(New Scientist) -- HEARD the latest? The swine flu pandemic was a hoax: scientists, governments and the World Health Organization cooked it up in a vast conspiracy so that vaccine companies could make money.
Never mind that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic, that thousands died, or that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering. A group of obscure European politicians concocted this conspiracy theory, and it is now doing the rounds even in educated circles.
This depressing tale is the latest incarnation of denialism, the systematic rejection of a body of science in favour of make-believe. There's a lot of it about, attacking evolution, global warming, tobacco research, HIV, vaccines - and now, it seems, flu. But why does it happen? What motivates people to retreat from the real world into denial?
Here's a hypothesis: denial is largely a product of the way normal people think. Most denialists are simply ordinary people doing what they believe is right. If this seems discouraging, take heart. There are good reasons for thinking that denialism can be tackled by condemning it a little less and understanding it a little more.
Comments
Lets say for the sake of argument, that the powers that be really and genuinely are benevolent and sincere. That still does not exclude arrogance and despotism of being the root cause of peoples resistance to what in this article is conveniently termed 'truth'. I could use the same headline and write an article that argues that the responsibility for the wide spread denial lies with those capable of taking the contextual nature of the truths of their claims into account when they communicate them, but are unwilling to make the effort! A typical example of The Pot calling the Kettle Black! What goes around, comes around.
RSS feed for comments to this post.