We are surrounded by people who are wrong about an amazing number of things. Each of us knows, and probably likes, people who believed in Global Freezing twenty years ago, and who were as easily led to worry even more about Global Warming, today. The same people worried about the Ozone Hole, and thought that dioxin was a “dangerous killer”.
This type of person is not just concerned with Imaginary Problems on a global scale. Individually, they watch their salt and sugar intake, solemnly letting people know how important such concerns are. Their weight is another deep concern, and they are quick to let others know how vital it is to maintain the latest body mass index and whatever other concerns they are told “are critically important”. They think that buying “organic” food is “healthful”.
Cholesterol is, of course, important to them. They often know the difference between “good” cholesterol and “bad” cholesterol, and are more than willing to explain those differences to the rest of us. Since most of them have medical insurance that covers prescriptions, they don’t mind spending a lot of money on various chemicals that keep their livers from doing the cholesterol-producing job they were carefully designed to do.
There is nothing about which vain pseudo-intellectuals can’t be convinced to be alarmed, from trans-fats to plastic bags. It is not so much that they are simply not bright, but that they lack the courage to ask the simple question “Who benefits?” from each new alarm. They are more comfortable with their easily-transformable view of the world. They regard switches in position, as from Global Freezing to Global Warming, as a sign of “flexible thinking”. That thinking is never flexible enough to realize that such “flexible thinking” indicates only that they are utterly controlled by skilled marketing professionals, much as puppets on the ends of strings.
Those able to ask “Who benefits?” more easily see who’s pulling the strings and are, therefore, less pliable.
One cure for alarmist, flip-flop thinking? Believing in God, love, and truth. The Unprogrammed Programmer has told us through His Church and Scripture that He wants us to be obedient, loving, and truthful. Those whose basic beliefs change with each new flurry of press releases are lost; poor souls wandering in increasingly opaque fog for eternity. Those who switch back and forth from one Imaginary Problem to another lose respect for their very selves, and are easy prey for the soul-devouring demons who lurk among the dark clouds of confusion.
We who are blessed with belief in God are also blessed with more consistency in our beliefs about the programmed entities and our relationship to them. Most of us, even if subconsciously, judge the people we know by their susceptibility to fads. We know that the person who could be led to believe in a fraud like Global Warming is less likely to be able to think intelligently about anything than someone who was able to see through the fraud.
We recognize that the sooner a person is able to see through the other side’s endless procession of frauds, the more intelligent he or she is. Those who never believed in what turned out to be a fraud or marketing ploy, of course, are the most trustworthy of all.
