The Psychology of Conspiracy Denial

From http://www.infowars.com/the-psychology-of-conspiracy-denial/

The Psychology of Conspiracy Denial






Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Thursday, August 5, 2010

Wired Magazine writer Jonah Lehrer claims his critics are engaging in “cognitive dissonance,” by expressing concern about experimental vaccines, which in fact is the perfect description for Lehrer’s own behavior.
Wired Magazine writer Jonah Lehrer attempts to offset the overwhelmingly critical response to his attack on Alex Jones by characterizing skepticism of authority in the context of vaccines and mass medication as a psychological dysfunction, despite the fact that the history of government-funded medical research in the United States is replete with examples of scientific abuse against unwitting victims.

Lehrer fires another salvo in the controversy surrounding brain-altering vaccines that eliminate stress and induce artificial states of “focused calm” by portraying those who are concerned about the potential abuse of such treatments as paranoid cult members who believe in space aliens coming to rescue them from an imminent apocalypse.
Unable to properly address Alex Jones’ video journal about the dangers of mind-altering vaccines point by point, Lehrer resorts instead to retelling a completely unrelated story from the 1950′s about a woman in Minneapolis who thought a giant spaceship would rescue her from the end of the world.
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According to Lehrer, people who are concerned about fluoridated drinking water and the New World Order, in other words, anyone who expresses consternation about what they are putting in their own body or what powerful people are planning to do with the planet, are mentally disturbed cult members who are victims of cognitive dissonance.
Of course, Lehrer’s tactic of labeling of those who disagree with him in pointing out that there are very real proposals to mass medicate the water supply with lithium, in addition to the already prevalent neurotoxin sodium fluoride, with a psychological dysfunction, could just as easily be applied to Lehrer himself.
The acid test on who is engaging in cognitive dissonance and ‘doubling down’ on their beliefs even in light of conflicting evidence, be it Lehrer or the “conspiracy theorists,” has to come down to the basic facts.
It’s a fact that Lehrer’s own fellow Oxford luminary Julian Savulescu, in a 2008 white paper, called for populations to be mass-medicated through pharmacological ‘cognitive enhancements’ added to the water supply.
It’s a fact that Professor Allan Young of Vancouver’s Institute for Mental Health told the BBC that “Large-scale trials involving the addition of lithium to drinking water supplies may…be feasible,” following claims that lithium led to a reduction in the number of suicides in Japan and helped to alleviate “mood disorders”.
It’s a fact that Barack Obama’s top science czar John P. Holdren advocated in his own textbook Ecoscience that a “planetary regime” should employ a “global police force” to enforce totalitarian measures of population control, including forced abortions, mass sterilization programs conducted via the food and water supply.
These facts are not a product of some spurious Internet link found on Google, as Lehrer spins it, nor do they have anything to do with alien spaceships or the apocalypse, they were either written or said directly by the individuals themselves.
In Lehrer’s first article on the subject, he wrote that people who expressed concern about proposals to put lithium as well as sterilants in the water supply were trafficking in “idiotic conspiracy theories”.

Lehrer’s knee jerk denial of these manifestly provable facts that he derides as “idiotic conspiracy theories” is proof positive that it’s Lehrer himself, and not the conspiracy theorists, who is engaging in cognitive dissonance and “doubling down” on his beliefs even in light of conflicting evidence.
Lehrer’s behavior is a classic case of cognitive dissonance – when presented with the fact that proposals are in place to mass medicate the water supply, he continues to spin yarns about space aliens from the 50′s while defending his belief system with sophomoric name-calling and discredited stereotypes which attempt to label anyone who disagrees with him as mentally unstable.
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Given the multi-decade documented history of the United States government using its own population as unwitting guinea pigs for the most abhorrent scientific experiments and trials, to deny that such plots could be hatched today is the height of cognitive dissonance.
Lehrer’s argument frames skepticism of authority in the context of vaccines and health care as a mental disorder, a trait of people who are susceptible to cults, people who believe in space aliens and the apocalypse.
In fact, skepticism of authority in the context of health care is the most rational and intellectual mind set one could possibly embrace.
If victims of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972, had ignored the advice of the doctors they had been told to trust and sought proper medical treatment, they could have saved their own lives as well as those of future generations who were born with congenital syphilis as a consequence of the U.S. health authorities deliberately withholding treatment.
If victims of Project SHAD, unwilling and uninformed participants in a Department of Defense program that deliberately exposed them to chemical and biological weapons like VX and Sarin nerve gas, had not trusted their superiors then they could have avoided lifelong debilitating diseases and premature deaths.
If parents of mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York, had not trusted Saul Krugman of New York University, who told them that their children were being enrolled for helpful “vaccinations” when in fact that were being deliberately infected with viral hepatitis, then more heartache could have been spared.
If people had expressed more concern at the time about radiation experiments which led to government scientists, “Feeding radioactive food to mentally disabled children or conscientious objectors, inserting radium rods into the noses of school children, deliberately releasing radioactive chemicals over U.S. and Canadian cities, measuring the health effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests, injecting pregnant women and babies with radioactive chemicals, and irradiating the testicles of prison inmates,” would this have been a healthy form of skepticism to adopt?

The list is endless – the history of human experimentation performed by government scientists on unwitting victims reinforces the fact that expressing concern about experimental vaccinations that promise to induce a state of “focused calm” is not to engage in delusions of paranoia or cognitive dissonance, as Lehrer characterizes it, it’s a healthy and informed response to the multi-generational record of scientific abuse of health care research in the United States.