![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Buying into the lies...
Mar. 30th, 2013 09:12 amI've been puzzling over a discussion with a friend of a friend on Facebook. And the puzzle is this. How is it that people buy into lies that, even when presented with data that completely blows their hypothesis out of the water, they insist on things being facts.
The two people in the discussion, and it's been pretty good natured actually, have presented two items as 'facts'.
1. Benefit payments are taking up the majority of the British economy and swallowing the money from good honest tax payers
2. Waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe are coming to the UK for the generous benefits
Now, my first reaction was to inform them to put down the Daily Mail and step away slowly.
My second was to go and look at some data.
Economically speaking the Austrian economics subscribers interest me because they just won't quit. It doesn't seem to matter how many facts are presented, nor how overwhelming the data is, they just keep reverting to the same tired arguments. At it's core seem to be two things. A moral component: feckless people sitting around living large while I work upset me. And an aspirational one: I'm going to be a gazzilionaire one of these days and I don't want to share.
It's a terrific lie to have sold to people. Living on benefits isn't actually all that nice and most people won't get rich, and yet they've managed to get that ingrained into people's minds. It's a cool trick.
As for the immigration thing. Whining about immigration seems to be as British as complaining about the weather and about as practical and meaningful. If there were any Picts left I imagine them sitting around the fire moaning about all those bloody Angles and Saxons coming over here with their foreign jibber jabba killing us and throwing us off our lands... ok, bad example, but moving forward the Huguenots were moaned about. The German Jews of the 1930s were moaned about and how they forced good honest cockneys (a term from Huguenot extraction apparently) out to Tottenham and other points north on the A10, until they got moved out to the suburbs by the Bangladeshis.... most of whom are now in East Herts moaning about the bloody Albanians.
Anyway, my suggestion for these people. Put down the Daily Mail, have a glass of wine and do some bloody research.
The two people in the discussion, and it's been pretty good natured actually, have presented two items as 'facts'.
1. Benefit payments are taking up the majority of the British economy and swallowing the money from good honest tax payers
2. Waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe are coming to the UK for the generous benefits
Now, my first reaction was to inform them to put down the Daily Mail and step away slowly.
My second was to go and look at some data.
Economically speaking the Austrian economics subscribers interest me because they just won't quit. It doesn't seem to matter how many facts are presented, nor how overwhelming the data is, they just keep reverting to the same tired arguments. At it's core seem to be two things. A moral component: feckless people sitting around living large while I work upset me. And an aspirational one: I'm going to be a gazzilionaire one of these days and I don't want to share.
It's a terrific lie to have sold to people. Living on benefits isn't actually all that nice and most people won't get rich, and yet they've managed to get that ingrained into people's minds. It's a cool trick.
As for the immigration thing. Whining about immigration seems to be as British as complaining about the weather and about as practical and meaningful. If there were any Picts left I imagine them sitting around the fire moaning about all those bloody Angles and Saxons coming over here with their foreign jibber jabba killing us and throwing us off our lands... ok, bad example, but moving forward the Huguenots were moaned about. The German Jews of the 1930s were moaned about and how they forced good honest cockneys (a term from Huguenot extraction apparently) out to Tottenham and other points north on the A10, until they got moved out to the suburbs by the Bangladeshis.... most of whom are now in East Herts moaning about the bloody Albanians.
Anyway, my suggestion for these people. Put down the Daily Mail, have a glass of wine and do some bloody research.
