Down The Rabbit Hole … The Wonderland of Science Denial
part 1
Zak Webber
“Do y’all remember before the internet, that people thought the cause of stupidity was the lack of access to information? Yeah. It wasn’t that.”
Climate change deniers … anti-vaxxers … Young Earth Creationists … Flat Earthers …
We live in a Golden Age of information, knowledge and communication. Any individual with access to the internet has, at their fingertips, a tremendous wealth of information in the fields of science, history, culture and current events, to name just a fraction of that embarrassment of riches.
The dream of Nikola Tesla has come gloriously true:
“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”
– Colliers Illustrated Weekly (1926)
Today, every human being on the planet with a smart phone is a part of Tesla’s “world brain” and can tap into a gargantuan resource which practically represents the sum of all human knowledge. Self-education is literally in the palm of your hand.
The value of this cannot be overstated. Aristole said “The fate of empires depends on the education of youth.”
This does not mean that everyone can know everything - you cannot become a brain surgeon by reading a website, or even by downloading a textbook - but in terms of basic facts, it is pretty much all there. What’s the capital of Burkina Faso? How far away is the Moon? Where is the nearest sushi restaurant? Click, click, tap, tap – Bingo!
There is another problem, though: a huge amount of the information out there is false. Propaganda is nothing new, of course; history is littered with many examples of deliberate misinformation communicated to further political, religious or commercial agendas.
Sometimes people tell lies. Sometimes that includes people in power. Government figures may say that the soldiers of an enemy state used bodies from the battlefield to make soap (The German Corpse Factory, World War One) or that the Russian Revolution was part of a Jewish plot to destroy Western civilisation (the Jewish Bolshevism conspiracy theory). Sometimes governments lie to their own people, such as in 1964 when the US President Lyndon Johnson spoke on television to tell the American public that North Vietnamese ships had attacked the US Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin (as a pretext to go to war). In more recent times, a president who fails to get re-elected claims voter fraud and smears legitimate reporting as “False News”…
The truth of what happened in such events can be complicated to verify, but in terms of scientific matters, surely the facts are easier to pin down? The Earth revolves around the Sun? The Moon causes tides? Apples fall due to gravity? These are all established scientific facts, are they not?
Apparently not everyone would agree that they are…
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