By the same token, Jestor, you must not only question what people tell you, but question whether or not such a question is necessary. A wise woman once told me (and I'm paraphrasing from memory, but this is close):
\"If we question too much and too often, we fail to see the beauty of life which is before us when we take a completely unjustified leap of faith.\"
I'm glad to see that phrase \"I don't know,\" used with the sincerity you did. Lots of people use that line as a copout, choosing instead to believe what they will.
Belief isn't a wholly negative thing, but make sure that your faith in something like government is justified. Trust is a good thing when it's not blind. And when someone wants to upend that trust, the question becomes one of what their purpose in doing so it. Do they want to hurt the trusted individual or group? Do they want control? Or perhaps money? Are they rabble-rousers who just want attention? Or are they just prone to stirring the pot a bit, seeing what rises to the surface?
The amount of self-importance which someone who does it for selfish aims such as these cannot be trusted.
A better aim is to protect people from madness, but our whole society in the US went insane after September 11, 2001: insane from the pain of the first attack by foreigners on our home turf in 60 years (give or take), insane from the grief of economic and social change which made everyone more desperate and greedy, insane from the anger and outrage at the lives lost, and insane from the changes which politicians enacted which eroded our personal freedoms in the name of \"catching the bad guys\" instead of empowering people.
And we were led by someone who by all rights acted insane.
But those who had an interest in discrediting the official version of the story had good reason to begin questioning it, especially as things just didn't match what we all knew to be true. It doesn't matter if Building 7 was demolished with dynamite, C4 or a tactical nuclear warhead; what matters is not whether or not a lie was being told, but in what details were lied about. We know that there were lies, but we can't simply question every detail and expect it to uncover other lies.
Some details simply don't matter, where the whole picture is concerned.
Nobody stops to consider that centralized banking is a private industry, and that at present it actually controls politics in a very big way. But most conspiracies I've heard go completely the other direction, that government is somehow the corrupting influence. But what if the banks are corrupting government in a way that nobody suspects, by offering them expensive gifts that they don't have to pay for, or compensating them in ways which don't have to be reported? What if government officials were so influenced by banking and other private industries that they were willing to go to great lengths to protect the rights of these organizations above the rights of citizens.
In the US, this has just happened. And the scarier part of that: it's the way things in Europe have been for 50 years and more. The erosion of democracy is something that most people just don't see happening when it's right in front of them, and yet we're still worried over whether or not \"Avatar\" is knocked out of the first-place cinema box-office spot after 6 weeks of being there, and why Vanity Fair Magazine is racist?
We must question what we're being spoon-fed. There is certainly a bias in the news media, and the issue is not that government controls big business, but whether or not big business controls government.
They love it when we have someone to focus on who isn't them; and yet they stick around, continuing to create more power and laws, and nobody stops to even consider the source of the information they view on a daily basis. And when someone like me tries to point out that there are bigger issues, I get told that they're boring and uninteresting, so they're ignored.
The death of liberty is apathy. And we have it today in spades.
But what do we question?