When I was a kid, I believed in many weird things, things that, in retrospect, did not stand up to scrutiny.
Santa Claus; an elderly, obese man, in a sleigh powered by flying reindeer, visits every child on earth in one night and leaves presents, which he apparently made himself. Why is this old man breaking into houses? Why is he obsessed with children? What does he do to the reindeer to get them to fly?
The Easter Bunny: A giant rabbit hides chocolate eggs for children to find. Why hide them? Why not just give them to the kids? And where does he get the eggs? Does he lay them? If he does, why are they chocolate and not containing tiny rabbits? Once you start learning biology, it’s all very anatomically confusing.
The Tooth Fairy: Where does she get the money? What does she do with the teeth?
My adult brain can only conjure some fairly nefarious answers to these questions. It’s a relief to know it was all your parents. When you’re a kid, you have the luxury of just believing. It’s part of the magic of childhood.
Adults are meant to actually think about things. Check the sources of information. It’s hard to do, the internet and social media give us an overload of information, but even so, people are choosing to believe some fairly absurd things without question. For example:
They won’t get the Covid jab because Bill Gates put microchips in the vaccines to track our movements. (Why would he do that when the phones we all voluntarily carry everywhere already track our location, number of steps, and all our communications?)
Covid is a hoax. There is no Pandemic. The Lockdowns are all an exercise in government control. (Because crashing the economy and lowering their approval ratings somehow is a good thing?)
Covid was caused by the 5G network. (No Idea, I can’t even)
Qanon. (Honestly, I didn’t even want to google this one for fear of what it would do to my targeted adverts). Qanon believes that the ‘Global Elite’ are running a child sex-trafficking ring where they kidnap, torture and kill children, and drink their blood to keep themselves forever young. They believe Donald Trump is the warrior who will retake power and bring the Elites down.
I know humans have always believed some absurd things. Flat earth, anyone? Or how about when the global elites were Lizard people in human disguise? The problem today is how the internet is bringing all these people together. I honestly think Qanon started as an absurd joke; someone throwing out the most insane thing they could think of. But people believed it and ran with it. Any attempt to contradict it is now “Fake News.”
I think there is a human need to believe in things. We’re just Hard-wired that way. It takes more of an effort to think about things, and we are lazy creatures. Maybe it’s best we go back to believing in the innocent things, like Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. We need to start THINKING about everything else.
So That Happened 