The root of irrationality

Under the flow of events that point forward, such as the prime minister’s announcements on Saturday regarding the 36 measures to improve everyday life at the Thessaloniki International Fair, under shocking events that define new dimensions in common things, under the alternation of incidents that constantly modify the content of our lives, lies a parallel reality that emerges in almost every crisis, big or small, and keeps us stuck in stagnant shallow waters.

A fire breaks out on a slope on an island and somebody says, “They started it to plant wind turbines,” and some others immediately agree. Islanders’ intolerance of wind farms is well known, and they’re partly right, due to past zoning mistakes and illegalities, but it’s a wonder how an old conspiracy theory that has been debunked repeatedly, after the mega-fires in Evia and Dadia, survives.

Environmentalists, organizations and people involved in scientific associations are tired of explaining again and again that there is no incentive to start a fire, there is no need to burn a forest to install a wind farm – this is already allowed by law in forested and reforested lands; that no evidence has ever emerged nor are wind turbines placed in burnt areas, where licensing and installation is not allowed; that the wind turbines do not threaten the forests, they protect them, since the cleared roads provide access to the fire brigade, while the water reservoirs of the wind parks are a godsend in the battle against a blaze.

Yet, the conspiracy does not dissolve, the truth is defeated. The simplistic response to what one doesn’t understand is not easily uprooted from the beliefs of a people who are suspicious, prone to denial, confused by our complex fluid times. It is not enough that research shows more than 90% of wildfires are due to human negligence. Seventy percent of Greeks still believe that they are all set by arsonists.

Myths are not weakened by the overwhelming evidence against them. Distrust of institutions wins. An inexplicable event (“Why do many outbreaks appear at the same time in different places?”) is enough to arouse paranoia. It is not only the difficulty of managing fear in a world surrounded by threats, it is also that irrationality acts as a pressure valve for the problems of the pocket, the mind and the heart.