Financial Illiteracy of Those Who Mock Conspiracy Theorists


Anthony Wile
Daily Bell
January 29, 2012
From Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS), a journal from the independent publisher Sage Publications, comes an article that has predictably seen wide distribution on the Internet. It implies that those who believe in globalist conspiracy theories are illogical – even downright nutty.
The article is entitled  ”Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories” and the thesis of the article is that people who believe in conspiracy theories eventually become so immersed in them and so mesmerized that they do not realize they are holding contradictory beliefs.
“Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: A self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs. The present research shows that even mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated in endorsement.” (SPPSAbstract)
“Conspiratorialists” become so distrustful of “government” and “authority” that they will impute any and every kind of malevolence to them.
Thus it is that people can claim, on the one hand, that Osama bin Laden is “dead” and died years ago, while simultaneously claiming that bin Laden remains alive and that US and Pakistan government authorities are not being truthful about him and his physical state.
Of course, I’ve never run into anyone, who claims that bin Laden is ALIVE. But it’s true that here at the Daily Bell we’ve run articles explaining that bin Laden probably died years ago. See, for instance, “Osama bin Laden is Dead Again?
The SPPS article would likely have you believe this is an outrageous conspiracy theory. But given that FOX news ran a report on bin Laden’s death in 2001, and given that Pakistan’s former president Benazir Bhutto herself claimed that bin Laden died in the early 2000s (supposedly as the result of an assassination), it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to speculate that bin Laden didn’t die as the result of a US raid in 2011.

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