Seeing is believing

Where conspiracy theories are 10 a penny it is not difficult to fool a lot of people for large proportion of time.

You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but never all of the people all of the time — so goes the saying. In general terms, it holds true but there are more ways to fool us than there used to be and the internet is both a fool’s paradise and a place where a lot get fooled.



The disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 remains as baffling today as it did at the outset. The conspiracy theorists were busy in days with their latest offerings showing up on my Facebook page, and posted by somebody who I had hitherto regarded as in full possession of their marbles. We were being asked to believe that the aircraft had made a landing on the island of Diego Garcia and that the passengers were all alive and well and possibly (note the use of the word “possibly”) being held in something described as a ‘Faraday hangar’ — whatever that is.

There is not a shred of evidence to support this and the author(s) of this fantasy never got around to explaining exactly why anybody would want to do that in the first place. Yet clearly there were people who did believe it to be, at least, possible if not actually true, an indicator that something has, perhaps, gone out of kilter in our credulity.

Over the last couple of years there has been a rash of photographs, many of them quite graphic, that purport to show incidents or the aftermath of atrocities — and they are wholly misleading.

Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar are dreadfully persecuted, of that there is no doubt. A photograph said to show a mass grave with Buddhist monks lifting bodies down into it was presented as evidence of an atrocity. It was no such thing. The photograph in its original form showed the monks assisting Chinese troops to bury the dead after an earthquake.

A close examination of the image tells the real story — but who looks closely? It is that tendency to unquestioningly believe what we are told that is our downfall and makes fools of many.

A fellow-columnist discovered this last year when he wrote a satirical piece about Malala Yousufzai. It was a mash-up of the conspiracy stories that still swirl around her, but was taken as literal truth by many — including an Iranian news agency which published the piece as hard news rather than the pointed satire that it was.

I recall at the time having a heated discussion with somebody who also failed to understand the satire and when I explained what satire was they wondered why anybody would want to write something that was not true. And anyway, it was published in a respectable newspaper so it must be true.

In a land where conspiracy theories are 10 a penny it is not difficult to fool a lot of the people for a large proportion of the time. There is a willing credulity, almost amounting to the suspension of disbelief that we experience in the cinema or watching a play in a theatre. We know that what we are seeing on the screen or the stage is not “real” in the literal sense, but we “believe” it for the duration of the performance.

When that elasticity of credulity leaks out into the real world, then perceptions become twisted and distorted, and critical reasoning goes out the window in a trice. Rumour takes on a range of forms, and with the internet now so pervasive, it is not difficult to propagate all kinds of calumnies that enter the wider consciousness as “truths”. The erosion of both the capacity and desire for critical reasoning prepares the ground for large-scale be-foolment.

It is not difficult to fool people in Pakistan because they will believe that dragons live in the mountains (of course, they do) and that 200-tonne airliners full of people can get spirited away at the drop of an internet meme. Perhaps therein lies the answer to why a bunch of charlatans and snolleygosters get themselves elected every five years — they fool a lot of the people most of the time. Tootle-pip!

Published in The Express Tribune, April 3^rd, 2014.

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