way or another, but you can read a book on communism and a book on capitalism and at least have some sort of balance. The more educated people are about how money and business work, the better they will be able to discern how biased a news source is and recognise when it has ulterior motives.
Who knows? Maybe I’ve been told by the government to write this article to confuse you even more! Follow me if you want to be brainwashed with my other ideas about sociology, politics, religion and science :P