I’ve been thinking about public delusions lately and that got me onto the subject of the various forms of moral panics that have gripped the world, faded away, and left people wondering what the heck that was all about.
And a lot of them do not stand up to the slightest bit of verification or logical examination. In other words, they don’t make a lick of sense, and they never did.
So I have put together a little list of ones I have observed in my life along with a basic description of why they were so very, very stupid.
- The Amazon Rain Remember this one? People were all over this bullshit. Someone would quote a number of football fields a day of the “world’s lungs” disappearing every day, and there’d be scary pictures of a bulldozer moving menacingly towards a jungle. You know, like this L
Look out, it has a knife!
But it was 100 percent bullshit. What nobody mentioned was that the Amazon rainforest is so huge that you could deforest at double the peak rate and it still would take thousands of years for it to have a noticeable effect on the rainforest, let alone its role in creating oxygen.
Oh…. and oceanic algae produces most of the world’s oxygen anyhow.
- Pornography
It’s sad that the American right wing has brought this one back to life seeing as they lost so definitively on the issue the last time.
Back in the Eighties,. Reagan put together the Meese Commission. They spent many years and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in an attempt to find a link between pornography and violence against women.
At the end, The head, Attorney General Edwin Meese, was forced to admit that they hadn’t found one…. but he was sure there was one.
That tells you all you need to know about motivated reasoning forever.
- Landfills / Overpackaging / Biodegradablility
Another one with a stock set of tropes. A bulldozer pushes a huge pile of garbage to another spot in an enormous landfill. Pictures of plastic and Styrofoam packaging littering the side of a highway. Talk of how fast garbage is added to it, with the clear implication that if we don’t do something right now, we’ll be hip deep in used diapers by Tuesday morning.
Bullshit. There is plenty of room for landfills. Most of what goes into landfills is yard waste anyhow, and that’s super biodegradable. But even if that wasn’t true, even places like Tokyo and New York have plenty of room for trash. There’s no danger of running out of room. This was NEVER A THING.
- Illegal Immigration
This one never dies because xenophobia appeals to people who can’t handle the reality of diversity and want a tiny bit of a fig leaf to cover up their naked racism.
The rhetoric always goes that some group of immigrants, legal or non, is some how going to “take over” and force the dominant culture to live THEIR way.
That’s as mathematically impossible as squeezing a lemon into the ocean and turning it into lemonade. A tiny percentage of the population cannot change a massive culture and any claims to the contrary should simply be taken as ready to be “I am a pathetic coward who is too stupid to handle there being a lot of different kinds of people who are all equal and so I am racist as fuck. “
- The Ozone Hole
Another blast from the past. People got all freaked out over the fact that a small patch of Antarctica was getting unfiltered solar radiation. Like in the other examples, this small nugget of truth was then projected into the future via only the most overdramatic misuse of statistical analysis until it spelled IMMINENT CATASTROPHE. What do you know, the world’s about to end… AGAIN.
This was also never a thing. Yeah, it would be horrible if we lost the entire ozone layer. But that was never a possibility. We could have tripled our use of CFCs and it would have only made the hole a little bigger. As it turned out, getting rid of them entirely was not that big of a hassle, and so we did that. But there was never any danger of a naked Earth.
- Gay Marriage See, not all my examples are from thirty years ago. This example is quite recent but it follows the same pattern of ludicrous claims exaggerated to the point of hysteria. Many otherwise sane and normal citizens somehow convinced themselves that society would go down in blood and flames if two people who happened to have the same gender chromosome pairing could sign a government document that made them legally married. Trying to imagine the mechanism through which that could happen boggles the mind. And here we are, in the era of widespread same-sex marriage, and what do you know, nothing changed. The straight couples are just as married as they were before and the only real difference between a straight marriage and a queer one is the quality of the catering.
- Water Conservation
This one also goes under the category of “how the hell would that work?”. Some subnumerate individual takes the amount of freshwater in the lakes of the world, divides it by the water usage of the world’s population, and declares that we are like five minutes from the WHOLE WORLD DYING OF THIRST.
And people start taking shorter showers, they stick bricks in their toilet tanks, and get pissy at people for watering their lawns.
But the thing is, we’re not hamsters with water bottles – it’s not like there is a finite amount of water and when that runs out, we’re fucked.
What anyone should be able to see if they have any sense is that water comes back via an exotic process called rain. It rains, the local aquifer fills up, goes to your house, you drink the water, pee, the water goes through the sewers and into the ocean, where it evaporates, forms clouds, and rains down again.
That’s Grade 7 science people, and even if you don’t understand the process, you have to understand that everything alive needs water and there must be some reason we haven’t run out yet.
- Kids These Days
This one has been around since the ancient Greeks. The lyrics change but the song remains the same. Someone takes some report of a few youths doing something bad (or even just weird) and blows it up into dire predictions about how the world is doomed (again) because this entire generation is horrible and sure to destroy the world when they take over…. which is ANY MINUTE NOW Aaaaagh!
Every single generation has had this said about them by older people who can’t handle the fact that the world will go on just fine without them when they are dead, so they latch on anything that says that isn’t so and that their generation will be the last one and the world will crash and burn without them.
And every single generation then forgets it did that and does it to the next generation that comes along.
Oh, but that was different.
- Anti-nuclear Activism Has there ever been another movement that shot itself in the foot so thoroughly as the environmental movement did when it opposed nuclear power? And for no other reason than what amounts to “nuclear things are scary? ” By any sane measurement, nuclear power is the answer to every environmentalist’s dreams… well, the more logical dreams, anyhow. Even via the old fashioned Homer Simpson cooling towers method, nuclear power has a microscopic environmental impact compared to generating the same power versus oil, coal, or natural gas. Sure, other techs like solar and wind can compete with nuclear now, but what about the forty years worth of carbon dioxide that got pumped into the air just because a bunch of namby-pamby art major liberal types couldn’t look at the numbers and realize we were way better off with nuclear? Sheesh.
- Terrorism
Terrorism is not an important problem.
It just isn’t. Terrorism is scary but that’s not the same thing as important. Terrorism kills way fewer people than alcohol, cigarettes, or even vending machines. The media loves terrorism because it’s very dramatic and visual and it makes it easy to whip people into a frenzy that makes them want more media. Politicians love it because it lets them get away with taking away all kinds of freedoms and not only get away with it, but get reelected for it.
But it’s just plain not important. It’s certainly not important enough to let minimum wage fascists make life increasingly humiliating and aggravating for air passengers. It’s not important enough to justify anyone invading anyone. It’s not important enough to label some nations “terrorist nations” just become someone from there did something crazy and wrong.
I mean, how racist is that?
So fuck terrorism. The only way to beat a terrorist is to refuse to be scared. They thrive on the fear and chaos they create and revel in all the hatred and vitriol aimed at them. That just proves how powerful they are.
Ignore them instead. Take precautions, but treat it like the rare bad thing it is, like a freak windstorm or someone famous dying in a car accident.
It’s the best way to take all the fun out of it.
And that’s my list. I am sure there are many more – I never even touched overpopulation or desegregation – but this thing has already gone on long enough.
The main thing I want you to take away from this is that all these inanities have the same formula : a tiny or nonexistent problem is blown into a massive panic by the fact that it confirms or at least is consistent with people’s existing beliefs and the result is a period of time that history reacts to with a laugh and a shake of the head.
And all because people were so eager to believe this confirming lie that they never even gave one thought to whether it was backed by any evidence or whether it even made sense in the first place.
So here is your mantra for today, kids : there is no relationship between how much you want something to be true and whether or not it’s true. None.
And with that, I bid thee farewell as I have other stuff I should be doing
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.