Why Well Informed People Go Silent At Times? The Ill Informed Need to Evalute Their Choices

Often well informed become silent in the wake of mass hysteria, or abuse for dissenting opinion or when binary arguments become order of the day. They know they can never make the arguments acerbically nor they can invoke passions to convince others of their arguments.

Mark Twain has beautifully summarized this predicament in his novel `A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’

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        Everybody around her believed in enchantments, nobody had any doubts; to doubt that a castle could be turned into a sty, and its occupants hogs, would have been the same as my doubting among Connecticut people the actuality of the telephone and its wonders and in both cases would be absolute proof of a diseased mind, an unsettled reason. Yes, Sandy was sane; that must be admitted. If I also would be sane-to Sandy-I must keep my superstitions about  unenchanted and unmiraculous locomotives, balloons, and telephones, to myself. Also, I believed that the world was not flat, and hadn’t pillars under it to support nor a canopy over it to turn off a universe of water that occupied all space above; but as I was the only person in the kingdom afflicted with such impious and criminal opinions. I recognised that it would be good wisdom to keep quiet about this matter, too, if I did not wish to be suddenly shunned and forsaken by everybody as a madman

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        It is not just the duty of the well informed to speak up, it is a bigger duty on part of the ill informed to re-evaluate the choices they have made, the people they have believed, the promises that were made, how much of that has been fulfilled, and what is the reality. IF WE KEEP FALLING IN THE SAME TRAPS OR FOR the SAME LIES, WE ARE GOING TO BE HEADED NOWHERE. CRITICAL THINKING IS ENOUGH, NO NEED FOR AN INTELLECT.

Airtel Customer Service Sarcasmed By A Customer

Mark Twain Throws Hints On How You Can Use Crowds To Control Opinion?

                Have you noticed the fake ring seller or the spurious herb seller? Have you not read about the ponzi scheme owner vanishing into thin air with crores of money of people? Are we not witness people believing fiction when it is told forcefully and with all oratory in command? Are we not aware of people being promised the moon, getting themselves into a crater, and accepting that as moon, because they believe the person who’s telling it?

                Why do they do it? Only because they don’t know how to critically analyse what is being told to them. Also some of the pathological liars are able to create such a hype and backed by vociferous supporters that what is being told is true, and those who don’t believe it are anti-society. Such people may seem mad but they are not.

                Read this passage from `A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ by Mark Twain, you will appreciate how critical is critical thinking in a society or else the society’s mental heal will become critical.

                I had to put myself in Sandy’s place to realize that she was not a lunatic. Yes, and put her in mine to demonstrate how easy it is to seem a lunatic to a person who has not been taught as you have been taught. If I had told Sandy, I had seen a wagon, uninfluenced by enchantment, spin along fifty miles an hour, had seen a man, unequipped with magic powers, get into a basket and soar out of sight among the clouds, and had listened, without any necromancer’s help to the conversation of a person who was several hundred miles away. Sandy would not merely have supposed me to be crazy; she would have thought she knew it. Everybody around her believed in enchantments, nobody had any doubts, to doubt that a castle could be turn into a sty, and its occupants into hogs.

                The last sentence is very crucial. Crowd controls the opinion of most people, and if you can control the crowd through typical methods, you can continue to fool people for all times.