This message from the UNC Progressive Student and Faculty listserv explains how mob mentality has clouded our understanding of 9/11, no matter what you choose to believe:

William:

Let me qualify my remarks by saying that I am sincerely not out to attack you personally. However, I do feel like I am "investigating" a certain kind of mentality, an approach to understanding things, a way of thinking, that you do seem from time to time to personify and display, and I believe, as a philosopher, that we all (humanity) need to take a good look at this kind of approach to the world -- which can be said to be prominent throughout Western philosophy over the centuries--so we can understand it, critique it, and then temper it with other ways of thinking.

Your terse responses are excellent in exhibiting this kind of thinking.
For example, your last statement, below, shows classical binary, either/or dualism:

On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, WILLIAM MARTIN wrote:

"The study by the MIT sponsored structural engineers must be taken seriously. You cannot ignore it. Either you must say that they, MIT and Scientific American were in on the conspiracy or they are all incompetent.

These people have nothing to do with either Bush or the government."

We MUST say EITHER a certain group of people were "in the conspiracy" OR "they were all incompetent"?

Well, not necessarily. As I watch with interest the emerging epistemic gap that has sprung up between what I happen to know about particular issues and what the official SPIN is, I am also noticing how many people, even among my friends and colleagues, are struggling within themselves to deal with the cognitive dissonance. As a teacher of Existentialism, I would say this kind of psychological struggle can lead to what Jean-Paul Sartre calls "bad faith," often defined as self-deception, though I think this definition misses some subtleties. At least for a certain period of time, the individual cannot handle the conflicting beliefs, cannot process them into an integrated understanding of "reality," and so they are blocked from full conscious attention.

The picture is further complicated when we add in social psychology (which Sartre also addressed in his later writings). There are many examples, both real-world and experimental, that demonstrate how strongly individual humans are influenced by the beliefs and emotional biases of others in their own "group," however that may be defined. The Solomon Asch experiments show that many people will go against the testimony of their own eyes to say that the shorter line is the longest line on a diagram, in order to conform to the stated beliefs of others in a group of strangers, just so they will "fit in" and be accepted by the group. The "bystander and victim" experiments by Latane and Darley demonstrate that the willingness of an experimental subject to help in response to cries of pain from another person drops from 70% to 7% when an unresponsive "stooge" is present (the real-world Kitty Genovese tragedy set the stage for these experiments). The Obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram and the Stanford Prison Experiment of Philip Zimbardo are well known and were in the news again when the Abu Ghraib story first broke. The social psychology of Hitler's rise to power and the abuses that occurred under the Nazi regime are also well known and well studied -- I include a section examining the deeds of the Nazi doctors in my bioethics classes. The conclusion? Even very "moral" people will do shocking things that violate their own ethical values when subject to social pressures -- even fairly mild pressures, it seems.

Putting these things together, it should not be surprising that questions about what happened on 9/11, or questions about lots of other shameful situations, from the persistent denial of global climate change to the "let's look the other way" attitude many share with respect to "mad cow disease" in the United States, are being actively suppressed, held just below the level of conscious thought, by the vast majority of people in this country. These are ideas that "must not be thought"--because to entertain even for a few moments the notion that perhaps our own government may have callously allowed, or even set up, thousands of Americans to die in order to facilitate its own agenda is simply too horrible to bear right now.

So, no, I don't think it's correct to say that the scientists and engineers at MIT or associated with Scientific American or Popular Mechanics are either in on the conspiracry or incompetent. They are subject to the same sorts of internal and external psychological tensions that we all are, plus they may have additional, more specific pressures regarding federal funding, academic politics, the goals of those who control the publishing industry, etc to contend with. The questions are still simmering in "the backs of the minds" of many knowledgable people. And the wheels of academia move slowly: there was some kind of hearing about 9/11 before an NSF panel this past weekend, in fact. And, as with the German physicians who came to believe they were all caught up in the "blood cement," inhibiting them from speaking out even if they were not facing the barrel of a gun, you don't have to be either "in on the conspiracy" or "incompetent" to be a bit slow to reach unhappy conclusions and even slower to speak out. (Just look at how faculty at UCF are responsing to what's happening to our "faculty governance.")

I don't know what happened on September 11, 2001. For some reason, however, I have always been relatively tough-minded and have always looked at people who turn their heads away from uncomfortable truths as, in the final analysis, coiwards, so I try not to let myself get away with such self-deception masquerading as self-protection. I do believe that the American people have not been given a truthful account of what went on in the "official story," and I find some of the alternative accounts to be quite reasonable. I look forward to watching as more and more people who are structural engineers and the like begin to overcome their internal censoring and their fears of external sanctions to discuss what, in their best judgment, they think was most probable. I even know a few people who have the sort of background in the physical sciences to come to well-reasoned judgments about what went on, and I know some of them are in fact quite dubious about the official account.

The typical approach of the Western/male mindset, however, which you illustrate so well, is to set up a dualism that seems to make one "side" of the controversy look absurd so that the whole issue can be summarily dismissed from further thought.

This is what you see with, for example, ethical issues raised about how humans treat other forms of life -- the dualism would be posed as, for example, either you privilege human life as being much, much more valuable than any other life or you decide that every bacterial cell must be treated as on a par with a human being. Since this latter pole of the dualism seems patently absurd, you can throw away the entire discussion and go on with the human takeover of the biosphere (which is giving us global climate change among other things) and with supporting the factory farming industry (which is bringing us the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies), et cetera et cetera.

In addition to this handy mechanism of dualistic thinking, which enables such thought throw-aways, the Western/male mindset also seems to be rather right-hemisphere impaired: the approach is quite good at linear thought and manipulation of digital information -- classic example being "money," little digits in computer banks that are often wildly disconnected from what our adherence to the money-is-power fascination leads us to do in the real world of biological organisms and systems. Learning to use BOTH sides of our cerebral cortex, like learning to transcend false dichotomies and grapple with the actual, if complex, situations we confront, is essential at this time in our human history -- we need to see our situation, grasp the gestalt. It is the intransigent refusal to SEE the gestalt when it's right in front of us -- the proverbial "elephant in the living room" -- that I am finding more and more tiresome these days, on the part of many in our male primate hierarchy, and that's why I am also intrigued by your apparent dismissal of "wholistic >>> practitioners of whatever" in your earlier post. There IS a place for (w)holism in the life of a rational animal -- in fact, I believe our hemispheric specialization -- along with interhemispheric communication by means of the corpus callosum -- is an adaptation for survival that we fail to make use of at our own peril. (There are interesting differences between malew and female brains being discovered "as we speak," by the way--that may possibly be a source of hope.)

So, William, please understand that I am not personally attacking you, but that I feel it is my ethical duty to challenge a certain type of thinking that you sometimes exhibit. We all need to direct our attention to alternative possible patterns of human thought if we are ever to overcome our "let's US make war on THEM" mentality, and analyzing the aspects I am considering here is just the first step.