Among the Truthers by Jonathan Kay Read Free Book Online Page B

position with a group of multinationals we call “The Company.” They call every shot this country takes. What laws to pass. What judges to appoint. What wars to fight. The thing is—if you want to rise in the ranks like I did, you had to commit to leaving everything you knew behind. Because then you start to get access to the real information . . . information that people would do a lot of things to get their hands on—like harm your family.
    â€” Prison Break, Season 1, Episode 19, “The Key”
    I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.
    â€”Suicide manifesto left by Joseph Stack, who crashed a single-engine plane into an Austin, Texas, building housing IRS offices on February 18, 2010
    Programmed for Conspiracy
    In the late 1990s, University of Michigan developmental psychologist Margaret Evans became interested in the question of why many Americans doubted the notion of biological evolution. So she began interviewing children of different ages and religious backgrounds about where they thought animals originated.
    The responses she got, analyzed in a 2000 academic journal article, revealed an interesting pattern. The youngest subjects, aged four to seven, gave a range of answers—most along the lines of “from someplace else” or “out of the ground.” But among eight-to-ten year olds, the responses were different: “Whatever their family background, most children in this age range endorse the idea that the first kinds of animals were ‘made by someone,’ and often that someone is God.” Only in later years, as children developed the ability for complex, abstract thought, were they able to process the idea of evolutionary change.
    Obviously, this reflects the fact that evolution is a complicated scientific concept. But Evans and other researchers believe there is more to it than that: From a young age, human brains seem programmed to see design and intention behind the world around them.
    When asked about lions, children tell social science researchers that they exist so we can see them in the zoo. When asked why some rocks are pointy, children will respond: “so that animals won’t sit on them.” No less a thinker than Aristotle theorized that rocks fell downward so that they could take their natural place in the world. Only in the centuries since the Enlightenment has this outlook been systematically challenged. And even now, it continues to have its defenders—the campaign for “Intelligent Design” as an alternative to random genetic mutation and natural selection being the most prominent example.
    Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, and executive director of the Skeptics Society, calls this mode of thinking “agenticity”—“the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by intentional agents, usually invisible, from the top down . . . souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, and government conspiracies are all believed to haunt our world and control our lives . . . It even informs our [modern] belief in government.”
    How does this thinking evolve? The same way our bodies did.
    â€œPicture yourself in the Neolithic environment of our evolutionary adaptation, and you’re a hominid walking along and you hear a rustle in the grass,” says Shermer. “Is