Hoaxed

Why you never should be too sure of anything

Have you ever been hoaxed. Believed something that clearly did not turn out to be true. And… if you had just thought about it a little more than you actually did, you might have never believed it in the first place.

My husband has a little bit of a macabre trait. He likes horror movies and he loves the old fashioned Grimm fairy tales. The ones where people, witches, and monsters actually get hurt and die. There is a strong correlation between abused children and them being drawn towards scary stories and movies. I do not know exactly what the psychological explanation is but it is stated quite frequently. There is an excellent story for teens named “A tale dark and Grimm” by Adam Gidwitz that explores this theme quite interestingly.

This is not what I am trying to talk about today. Today, I want to describe how at my age I am finally realizing how I fell for many of the past hoaxes that dictated the majority of how life in the western world has regressed.

It also shows that anyone who references “Science” as a proof of why his or her opinion is infallible is either wrong or about to be wrong.

Science is never settled.

Period.

When I entered the chemistry lab in my old high school, the teacher immediately gave us a safety tour and instructions. I was told to never… NEVER… drink the distilled water as drinking distilled water would mean imminent death. Yes, that is what I was told and… I believed it fully. I even recited this often. This little fact that I was told when I was 14 years old has led me to have my most humbling and embarrassing moments about 20 years later when I told that distilled water is deathly and everyone laughed at me.

No, you won’t die drinking distilled water.

Can you die from drinking water? Yes, absolutely. There are cases of marathon runners who over-hydrated and caused serious harm to themselves, even death. My own mother over-hydrated to a point where her sodium levels in her blood were shockingly low and caused health issues that needed to be corrected. She had learned that drinking water was relevant and she had started drinking water to a point where when she was not carrying a full water bottle in her hands, she would panic and fear dehydration. She once hopped into my car and immediately drank the water that was sitting there.

“Mom, the water is at least three month old. Don’t drink that.” She just looked at me as if I knew nothing about life and, yes, she insisted on drinking the entire bottle of warm, stale water, that I had bought three months earlier and left in the car half empty. She could not wait the 15min to get home for fresh water.

She did not care. Her biggest fear was developed by misguided health advice. And many of us have fallen victim to bad information, so called hoaxes, that changed the trajectory of our lives significantly.

I fell for so many hoaxes in my life. I learned that the forest was dying, that the ozone layer would be completely gone by now, that preserving water and energy by long cold washing machine cycles with minimal water is mandatory, that recycling is effective, that the world is about to collapse, that world hunger is the fault of white people, that everyone just needs to be given the same opportunity and… things will be peace, joy, and pancakes for everyone.

Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen (peace, joy, pancakes) is a German expression that basically describes the perfect state of being.

I later learned that life is not a pony farm (“Das Leben is kein Ponyhof”, an expression coined after a family series that was popular in Germany in the 60s and 70s where a family made a (happy) living on a pony farm). What I mean by that is that we, the humans living on this planet, have very little control. Way less than what we want to believe.

We cannot make people act a certain way.

We cannot control weather or climate.

We cannot change or improve the world by changing one variable without altering other aspects negatively.

Everything has unintended consequences. Bad consequences. Just yesterday, someone on Twitter-X wrote how much better bamboo is than using any other artificial fabrics. Yeah… right. Like the increase in demand has not led rainforest farmers to rode down the big trees to plant bamboo and thus destroying the rain forest even further. We have not seen that electrical vehicles have disastrous consequences to those places on earth where the raw materials for the batteries are mined. People talking about water conservation and new washing machines using less and cold water, have not experienced the funk that builds up in the machine and even your clothes over time as the low water temperatures and volumes are just insufficient to clean and… mold starts building up when the water is not hot enough to kill the spores. Water conservation has led to pipe clogging as there is simply not enough pressure and flow to clear them… many, many reasons.

And now the UN seems to have admitted that the alarmist climate change models have not predicted the outcome accurately, I am one more time in awe at how gullible I have been all my life.

Humanity knows astoundingly little. And all of our calculation models that are supposed to predict an outcome have been unbearably inaccurate. I remember sitting in my 8th grade geography class being scared to death, because we were told with predictive models that the Netherlands would be gone by year 2050. We were shown a map of how the rising water levels would make so many countries disappear and drown. We were told the livable space would shrink and we need to invite people out of those countries into ours.

And yet, nearly 40 years later, the catastrophe we are actually dealing with is very different. Yes, we have a lot of migrants living in European and other Western countries. But not because of rising water levels.

Another hoax.

Another hoax to enforce behavior and compliance from populations: give more, demand less. Be happy with very little. Prioritize everyone, but your own family and community.

We have been hoaxed so many times that by now we need to understand that all these scare tactics are used as a manipulation tool. We are being manipulated into behaviors we otherwise would not engage in.

We have been subjected to this type of manipulation for so long that even when something as outrageous as the Covid restrictions came, we just accepted them as the new normal without even the littlest hesitation. Have you ever wondered why it was so easy for so many people to be told to stay home, wear masks, and get some substance injected?

I am quite sure a new model will be established, yet, giving a new timeline of when the world will collapse. Sounding scientific and factual. And everyone will just follow along. I know new behavioral patterns will require us… to demand less, give more… just like always. We have given up so many things already, what is one more thing? Who really misses halogen lightbulbs, appliances and cars you can repair yourself, doctor visits where you were not sold up on injections, treatments, supplements, or medications? Are you missing a life that felt way more controllable where you worked hard and harvested what you sowed.

Yes, there is nostalgia driving some of my assumptions, but in general, I sometimes want to escape to a life without smartphones, no digitalization of every aspect in life, and with a bunch of goats and rabbits. Maybe chickens. Something so real that any fakeness will not penetrate your life.

Are you inoculated enough to reject the next hoax?