Those cases are not commensurate. And neither is really indicative of any general social issue. Their stories are as old as time.

But to get at the truth of either, you have to Do Your Own Research competently as advised. And not just repeat common opinion; as that is too often wrong.

Hello, If I were Rwandan and a time traveler informed me of the genocide, I would immediately turn off my radio and urge everyone to do the same, preaching what the time traveler revealed to me. But since you’re labeled crazy or naive when you don’t share the general opinion, I would run as far away as possible before that happened. It’s quite sad.

Without wanting to digress, people lie all the time anyway, so it’s not like the institutions are going to be honest with us.

The elites, politicians, and others all serve their own interests.

To try and return to your example of mass manipulation, I’d like to bring up the sexual assault trials against Michael Jackson in the 90s. What do you think about that?

Or, more recently, the Sean “P. Diddy” Combs case (although I don’t lump these two individuals together)?

Not that I’m obsessed with it, but I’d like to know who benefits from this uproar.

I’d like to know your opinion on this and how the media plays on our perceptions and how they use myths to manipulate us.

Regards

Isn’t humankind inherently paranoid?

No. They are driven paranoid by mass persuasion designed to produce that very outcome. Disinformation by sowing distrust has been a deliberate, science-driven policy of the power-elite ever since Big Tobacco invented the tactic, Big Oil borrowed the tactic, and Fox News implemented it on a mass media scale.

There are studies of the Rwanda genocide that reflect this. Before a single radio station started driving Rwandans literally insane by sowing paranoia and fears that didn’t exist before, resulting in a mass murderous hysteria—even just ten years before—no antipathy even existed between the tribes. It was deliberately manufactured by a media campaign.

So the method to use would be: doubts – hypothesis – replication of the experiment – falsifiability – peer validation – new theories?

If you were a Rwandan informed by a time traveler that this was going to happen to you, what steps would you and your neighbors have to take to be immune to the manipulation and thus remain sane under intense reality distortion pressure?

All the things you list have been captured and coopted by science-informed media operators to hijack every single one against you. You can google and read about how the tobacco and oil industries did this systematically. The technique is now routinely used even by minor players now (e.g. it is documented that both Depp and Baldoni hired PR agencies to build underground disinformation campaigns to shape people’s opinions of their opposing parties, and those campaigns used all the same strategies).

There is evidence that a Saudi Arabian bot farm recently did this to Chappell Roan (we just don’t know who funded it behind all the shell corporations: I highly recommending watching the whole long analysis on matt bernstein’s channel). Pro and anti-zionist interest groups are running these ops on us right now, all the time. It’s so ubiquitous that we should simply assume every interest is an op being run on us using these techniques, all the time, and never trust any intuition we have about people or subjects we have not personally and carefully and responsibly and thoroughly researched.

The solution is not a list of buzzwords. But a whole skillset.

For example, it’s not enough to value doubt. You have to value reasonable, informed doubt, which achieves rather than resists belief. Responsible belief should be your goal, not doubt. Skepticism unregulated becomes just a rabbit hole of denialism and conspiracy theories and thus, ultimately, madness. And media and marketing and lobbying agencies actually seek to push you down that pipeline all the time, because you are easier to manipulate or disempower down there.

Likewise, “hypothesis” under the pipeline becomes “whackadoo” and “conspiracy theories”; replication and peer validation become “echo chambers”; falsifiability becomes “apologetics” to dismiss anything whatever no matter how evidenced, based solely on what you want or fear to be true, and thus emotion rather than reason dictates which “new theories” you believe.

And the bogus package of fake critical thinking skills the moneyed elite push on you is designed to convince you to rationalize all this away so that you go around saying “facts don’t care about your feelings” while you in fact are all about feelings dictating your facts and thus not even remotely following your own advice. That’s the pit everyone is being actively pipelined to, on purpose, with science-based skills of persuasion.

The only protection is awareness of the threat and overwhelming dedication to competence and responsibility in pursuing knowledge and belief critically. You have to value truth above all else—above who you fear, who you hate, what you fear or hate, everything you have any feelings about whatever, it has to be truth first. Only then will it be harder to manipulate you. But as soon as you put any lever above truth, they will exploit it, pull the lever, and control you.

So the only step forward is commitment to that value, followed by skill-building. And that means reading and learning, as just the start, The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking and A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research

Thank you so much for the information.

Your last paragraph really resonates with me; it reminds me of all the fallacious theories that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

1) COVID-19 was supposedly caused by 5G waves.

2) The vaccine, planned by the world government (with the collaboration of Bill Gates ^^), is supposedly designed to control the world’s population and keep us in servitude (I don’t know how).

3) COVID is the work of the devil or the will of the divine, intended to test us.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but these examples show that no matter how much information is available on the internet or in other knowledge-sharing spaces like libraries or media centers, people will always fall into the same traps.

Isn’t humankind inherently paranoid? Which, for me, isn’t so different from superstition, in the sense that empiricism is secondary and not a method that reassures or unites.

Because, without being hypocritical, during moments of solitude brought on by the sudden pandemic of 2019-2020, I sometimes thought that fate was conspiring against us, instead of recognizing that the pandemic was an accident and the result of a confluence of circumstances.

All this to say that doubt, without going through empiricism, is just as problematic as superstition.

So the method to use would be: doubts – hypothesis – replication of the experiment – falsifiability – peer validation – new theories?

Is that correct?

Interesting, thank you for your analysis.

The Middle Ages didn’t end in the 10th century. That’s when the Low Middle Ages (in the Western segment called the Dark Ages) ended. The High Middle Ages (the beginning of the recovery from the decline of the Dark Ages) goes to the 14th century at which begins the Renaissance (though I would personally suggest the Renaissance begins in the 13th century, overlapping that, but either way). The Enlightenment begins in the 17th century, and that corresponds with the Scientific Revolution. The question of “Why Then?” for the SR is a widely debated one. I present my theory and case in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire.

But the short answer gets to your second question: it’s a happenstance of cultural and political decisions, aided by enough generalized economic prosperity to allow independent exploration and thought (as opposed to subsistance and survival). That’s why it didn’t happen at all in China (see Rome vs. China: What Made the Difference?). And why you are absolutely right that we could stop preserving and sustaining the requisite culture and devolve into primitive superstitious lunatics again (see The Argument from Reason for the difference between innate human and culturally invented tools of reason).

Although to correct another point: it is not the case that “there are as many believers today as in the darkest periods of history.” Global atheism and agnosticism is actually higher today and rising than ever before in history; and even within religions, so is the decline of superstition, i.e. most Christians, Hindus, Muslims today do not believe in demons, blood magic, and the like. Even insofar as they do, they distance it all from reality, having developed elaborate worldviews that are functionally naturalist by sequestering and excusing the absence of supernatural explanations in the world. So, for example, 90% of people in ancient Rome would sooner credit a shipwreck to demons or gods or black magic, while 90% of people in modern India or Africa even (much less America) would sooner credit it to ordinary physical causes.

This is why the Enlightenment was not defined by a decline in belief in gods or religion, but in a decline in recourse to supernatural explanations of everyday things or even momentous society-wide things. The role for magic has mostly shrunk and been swept into a corner and hidden under a blanket. Rather than the World Being Full of Gods and The Irrational.

This has added significance now that secular (naturalistic) superstitions and religions are replacing supernaturalist ones precisely because it is harder to believe in gods and blood magic now, and easier to believe in government conspiracies and lizard people. That’s an effect of the Enlightenment. But it isn’t progress. I discuss this at the end of my critique of Jordan Peterson.

It may be a feature in the Disqus Comment System, which is the most popular and one I want to replace mine with, but that’s the “it will break everything and take days to fix it all” worry which has been keeping me from pulling the trigger on that.

Yes. That’s an RSS feed, which you need an RSS feed reader to employ conveniently.

It indeed works as you surmised. I seem to have made a mistake in pasting the URL. I meant https://www.richardcarrier.info/comments/feed

It’s unfortunately hidden unless you’re in the know. It’s the link rel=”alternate” tags in the HTML. I use an add-on called RSSPreview which displays an icon with a dropdown list when it comes across any.