Quote:
Originally Posted by Dowly
This is true. I should know, I believed 9/11 was a bit fishy, until I actually researched it myself. Not my proudest moment that.  |
I certainly had some conspiracist traits when I was younger as well. I used to talk exactly like the pre-election Bubblehead; in total lockstep with the far right. I used to parrot their arguments, and was even a viewer of the 700 Club. In fact, I donated to it. In time, I began to believe that there was a leftist conspiracy to undermine our "fundamental Christian values" (yes, I actually used that language) and to ultimately outlaw the practice of Christianity.
What needs to happen, and what happened to people like you and I, is that we were able to pull ourselves out of that cycle before going over the edge; something similar to the fiction writer's device called the Moral Event Horizon (
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...alEventHorizon). In said event, a character that has been making a slide to being something of an antagonist perpetrates an act that is considered unforgivable to the reader or viewer, thus permanently labeling that character as evil. Similarly, an individual with conspiracist leanings can fall over the edge, as we have seen in this thread, by some crisis, real or imagined. In the case of the OP, the Presidential Election of 2012 was the catalyst for this change, and I fear that he may be lost for good.