Not that I think such a cabal exists per se, but certain powerful groups can make such decisions, and these groups do exist.
Bear in mind Hanlon's Razor : Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Also, as others said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
If it bothers you and is senseless, choose other people to hang around with.
I have always chosen to hang out with people that are more like-minded. However, just over Christmas, I had the pleasure of interacting with family which brought up this question.
Although I don't see them much, some of them are pretty educated. It's kinda sad, actually, to see them truly believe this stuff. So it's more out of me genuinely wanting to help them, not prove them wrong.
For instance, it's plausible that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was made well in advance by a small group. Is that what is meant by "run the US"? The outcome and consequences of the Iraq war don't seem to have gone to anyone's plan. What part of the US is being "run" and what part isn't?
But as we got modern postal services, the telegraph and so on, economic events on one side of a continent became pertinent to people on the other, and they would hear of them in short order. The technology made people feel invested in a nation's politics, so they could, and felt they had a right to, participate.
So I would have said that in today's information society, in the age of TV and Wikileaks, a 5-man dictatorship can't effectively function. Too many people feel too invested in national and world events to permit it without a Soviet-style iron control of channels of information. But the effect of corporate money on what kind of information gets mainstream attention is a whole other question.
Yup, came here to post just that.
Additionally, you can take some cards from Skeptics in general, and assert that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Burden of proof lies not on the skeptic, but on the one with the ludicrous claim.
It could be as a result of me being tired...but I couldn't quite understand it.
Thanks.
For example, a car accident could be caused by a driver attempting to SMS while driving, or an extraterrestrial life form stealing the drivers' thoughts and consciousness temporarily.
Occam's razor would suggest that the simplest explaination (in this case, texting) is more likely to be the correct explaination, rather than a more complicated (though technically still possible) explaination.
Occam's razor has its place in science (where it consistently holds true), but also applies to things like conspiracy theories.
"Simple" is a subjective term.
The way I understand it, the simplest explanation is not the one that "makes sense to me", but the one with less unneeded baggage.
And it's not a principle of logic, but a general guideline. So take it with a grain of salt.
Consider a pen falling down, and consider these explanations:
1. Things always fall down
2. There exists gravitational force between bodies
3. Relativity's explanation about how bodies bend spacetime (which frankly I don't really understand).
#1 is the simplest, but the least accurate. #3 is more complex but more accurate. And when I say it's more complex, I mean relative to #1 of course.
Relativity (from what I understand) is actually simple (once you have the right mental model), but to the uninitiated, it appears to be rather complex, and #1 would appear to be much simpler. But, it would be wrong to dismiss Relativity based on "Occam's razor".
Which is why it's sometimes stated as "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily" - i.e pick the explanation with the fewest moving parts. That's less subjective, assuming you can agree on how to count the entities.
1. Things always fall down
This is not actually an explanation at all, it just restates the observation.
2. There exists gravitational force between bodies
Newton's inverse square law of gravitation is simpler than relativity, and it's good enough for a lot of uses. But it is not a viable explanation either, since it does not fit exactly with observed reality - it does not handle the edge cases of very fast or very heavy stuff.
It's an explanation for "why the pen fell down". It states a law whereby "things always fall down".
"Things always fall down" doesn't add much. It says that the observation can be repeated.
Newton's law says more than "There exists gravitational force between bodies" which isn't much of an improvement over "things always fall down".
Newton provided a mathematical formula to measure it, which, as best as could be seen in Newton's time, fit exactly with reality, applying from apples up to planets. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gra...
This makes testable, measurable predictions about "why things fall down", i.e. "things fall down because all things obey the law of universal gravitation as given in the formula...". But it doesn't even begin to explain why there is gravity all rather than no gravity. Science is largely silent about this category of question of meaning not measurement - it observes reality and predicts based on extrapolating from existing observations. Other explanations of "why" are hardly much better - "gravity exists because God said so" aren't very satisfying since you can't test it or infer anything from it.