Quote of the Week...from Carl Sagan

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.  We're no longer interested in finding out the truth.  The bamboozle has captured us.  It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken.  Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never give it back.                   ---Carl Sagan

One of the reasons I picked the above quote...which I once again first saw as a posting by WKTK Radio morning show personality Storm Roberts...is the frequent use of the word "bamboozle": I like it and plan to use it myself.  Carl Sagan was the astronomer who created the 1980s TV series Cosmos in its original run and did much to bring complex science to a level that the masses can understand.  He also seemed pretty adept at understanding how people think, for this quote of his directly applies in great measure to our present time here in 2020, 24 years after his death.  Last Sunday I was driving down NW 39th Avenue here in Gainesville...as I crossed over I-75 I saw several people on the sidewalk overlooking the Interstate, waving big Trump banners to the passing traffic below them.  Today it's more than three weeks after the election with state after state certifying Biden's victory over the sitting president, but Trump refuses to concede, claiming massive voter fraud although all of his legal challenges have been rebuffed in court.  Whether one voted for Donald Trump or not, any reasonable conclusion from his behavior is that he is a sore loser and never acknowledges defeat...but apparently some two thirds of his supporters are incapable of seeing what is right in front of them and have chosen to parrot the president's claim of mass election rigging.  This probably happens in every close election to some extent...I vividly remember disappointed people in 2016 after Trump won exclaiming "Not my president!"...but this year the degree of denial from the losing side seems to be have sharply accelerated. Why?  I think that, along with a very unhealthy personality cult here, it has a lot to do with what Sagan called "bamboozling". People have been fooled by politicians since time immemorable, but recently with the rise of social media like Facebook and Twitter many of the suckers have gone on public record with their views, for anyone to see.  While in previous times folks could just shrug off their betrayed faith in a political figure, nowadays it's probably too humiliating for someone, after so adamantly publicly supporting a con, to admit they were bamboozled.  So instead many just continue with their delusions, existing in an artificial social bubble of an alternate universe where Donald Trump easily won reelection and was cheated out of a second term by a vast, extremely elaborate conspiracy.  As someone generally skeptical of conspiracy theories, I agree with Sagan that it's probably a waste of time for anyone to attempt to steer any of these people back to reality...their pride is too painfully threatened...