I have thought about this a lot. Why are Americans becoming sheep? We are allowing asasinations (murder) of US Citizens just because our government says they want are terrorists - no proof needed. We buy idiotic ideas and treat them as reality (Obama wasn't born in Hawaii, 9/11 was known about by the Bush Administration before it occurred, The Moon Landing was a fake, etc.).
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I think I know why now. It isn't that we are stupid or anything - but it is technology.
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Think about it. We use all kinds of things we don't understand. Cell phones work (could you build a cell phone?). Calculators work (how long would it take you to find the square root of 17 to 3 decimal places?). Giant Planes just work.
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We use a lot of stuff, most of which we don't really understand how it works, and almost none of which we could build even if you gave us all the materials and 100 friends. So we trust experts.
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And when people we think of experts say something crazy or asinine, we tend to believe it. Thinking that Obama was born in Kenya is actually easier than trying to figure out how a motherboard in a computer works. Hell, you can explain a fake birth certificate to your Great Aunt Betty. But talk all day and Great Aunt Betty isn't going to understand how you wave your hand over the iPhone and a map with directions from her house to Lubbock TX suddenly appears. It might as well be magic.
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Technology forces us to trust experts. Our (valid) belief and dependence on seemingly "unprovable" science fact, makes our belief in other unprovable facts more understandable. Not correct, mind you, but more understandable.