One of the great beliefs of the democratic society is one can believe in whatever one wants to as long as it does not break any laws. From this belief a book called Counterknowledge by Damian Thompson, Penguin Books, London, 2008 was written. The premise is how we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science, and fake history. In the modern age which we are in, we all have access to great amounts of information, most of it we do not know what to do with, but there is a great amount of information and more and more of it is on the internet. The internet started for government officials and university researchers sharing and trying to find more information to lead to a decision. Whatever topic you are interested in, there is something for you on the internet, most of us rarely go to most of it until something affects us personally. When something affects us, we want to communicate with others and come to a decision and move to other things in our lives.

In theory, we are better educated than the previous generation which allows us to look at the facts, do the research and make decisions. Unfortunately, when we do research, there is a great deal of counterknowledge or misinformation packaged to look like fact – packaged so well it could be fact. Ideas that use to be on the fringes of society and now being taken seriously be the general public. The essence of counterknowledge is that it purports to be knowledge but is not knowledge. Its claims can be shown to be untrue, it misrepresents reality by presenting non-facts as facts.

It is important to understand, why theories are being offered, for counterknowledge has been used through the generations to affect a particular response. Only now in the internet age. more of them can be seen and some them are based on the existing companies and government having done wrong in the past for a particular end. For example, the classic case is drug companies bringing out a drug with a bad side affect to make money. Is natural then better? or worse? Another classic case in the past was the Spanish Inquisition where the Catholic church killed people for not believing in their religion. Spain formerly had Muslim and Jewish communities, when the new ruler who was Catholic decided all should be Catholic, many died who were accused on not being Catholic enough. There are many examples in our day to day lives of counterknowledge.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the internet brings challenges to every company because people have the tools to research and make a decision. Upon making a decision, they can tell the world, once in a while it goes viral. When it does, the company has to make a decision about the reason or sales may go down. It may be correct or incorrect, but decisions have to be made. The decision will have impacts one way or the other, and resources have to be spent to counteract the claim to show that it is not what is suggested. The important question is why is someone making the claim? what results are expected? people have all kinds of agendas some of them are good.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions