Facebook is riddled with pockets of abject ignorance.
If you venture inside the deepest of these private and sometimes secret groups, you’ll come out either despondent at the state of humanity or a true believer. It’s in these places that lies are born. As the most fervent believers find an echoic place to commiserate, their ideas recombine.
Mix a current event, a dash of disproven 1980’s research, and a tinfoil hat and you have a brand new story about the conspiracy to murder holistic doctors by Big Pharma agents who want to hide the truth about Gc-MAF. The stories most fantastical, least disprovable, or most closely approximating a movie plot get filtered out to the rest of Facebook through the memetic process.
Until the latest “Amazing Natural Cancer Cure!” winds up on my grandmother’s feed, I don’t really care—it’s their hobby, in a way. An ignorance induced LARP with fully committed players.
But to those in the middle, the people who simply think that natural is better, and pass on these wild claims from their trusted sources, I ask this:
Can’t we have a disagreement without you living a fictional universe?
I understand how people could feel we have become too sterile, too reliant on technology and medicine and want to find alternatives. I can sympathize. But wrapping yourself in a cloak of misinformation helps nothing other than your cognitive dissonance. We can’t have a debate when the entire set of facts underlying your argument are wrong.
Vaccine-preventable diseases aren’t fake. They weren’t cured by good hygiene. Fluoride isn’t poisoning you or making you stupid. Cancer cannot be cured by changing your PH levels.
In order to believe these things you have to either:
- Accept whatever someone is telling you with no fact checking;
- Believe an enormous number of people (tens of thousands) are willing to waste their entire professional careers NOT conducting proper research, but also harm all of humanity in order to make money, or;
- Believe the vast global conspiracy keeping all of the good scientists and doctors in line has avoided a single leak of substantive information in 100+ years.
That is not consistent with the universe that I live in.
On a regular basis, I am told to go “do my research and learn the real facts,” by people whose own information is not only internally inconsistent, but contradicts an enormous amount of work by medical bodies, government agencies, and scientific consensus world over.
It’s hard to distinguish fact from fiction online. But considering about half of the things I read are LITERALLY MADE UP, if you have any concern for yourself, your family, or the effects of the decisions you make, you need to learn how to evaluate information and discern truth from reality.
If you won’t, you’re just playing fantasy games, and we can’t possibly have an argument.
