Gullibility

From the Way of the Mind I discovered this little test that at first sight seemed promising. I was initially skeptic of some of the questions asked within and I was pretty certain that one could get a 100% score by answering in a very paranoid/conspiracy therist way.

I was not wrong. I received a mediocre 67 which as the site puts it, make me a

Learner

As a Learner, you’re smart enough to know better, yet you’re still not fully informed about reality. Around 15% of the population are Learners. You have the critical thinking skills to be a truly free individual, but you haven’t exercised them enough yet. From time to time, you’re still manipulated by the powers that be, although you frequently learn from those mistakes and refuse to be exploited again. You buy things because they are practical, not because they’re cool. If you were in The Matrix, you would have taken the red pill, but you would still be in a state of mild disbelief about the nature of reality. You are essentially unplugged, but still untrained. With more knowledge, you could become a true free thinker.

Your architects: You have always been an independent thinker. You rebelled against your parents, schoolteachers and always chose to hang out with smart friends who weren’t necessarily that popular to the “in” crowd. Increasingly, you shape your own world by deciding what actions to take based on your own internal drive rather than what society tells you is right.

Action steps: Learn more. Educate yourself through alternative media and cutting-edge books. Read the answers below to get started.

All well and good, pretty much describes me. I was prepared to ignore the – immediately following – link to the author’s book, as it completely undermines the impartiability of the test. I continued to read though and my worries became true, although he seemed to have some very true points (like the Lying Goverment or the Federal Reserve), some of them were twisted in a way to make them seem so much worse, as in the case of the Carmine which, although it is indeed created from crushed bugs, (nothing wrong with that imho, unless you’re very squeamish) the author then goes on to try to scare people by saying:

carmine also poses the threat of causing a rare but fatal allergic reaction known as anaphylactic shock

Well, no shit, Sherlock! As in the case of every person with allergies, you’d better not go near and especially eat stuff you are allergic to. This is not a problem of Carmine but a problem of people with the allergy who should be taking care of what they are eating.

The rest of the test builds results up to more and more dubious claims as in the case of cancer and finally ADHD. In the cancer explanation, I liked the fact that he is trying to move people away from the proven medical solutions into “New Age Cure territory”, to which I want to cry a humongous “BOLLOCKS!”.
I’ve had personal experience of my mother dying from cancer after she preferred homeopathy, new age cures and all that jazz, until her Massage therapist discovered that the pain leg he’d been trying to fix for the last 6 months was an actual tumour that found the time to migrate to her lungs…BOLLOCKS I say!

And then of course he goes around the say that ADHD does not exist and it’s all made up to feed the drug industry etc. Seeing as I am a person with this annoying disorder, it is extremely irritating for me to read him claiming that it’s all due to bad nutrition. Especially since my mother was completely against all the “pop” food and she kept feeding us organic products and stuff like that (Seriously, I did not eat white bread until after she passed away). Not that I’m complaining or anything but once again this completely undermines it, at least for me.
Then, after coming just one step before claiming that all [tag]ADD[/tag] people are “just lazy and need some firm guidance“, he goes on to link to a friggin’ Scientology site which, for me at least, just completely discredited almost anything he said up to that point, excepting the ones I already knew of…

Becoming extremely curious at that point, I started Googling around and I came upon a StumbleUpon review in which a user, having had the same suspicions as me, goes on to say:

I just spent several hours looking up Mike Adams, the guy who runs this web site and dozens of others. Why? I guess because I was bored. Also, because I found a Scientology link on this web page. The whole page seems to be some sort of Dianetics/Scientology ad, so I was convinced that this Mike Adams guy was a Scientologist. Well, despite all my searching, I couldn’t make the connection, though Google did give some somewhat interesting results. The most interesting result was a page that revealed Mike Adams has incorporated all his companies in Taiwan! Now, that’s a red flag. Why didn’t he incorporate in the U.S.A., where he lives and operates his businesses? Well, let’s go further. It also turns out that he’s a known internet scammer.
Here’s the evidence:

Lots of good information on him, if you do a google web search for “mike adams” scam (or scammer).
Please, people, don’t submit links like this.

Unfortunately I could also not find any link between Mike Adams and Scientology, although I’m positive there is one. It is a shame that he lumped this crap along with true stuff as it will lend discredit to the true.

So to all people that are extremely paranoid, take care to be paranoid on this kind of crap as well…

3 thoughts on “Gullibility”

  1. thanks for the warning about Mike Adams.

    I wanted to say something about your comments on ADHD though. One side of it is that I have a friend who was diagnosed with this, given ritalin, and is now doing a PhD in fluid dynamics modelling. So it’s worked for him. The other side is I’ve been diagnosed with various mental health ‘disorders’ for the last seven years – currently borderline manic depression. And as far as I can tell the medication I’ve been taking (pretty consistently with a few breaks when I got pissed off with it) has done me little real good. So for me at least, I’m now looking for other ways of getting myself well – T’ai Chi, making the effort to eat well, going out for walks, keeping myself occupied rather than dwelling on stuff, etc. Which (I think) is making more of a difference, though it’s hard to tell as I have good and bad phases.

    The thing that gets me about mental health diagnosis is sometimes they medicalise problems that can be as much to do with other peoples’ inability to relate to the person who is ‘ill’ as any underlying medical condition. I’m not saying it’s all like that, just that medication can be a way of avoiding the issue here.

    E.g. the DSM has a category called ‘oppositional defiant disorder’, which I think should be renamed ‘stroppy bastard disorder’, as that’s what they really mean when they say it, but won’t. This is related to ‘conduct disorder’ which magically turns into ‘anti social personality disorder’ (which IMO should be renamed ‘we don’t really like you and you don’t like us very much either, do you, disorder’) when the patient turns 18. What I mean at the very least is that the language is all wrong and says more about the people who invented it than it does about the supposed patients.

    see:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/ask_the_doctor/odd.shtml
    http://www.mentalhealth.com/dis1/p21-ch05.html
    (and:
    http://theicarusproject.net/culture-jamming/campaign-for-a-new-diagnosis-in-the-dsm-world-domination-disorder
    for a good take on the issue by an american radical psychiatrist)

  2. ok. I just don’t have much faith / belief at the moment that the medication is ever going to do more than manage my ‘condition’. I.e. keep me in a relatively placid state where I don’t worry too much rather than confront problems in my life.

    For an interesting point of view on schizophrenia, see:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind
    (and the criticisms below the article)

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