A great look at what the Yes Men do:
The power of faith to transcend the most obvious logic is a well-established phenomenon. When the Crusaders discovered themselves in pitched battle against Christians they had travelled thousands of miles to save, they refused to amend their theory that these Christians needed their help. Faith!
Faith, likewise, spurred thirty-nine web developers to don Nikes and swallow poison, on the theory”‘not backed by much solid evidence”‘that they’d shortly meet up on the Hale-Bopp Comet. (The “Heaven’s Gate” suicide was remarkable among mass suicides for its interface with observational astronomy.) And when Appalachian snake handlers insist on dancing with poisonous critters, despite not-so-rare deaths and lost limbs, it is from faith in the theory that God is protecting them. (The basis for this often-contradicted theory is two Biblical verses: “They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them” “‘Mark 16:18″‘and “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions” “‘Luke 10:19.)Similarly, our audience of lawyers in Salzburg had a theory”‘that the free market could bring happiness to the world at large”‘and they had the deepest possible faith in it. We had imagined that if we pushed our proposals into the outer limits of ugliness, we could horrify our audience into objecting. But the nature of their faith was such that so long as our proposals derived from the one true theory, there was no way they would ever see anything wrong with them.
November 19, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Hmm, interesting. Once we’ve learned to trust something it’s hard to start questioning it, it seems.
Do people actually believe in the market anyway? With reoccurring financial crises, and the obvious overuse of natural resources, shouldn’t there be more people protesting life as we know it?
November 19, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Also, awesome Yes Men videos here:
Yay slaves!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5206347030584294754&ei=v7YkSfP5FpzUqAO44NzAAQ&q=yes+men
Yay pollution!