A lunar traveler deals with a lunatic

(Note: the incident occurred in 2002.)

In this video, an obnoxious conspiracy theorist named Bart Sibrel accosts 74 year old Buzz Aldrin of the Apollo 11 mission, charging that the moon landing was a fraud and challenging Aldrin to swear on a Bible that he was on the moon. Aldrin, accompanied by a woman, keeps doing everything he can to get away from Sibrel, crossing the street, changing his direction, returning to what appears to be his hotel, but the lunatic keeps following him and speaking to him insultingly. Finally Sibrel calls Aldrin a “coward and a liar,” and Aldrin punches him in the face. Unfortunately the video stops at that point. I would like to have seen what happened next.

Modern society is filled with conspiracy lunatics like Sibrel. In a 2003 entry, I explained the connection between modern conspiracy theories and ancient gnosticism. The ancient gnostics, driven by cultural alienation and uncertainty about the transcendent God, claimed that the entire cosmos was a conspiracy; modern conspiratorial obsessions, though a different phenomenon from ancient gnosticism, are an expression of a similar underlying alienation. I concluded:

Given our present civilizational crisis, and the fact that our leaders are, in some fundamental ways, betraying our civilization (not conspiratorially, but completely openly), we can only expect that gnostic thinking with its rejection of rationality will keep growing more and more prevalent for the foreseeable future.

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James P. writes:

You wrote:

Given our present civilizational crisis, and the fact that our leaders are, in some fundamental ways, betraying our civilization (not conspiratorially, but completely openly), we can only expect that gnostic thinking with its rejection of rationality will keep growing more and more prevalent for the foreseeable future.

People naturally hunger for the truth. Conspiracy theories emerge because the elites are lying to us, and people are trying to make sense of events anyway. The attempt to arrive at the truth when the elites are lying to us is rational enough; unfortunately the products of such attempts to understand events are not always rational. The irrationality of much conspiracy thinking is a product of the elite’s deliberate dumbing-down of education. The elite does not want the people to be capable of rational thought, or the people would be more likely to see through elite lies and arrive at the actual truth. Irrational conspiracy-mongering does not threaten the elite; rational analysis of the elite’s program does threaten the elite.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 13, 2011 10:09 AM | Send