The Individual Vs. The State, An Unusual Case

[eppie]

I can understand that people are still defending debunked information. People don't believe the holocaust happened, people don't believe we landed a man on the moon (well 12 men have walked on it). There are people that believe in a god, there are people that don't. People are very good at creating a reality that they find comfortable. It's actually impressive to be able to selectively believe things, it takes a good filter to remove all the counter information, or invent fallacies.

Basically I'm just saying that people believe in things where it is much easier to provide observable facts that are counter to their belief. It should be fairly easy to understand why people believe that the WMD excuse was legit. People believe what they want, right or wrong. You can change people's mind, you can educate people but you will never reach everyone. I'm not sure there is a single fact that you could get the entire population of a country to agree on. I'm sure I could find someone who doesn't believe in gravity if you give me enough time, and that I wouldn't be able to change their mind. I work at a university, I get to see on a daily basis how narrow minded otherwise highly educated people can be.

I think you are correct, at least I think about it the same as you do. I recently read an article about an autsralian psychology prof. who research this kind of behaviour (so why people like to believe in conspiracy theories, and why so many people with no scientific background at all swear that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist).

However, some cases (like the Iraq war) also have some other causes, such as patriotism, fear for not showing you are a patriot (saying you didn't believe that Saddam had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks could give you a big chance of being lynched in the fall of 2001 in certain parts of the US), and party political reasons......no republicans would state that Bush was wrong for example. And even though the reasoning might not have been correct......many of us were of course really happy to play war again.