Changing your mind can get you in trouble.
Which sounds … dumb, when you think about it. I mean, being able to change our minds is what makes us humans. We aren’t locked into patterns of behaviours like animals. We are not limited to fight or flight.
(What’s that? Oh. Yes. And Freeze. Scientists tell us the reason why grouse just stand there not moving when you are barreling down on them at 100 kph is that their way to avoid predators is to not be seen. So they don’t fight and only flight when they are certain they have been spotted. They aren’t as dumb as they might appear.)
(I say they don’t fight, but that doesn’t explain that one grouse who tried to take me on when I was biking in the Whitehorse Creek area. I mean, here I am, weighing in at about 280 lbs more than this dumb bird, and it’s charging my feet. “Come here; I’ll peck your kneecaps off,” it seemed to say. Boy, grouse are sure dumb.)
(And fawn, too? Is that one official? I mean, I’ve seen it on some lists but not others. Okay, so fawn, too, which means to be overly agreeable, overly helpful, and seemingly only concerned with making someone else happy as a way to get out of a dangerous situation; this one, despite the name, isn’t really something (m)any animals do. Which brings us back to… Fainting? Seriously? What’s with all the effs? No. Drawing the line here. Done.)
We as humans are not limited to these autonomic responses. We are able to change our minds.
And yet…
And yet changing our minds can be dangerous.
Take, for example, Charles Veitch.
Veitch is a Brit, who watched a video by Alex Jones, called Terrorstorm.
The video describes all the alleged false-flag terror attacks and then makes the case that 9/11 was such an event.
Veitch found the argument compelling, and he began to watch all the 9/11 conspiracy videos. All of them. And there are a lot.
Veitch became an anarchist and guerrilla film-maker, confronting the UK’s authority state.
He started to show up on Alex Jones video, started to become popular with the sort of people who watch Alex Jones.
After a few years of this, he caught the attention of a documentary film crew, working on a project for the BBC. The show was called 9/11 Conspiracy Road Trip, which took five British conspiracy theorists who believed that 9/11 was an inside job to ground zero, where they met experts in building demolition, professors of metallurgy, some of the people who helped build the World Trade Center in the 1970s, CIA analysts, eyewitnesses, and aviation experts.
He also had a chance to speak with Alice Hoagland, the mother of Mark Bingham, one of the passengers on Flight 93 who helped fight the hijackers.
And he realized he was wrong. “After meeting all of these alleged conspirators that were supposed to be in on it, I realized they were normal family men,” Veitch says in an article on Slate.com. “There wasn’t anything conspiratorial about them. It’s not so much a matter of technical evidence, it’s more of a change in mindset that I’ve had, going from a paranoid mindset to a less paranoid mindset.”
So far, so good. But when he mentioned his change of heart on his blog, Veitch was labeled an apostate. He began receiving threatening phone calls and emails. He was accused of having taken a payoff from the BBC, of having been subject to mind control by “neuro-linguistic programming experts,” of being under hypnosis by British illusionist Derren Brown.
“The best theory I heard has been that I have been deep undercover MI6 or CIA agent,” Veitch said. “That I was basically a one-man sleeper cell waiting to discredit the 9/11 Truth movement and destroy what they call ‘the resistance’ from within.”
His website was hacked an a message was sent to everyone who subscribed (15,000 people), saying he was a child molester; someone even photoshopped his children’s heads onto images of child porn and sent it to his mother.
Changing his mind? Was dangerous. It was costly. As someone who was once part of an in-group but had a change of heart about a core belief held by the in-group, he was outcast. Ostracized. He had found a group that he thought he fit into, but they quickly turned on him.
We like to think that we think for ourselves, but when we change our minds, when we go against the conventional wisdom of our group—be it political, spiritual, familial or other—we can be kicked out. Kicked to the curb.
We can even be cast out for accepting that some scientific fact is indeed fact.
And yet…
And yet, sometimes things do change. One day, not too long ago, the majority of people were opposed to same-sex marriage. Now, the majority are for it. Not everyone, certainly, but more people than were previously for it.
When I was growing up, most people thought smoking was cool. Somewhere along the line, that changed, too. We now live in a country where marijuana is legal, where most skirts are above the knees (in summer, at least), and where having a beard is sexy. Or so I’m told. Where women and First Nations and Mennonites all have the right to vote.
But some of these changes? Have been dangerous, too. Changing minds on an individual level and on a cultural level can be dangerous.
But—and this is important—it can be for the best if it furthers the cause of equality, if it makes us more scientifically literate, if it helps move us from a culture of jingoism to one of interconnections, if we are less self centred and more empathetic, and if it moves us towards love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, for against such, there is no law.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
