The Age Of Outrageous Credulity

Last Christmas, Umberto Eco wrote:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.” Whoever said it – he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Robert Bove of The New English Review links to a recent Howard/Ohio University poll that claims:

More than one-third of Americans suspect federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new poll.

The survey also found that 16 percent of Americans speculate that secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets, were the real reason the massive Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.

The national Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll of 1,010 adults also found that anger against the federal government is at record levels, with 54 percent saying they “personally are more angry” at the government than they used to be.

Widespread resentment and alienation toward the national government appears to be fueling a growing acceptance of conspiracy theories about the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Robert adds, “It would have been illuminating if the survey also had asked respondents where they get their news”. Rush Limbaugh had the best punchline of all, though:

“When Elvis hears this–it’ll kill him!”

Heh, indeed.^TM

Update: Some further thoughts that are very much related from ShrinkWrapped. And John Gibson adds that it’s all about the BDS:

The truth is: People don’t believe the 9/11 story because they hate George Bush and don’t believe anything he says.

If he says Usama did 9/11, they don’t believe it. If he says the Twin Towers were felled by two hijacked jetliners, they don’t believe it. If Bush says there were 19 hijackers and they took four airliners and crashed all four in the largest attack on American soil ever, they don’t believe it.

So now we have one-third of the American people as blinded by hate as many Europeans and many Canadians and many Arabs. They’re so blinded they cannot see or hear the hundreds if not thousands of experts who have told them exactly what happened on 9/11.

Instead they rush to so-called evidence and so-called investigations that are much closer to alien spaceships than they are to observable and verifiable fact.

On September 11th, as my wife and I sat glued to the TV and our computers watching the nightmarish events and their immediate aftermath unfold, I leaned over to her and said, “You just know that there will be people who believe this is all a fake”–or some grand conspracy. I had no idea at the time just how quickly they’d come out of the woodwork–or their astonishing quantity.