I hear this when I discuss why I believe government agents plotted and perpetrated the crimes of 9/11, for instance. Or when I say that Lee Harvey Oswald was framed and others shot President Kennedy.
This statement presents a non-falsifiable claim - that secrets about our government are always revealed - because we have no way to prove one way or the other that the statement is true or false. This problem occurs because we cannot see the successfully kept secrets, which leaves us in doubt as to whether secrets are always revealed.
The best way to deal with this unfair statement is to re-frame the issue: Maybe the secret is out and those who do not "know" the secret have not bothered to discover it.
It would change the way people discuss these topics. Those who support the government's invariable position that the government did not conspire to commit the aforementioned events or others, such as the successful coup of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973, would now be on the defensive. They could no longer tell people to "knock off the conspiracy talk."
Instead of having to prove our case of government agent complicity over and over, we could, with the help of an informed and enthusiastic public, take legal action against the perpetrators. People like former Vice President Dick Cheney could no longer hide behind the secret that has kept him from a grand jury for the past eight years. He would have to do what anyone else accused of a crime would do - get an attorney for help with his legal options.
Likewise, I sometimes hear that people who do not believe a certain way about religion will go to hell. The people who speak of this place of eternal fire never say that they themselves will go there and they insist that the place exists as they describe it.
Instead of taking their word for it, we can re-frame the issue: What if hell does not exist or exists in other way?
Hell could be what happens when a person loses their integrity, not just to the world but to themselves. It could be what one might feel if they had nothing to look for, as if the one thing they need in life will, like Godot, never arrive.
We can do and feel so much better when we refuse to let other people tell us that there is some "secret" that we do not know. Or that what we do know cannot be true because the other person does not think so. The truth does not come from the mouth of another; it goes through our own minds.
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