So, the following story about how dangerous it can be to use pop psychology as a basis for character assassination is immensely interesting because it holds much relevance to the present cultural trend of analyzing occult symbolism in the media, especially since that trend is largely driven by evangelical Christians who see any deviation from the "traditional family" as evidence of wrong-doing. Given that there really are occult organizations such as high-ranking Freemasonry involved in genuinely sinister activities such as wide-scale child pornography, human trafficking and trauma-based mind control programs, there is the potential for exposure and discussion of these issues to dissipate into a literal witch hunt based on superstition and religious phobia. The overlap between military and Freemason-sponsored mind control projects is a ripe area for this dissolution because corporate media is both so widely disseminated and intentionally provocative, and also because analysis in this area can be much easier than wading through stacks of pages and throughly familiarizing ones self with the issues involved.
Ultimately, this kind of pearl-clutching hysteria obscures the real problems that people need to be made aware of, since only a very limited demographic is going to take claims such as sexual slavery for the worlds' elites seriously when those claims are mixed in with moral condemnations about some celebrity cheating on their wife or being intoxicated in public, since the latter kind of problems are all too mundane and predictable. It can be tempting to jump to conclusions given the overwhelming prevalence of Freemasonic symbolism in the media, assuming that such and such producer is a handler who drugs and sexually exploits his stars, because abuses like these are a routine part of the entertainment industry and to a certain extent this is common sense--although your average person really has no idea exactly how well-organized and extreme this kind of personality deconstruction really is. Closely looking into the personal history of Britney Spears or Marilyn Monroe provides more than enough evidence proving that there are celebrities out there whose management team violates basic human dignity, and in combination with the history of celebrity assassinations, many carried out largely for the purpose of collecting stars' post mortem revenues, speculation is rendered unnecessary. Point being: stick to the facts, or at least to personal knowledge before potentially destroying people's lives from the anonymous comfort of your keyboard. Hopefully the exoneration on Amanda Knox can serve as an example of the kind of harm that can be inflicted by unfounded accusations, whether those accusations are practiced by government officials or the public as a whole.
Amanda Knox: What's in a face?
Amanda Knox was convicted of murder and her reputation sullied around the world, in large part because of her facial expressions and demeanour. Her story reveals how our instincts about others can be dangerously superficial.
In the days and weeks following the discovery of Meredith Kercher's body, Italian police found no physical evidence linking Amanda Knox to the murder. But then, they didn't need it: they could tell Knox was guilty just by looking at her. "We were able to establish guilt," said Edgardo Giobbi, the lead investigator, "by closely observing the suspect's psychological and behavioural reaction during the interrogation. We don't need to rely on other kinds of investigation." Giobbi said that his suspicions were first raised just hours after the murder, at the crime scene, when he watched Knox execute a provocative swivel of her hips as she put on a pair of shoe covers.
Little about Knox's behaviour during that time matched how the investigators imagined a wrongfully accused woman should conduct herself. She appeared too cool and calm, they said – and yet also, it seems, oddly libidinous. One policeman said she "smelled of sex", and investigators were particularly disturbed by a video that first appeared on YouTube, shortly after the investigation began, which showed Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in each other's arms outside the cottage in which Kercher was murdered, as the investigation proceeded inside.In fact, the video is anything but sexy. Knox, looking wan and dazed, exchanges chaste kisses with Sollecito, who rubs her arm consolingly.
...It's not just police or legal professionals who make this error. We all have an inherent bias towards assuming that we can discern a person's inner mental state simply by observing them...It is astonishing how quick we are to draw conclusions about how a person ought to look or behave in circumstances we haven't ourselves even come close to experiencing. How many of us have returned to our home after a night away to discover that our flatmate has been brutally murdered? How many of us can know what it feels like to be at the sharp end of a punishing interrogation, in a foreign country, carried out by men in uniform who seem absolutely convinced that they know what happened, who are as certain as we are confused, fearful and exhausted? None of us. And yet we feel free to blithely pronounce, from a great distance, on whether someone in this situation is "acting weird" or not. What does it stem from, this over-confidence in facile intuitions about what other people are thinking? It probably has something to do with our innate difficulty in recognising that other people are as fully rounded and complex as we are.
...Thinking about what others might be thinking and feeling is hard work. It requires intellectual application, empathy, and imagination. Most of the time we can barely be bothered to exert such efforts on behalf of our friends and partners, let alone on people we read about in the news. We fall back on guesses, stereotypes, and prejudices. This is inevitable, and not always a bad thing. The trouble comes when we confuse our short-cuts with judgment.
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