Q&A: Helping Fools
Helping Fools
Question
There are piles of fools around me; I live among human beings…
Some of them realize that their situation isn’t so great, and again and again they fall for all kinds of conspiracy theories and craziness, some of them completely bizarre, about the world and various social phenomena. Some of them don’t understand that their situation is problematic.
I’m thinking about those who do, from time to time, draw conclusions from past events and understand that they keep falling for things that are warped, weird, unhinged, false—but in the moment they don’t have that understanding, and at first glance they always buy the nonsense.
It takes a lot of time and effort to investigate and explain things to them, and only then do they grasp that they’ve been duped. That is effective only for each individual case, and it’s a process that takes a very long time. They simply do not have the reasonable natural ability to filter truth from falsehood, craziness from possible reality, etc.
What can be done? What is it that some people have, so that most of the time they don’t fall for conspiracies and craziness, and what is missing in those who always fall to the side of conspiracies and craziness?
Is this a skill that can be acquired? Or, alas, is this just how the Creator made them—fools, and that’s that?
Answer
If this seems to you like a reasonable question, it may be that you should re-examine your own standing relative to your surroundings.
Discussion on Answer
Even if one accepts the writer’s description, it is still obvious that there are masses of fools of all kinds. In addition, there are people who seem foolish to you and really are not. And there are others who are foolish and you don’t see it (and that could also be you yourself). There are those who adopt conspiracies only when it comes to Bibi, whether for or against, while in every other area they operate with a great deal of logic. Others adopt conspiracies in various scientific fields, regarding Russia or China or Trump, regarding one religion or another, and so on. Each of these is stuck at a different point, and it is not at all clear that even if there is some treatment, it would suit all of them. Not even all those who are stuck in the same angle, because people differ in their thinking and in their psychology.
Therefore I wrote that these sweeping statements, and the search for a general solution for all the fools in the world, is plainly an unintelligent question. And I remarked sarcastically that the writer himself is not presented here in a light very different from the foolishness he describes in his surroundings.
I didn’t understand.