Today Adam (yes contrary to popular belief he is still alive) sent me a text telling me something he’d heard about another friend of mine, who will remain nameless. I’ve no idea whether or not what he has said is true or not until i talke to my other friend but it got me thinking on the power rumours have.

The world is full of examples where people have taken action based upon the strength of rumour alone. Given the right atmosphere rumours can take on a life of their own. It becomes irrelevant whether or not the rumour is true, the mere existance of the rumour is enough to cause dramatic results.

Look at modern examples, i’ll pick on the Iraq war here as its very controversial current event. Now there may have been lots of reasons why the war in Iraq began and we could debate them until the end of time. But one of the big reasons was that it was suggested that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Now at the time no one really knew whether or not this was true and arguments flew back and forth on the issue, but the mere existance of the rumour was sufficent to sway many people into supporting war.

This is just one example of how a simple rumour can have dramatic world changing consequences, there a thousands more examples where rumours have brought about change, be it on a global scale or just small changes in our own personel lives. The fact is one should never underestimate the power of rumour and its ability to bring about dramatic consequences.

So next time you hear a rumour, stop and think a moment before passing it on, it could have greater effect than you think.

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Tags: Change, consequences, dramatic, rumour

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.