"I Mean You No Harm..."

I've been thinking a lot about the "Presence of a Conspiracy" myth and how/why it can be viewed as harmful to certain groups of people. First of all, we talked in class about how this myth is often applied to political campaigns and politics in general. Do you see the huge problem here? If we're always being led to think that the person who is in charge of our nation(or state, or county, or whatever..) is a corrupt man/woman who isn't telling us the whole truth, then we can never truly trust them. Even when they are telling the truth, the public always has it in the back of their mind that something just isn't right--"no way could a politician be telling the truth! It's unheard of!" This is not detrimental only to politicians who must know that there will always be someone telling the public that what the politician is saying isn't true, that they're corrupt and unjust, and that they're hiding things...it also greatly harms the American public. Things can never just be plain black and white for us. We are always suspecting that we're not getting the full truth. If someone tells us one thing, in the back of our heads we immediately think that perhaps they mean just the opposite. For goodness sake, we don't even know whether or not to believe it when the media tells us someone has died--there are still people who believe Elvis is around somewhere, hanging out in a diner or something. And there are still theories going around about the big scandal with the Beatles' Sargent Pepper album and the "death" of Paul McCartney. Try it yourself. Type "conspiracy theories" into any search engine and I guarantee you'll find a ton of matches. It's absurd.

But at the same time, it's wonderfully entertaining, and isn't that one of the main purposes of media? That's why so many people are obsessed with conspiracy theories and movies or books or newspaper articles about conspiracy theories. They're entertaining. This is perhaps the main reason why the "Presence of a Conspiracy" myth has lived on for so many years. Even though it may in some way be ruining our country and corrupting our mindset, it entertains us and lets us use our minds to try and figure out who is really telling the truth.