THE GUM ON MY SHOE WAS IMPLANTED BY ALIENS WHO SHOT JFK FROM THE MOON HIRED BY THE FBI!!

To start off, I'd like to apologize to anyone who stumbled upon this blog who thought it would have much better material of a more risque manner than it does because of the name. Don't worry, I'm fairly positive the link below this one on Google will have what you're looking for. Now scuttle back to the dark side of the Internet, you.

In any case, people always seem bent on believing strange things. NASA used its multibillion dollar budget to fake the moon landings, JFK was shot with a magic bullet by a midget hidden in the grassy knoll, and Barack Obama is a secret Socialist Muslim anti-Christ who wants to kill old people with death panels.

I think that this, ironically enough, is based on people's attempts at reasoning. I think people start off with this vague sense of fear, distrust or suspicion, and when they see or hear about one of these events, they rationalize this emotion by projecting onto whatever theory they hear. They then get this "gut feeling" that it all makes sense, since now their fear, distrust and suspicion makes sense, and that's enough to get around the fairly obvious nonsensical parts of the theory. The logical explanation doesn't make as much sense as the conspiracy theory because of this element, and good old confirmation bias takes care of the rest.

The fact that many such theories center on some evil government with faceless figures, probably evilly petting their evil cats while thinking derisively about the populace over whom they reign, seems to validate my point. They feel disenfranchised with how the government's working and also suspicious of what the government will do in the near future. For example, the hippies who came up with the moon landing conspiracy were definitely suspicious of the government, and the story helped rationalize and prove that the government was evil or at least lying, so it was believed more than the simpler explanation that they sent a rocket to the Moon, a clear-cut case of confirmation bias.

Of course, there's still the issue of what make that first little spark of suspicion in the first place, and I say it's probably only fair to say that I'm happy to get a chance to rant about the worsening state of society and my pessimistic views about why society sucks, has always sucked, and will continue to suck until we become substantially more intelligent people than we currently are. I believe suspicion/fear is an innate condition of every single human, embedded in our genetics, since being suspicious probably stopped many an ancient cavemen from examining the mouth, or crawling into, the mouth of some form of predator, and also probably stalled the discovery of shrooms for at least a few centuries. Until people learn to trust everyone to a good extent, there will still be violence, gangs, and war. All three of these stem from a lack of trust or the ability to be trusted. Gangs can be seen as an attempt to join a group of people who they can mutually trust, and war is the lack of trust between two separate nations. On a smaller scale the effects of mistrust can be seen in how insecure-anxious babies tend to be more violent when they grow, as was said in the lecture for psych class, which is being taught by an awesome teacher whom I'm totally not pandering to at the moment. This problem needs to be conquered before society can actually make more substantial improvement.

That's my theory about theories. And of course, here's an obligatory video of a crazy person.

[These pictures and videos aren't mine but belong to the websites/authors which you can probably find by looking at the website and/or webpages from where these resources came from. I don't own anything on this page except for the text within these blog entries. And your wallet, that's mine, send me all your money now or I'll sue you for theft.]