I’m really starting to think many of them don’t believe the lies so much as just not having the intestinal fortitude to face the embarrassment of admitting they were wrong or easily duped. After so many of their prophecies’ expected due dates pass them by without coming to fruition, deep down they have to know the truth eventually - it’s the idea that they’ll be mocked mercilessly if they admit the truth that they’re afraid of.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
I’m really starting to think many of them don’t believe the lies so much as just not having the intestinal fortitude to face the embarrassment of admitting they were wrong or easily duped. After so many of their prophecies’ expected due dates pass them by without coming to fruition, deep down they have to know the truth eventually - it’s the idea that they’ll be mocked mercilessly if they admit the truth that they’re afraid of.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
That’s the reason why it’s so dangerous.
If they die believing the lies … to them, up to the moment of their death, they would have never been wrong.
We saw them doing this, literally, during Covid - “This whole Covid thing is a great big conspiracy! It’s just the flu/a cold…etc.”
I think we’ve all experienced this to one degree or another.
It’s why I’m so baffled by people who can’t recognize it in others.
Yeah, maybe you wouldn’t let it go so far. But the process is familiar.
Why is it easier to justify another person’s irrationality as something completely foreign to your human experience rather than something familiar?
For me, it’s so much easier to say “they’re just like me if I were a little stupider, more insecure, and much more proud.”