Part of it is that people do want to believe that they live in a just world.
People know that injustice occurs. They know that bad things happen to good people and all that. But at heart, people like to believe as MLK said that "the moral arc of history bends towards justice". That's why you always hear liberals talking about "being on the right side of history". That phrase "the right side of history" implies a faith in the universe it is ultimately good and moral. That while the bad guys may get the upper hand for a time, in the end, the good guys always win.
The scale of deception being perpetrated on society by our overlords is of such an extraordinary magnitude that it boggles the mind. People don't want to believe that their own society is capable of that level of dishonesty. Maybe that sort of thing happens in North Korea. Maybe it happened in Stalin's Russia or in Nazi Germany. But MY society? Surely MY society is capable not of that level of dishonesty. The idea that EVERYONE is lying to them, the media, academia, the politicians, the celebrities, big business.... People don't want to believe that level of deception is even possible.
And people would like to believe that surely there must be mechanisms in place that would make that level of deception impossible. If the BBC started lying to them, then Sky News would call them out. If the New York Times started making up bullshit, then the Boston Globe would reveal the lie. Surely in a "free society" the truth must ultimately and always prevail.
So I get people being suspicious of me. Because if what I am saying is true, then that means all of society is lying to them. On a pure emotional level, it just feels more likely that I, some random dude on the internet, am full of shit than that all of society is lying to them. That if I was telling the truth, then surely they would be hearing it from people with more credentials and trapping of authority than I have. I understand that feeling.
If there were in any doubt at all, then you would think there would at least be a debate about it going on. But there is no debate. Democrats and Republicans, Labor and Tory, Fox News and MSNBC, Christians and atheists, Blood and Crips, they may all disagree ferociously on a whole spectrum of issues from taxes to abortion to anthropogenic climate change. But there is one thing all them agree on and that's that all races are equal and that racism is the absolute worst thing in the world. They may disagree on absolutely every other issue under the sun but that's the one thing that EVERYONE agrees on. Who are you go to believe: me or all of society?
So when people say things like "all the evidence shows", they probably believe it does. But they don't believe that because they personally have seen that evidence. They just assume that it MUST be out there. It MUST be. Mountain of evidence. The size of Mount Everest. And that evidence absolutely 100% says what they think it says.
When Verso says stuff like "If you said that in a room full of academics, they would laugh at you", he probably believes that. It's his way of saying "While I personally can't explain to you why you are wrong because I've never really taken the time to look into the evidence, SURELY those big brains in the university who HAVE looked into this stuff could debunk it six ways to Sunday."
And do you know why they think that? Because if that's not the case, if the evidence isn't there and it isn't overwhelming and incontrovertible, then that means all of society is lying to them and people don't want to believe that is possible. That would make the world they live in not just unjust, not just dishonest, but unimaginably cruel. It means their society has been manipulating their emotions their entire life, guilting them and making them feel like shit with lies. And people do not want to believe that their own society is capable of that level of cruelty.
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