bashi
25th November 2010, 14:39
"In a country that has a large, educated population there is a large subset of individuals who suffer from what's called paraphrenia. Paraphrenia is a form of mental illness that doesn't interfere with your everyday life. It means that you can have a delusion and not be crazy, a delusion that you can confine and control. Many of us have one corner of the mind that is delusional - I bet you that I do.
'I might, for example, be religious - I'm an Episcopalian, though as such, I am protected from diagnosis, as are all the UFO buffs, because a large social structure of shared beliefs, like a religion, cannot be a delusion. So all those people who believe that they are being beamed at by the government can no longer be diagnosed as crazy - there are just too many of them.
'But, if there is a condition that is threatening to the social structure - like the idea that the aliens are here and they are taking our babies, or that God hates people of a certain creed or colour - and if people who believe in that kind of delusion band together, they can end up encouraging each other to get a lot sicker, or they strap on belts and make themselves human bombs. So we have to know how to deal with these people and how to prevent them from being dangerous to others.
'This applies to the UFO problem. If something really strange in the area of UFOs is true, then what do we do about conveying that information to the public? First we consider what may be the basic facts: maybe there are civilised lifeforms elsewhere in the universe; maybe they visited us in their spaceships a couple of times and then went back home; perhaps they left a vehicle or some technology behind and we've spent a lot of time and money trying to figure out how to use it. And there may be people in the government who believe that this did happen, and believe that the information needs to be public knowledge, because perhaps someone outside of the government will be able to make sense of their technology. But there's another group of people in power who say, "No, it will make them sick to know all this, we can't let the story out, it's too dangerous." '
'So, what do we do? There are studies on both sides of the problem. Some show that people will go crazy and jump of bridges when they're presented with this information. Others, however, say that if you don't want them to go crazy, what you do is systematically desensitize their fears.
'If you are a psychiatrist with a patient you can do that in a very methodical way. If you are a sociologist working with a group of students at a university you can do this in a very structured and experimental way. But if you are a government with a population it's a lot more complicated. Sure, there are those who are just going to shrug and say, "I always knew the aliens were real, it's no big deal." But you also know that some of them are nuttier than a fruitcake and could cause a lot of trouble. So we have to ask ourselves how we can tell people what they deserve to know and, maybe, what they need to know?
'The way to do it is to construct a framework whereby they can parse out the things that they've heard that are not true, and you whittle it down to a manageable story. A story like this: "There were three spaceships that came here over thirty years, and we've got one of them. We can't figure out how it works, we've crashed it because there's a lot of physics that we've still got to learn. We do have something that's like a magnethydrodynamic toroid, and it really did get a craft of the ground, but it smelled bad and it killed a couple of pilots. And we're really sorry about that, but we did it because we've got this machine that came from another planet, and we need to know how it works." '
"If you were to give them the core story right off the bat, they'd get sick, so you do it slowly over ten or twenty years.You put out a bunch of movies, a bunch of books, a bunch of stories, a bunch of Internet memes about reptilian aliens eating our children, about all the crazy stuff that we've seen recently in Serpo. Then one day you say, "Hey, all that stuff is nonsense, relax, it's not that bad, you don't have to worry, the reality is this..." - and then you give them the real story."
Source: 'Mirage Men' by Mark Pilkington
'I might, for example, be religious - I'm an Episcopalian, though as such, I am protected from diagnosis, as are all the UFO buffs, because a large social structure of shared beliefs, like a religion, cannot be a delusion. So all those people who believe that they are being beamed at by the government can no longer be diagnosed as crazy - there are just too many of them.
'But, if there is a condition that is threatening to the social structure - like the idea that the aliens are here and they are taking our babies, or that God hates people of a certain creed or colour - and if people who believe in that kind of delusion band together, they can end up encouraging each other to get a lot sicker, or they strap on belts and make themselves human bombs. So we have to know how to deal with these people and how to prevent them from being dangerous to others.
'This applies to the UFO problem. If something really strange in the area of UFOs is true, then what do we do about conveying that information to the public? First we consider what may be the basic facts: maybe there are civilised lifeforms elsewhere in the universe; maybe they visited us in their spaceships a couple of times and then went back home; perhaps they left a vehicle or some technology behind and we've spent a lot of time and money trying to figure out how to use it. And there may be people in the government who believe that this did happen, and believe that the information needs to be public knowledge, because perhaps someone outside of the government will be able to make sense of their technology. But there's another group of people in power who say, "No, it will make them sick to know all this, we can't let the story out, it's too dangerous." '
'So, what do we do? There are studies on both sides of the problem. Some show that people will go crazy and jump of bridges when they're presented with this information. Others, however, say that if you don't want them to go crazy, what you do is systematically desensitize their fears.
'If you are a psychiatrist with a patient you can do that in a very methodical way. If you are a sociologist working with a group of students at a university you can do this in a very structured and experimental way. But if you are a government with a population it's a lot more complicated. Sure, there are those who are just going to shrug and say, "I always knew the aliens were real, it's no big deal." But you also know that some of them are nuttier than a fruitcake and could cause a lot of trouble. So we have to ask ourselves how we can tell people what they deserve to know and, maybe, what they need to know?
'The way to do it is to construct a framework whereby they can parse out the things that they've heard that are not true, and you whittle it down to a manageable story. A story like this: "There were three spaceships that came here over thirty years, and we've got one of them. We can't figure out how it works, we've crashed it because there's a lot of physics that we've still got to learn. We do have something that's like a magnethydrodynamic toroid, and it really did get a craft of the ground, but it smelled bad and it killed a couple of pilots. And we're really sorry about that, but we did it because we've got this machine that came from another planet, and we need to know how it works." '
"If you were to give them the core story right off the bat, they'd get sick, so you do it slowly over ten or twenty years.You put out a bunch of movies, a bunch of books, a bunch of stories, a bunch of Internet memes about reptilian aliens eating our children, about all the crazy stuff that we've seen recently in Serpo. Then one day you say, "Hey, all that stuff is nonsense, relax, it's not that bad, you don't have to worry, the reality is this..." - and then you give them the real story."
Source: 'Mirage Men' by Mark Pilkington