This is a good exercise in understanding the difference between having alot of information and using reason and logic to draw appropriate conclusions. You can read every book on the planet on a particular subject and STILL draw irrelevant conclusions from that information, like you have most likely done.

It's not just having information that makes one intelligent or informed or an "expert" -- it's how that information is interpreted and used. What one does with the information gathered ultimately depends on the person doing the gathering.

For example, you might purchase a set of binoculars and take in every sight that is available to you, but what ultimately gets seen on the other end depends on the state of the instrument. If your instrument is dirty or imprecise, what you end up seeing is not a beautiful landscape, but something tainted or skewed.

You have to work on having a functional, stable instrument before you can "see".

All of the information in the world is useless unless one is capable of processing that information carefully and precisely and objectively, without projecting one's pre-existing beliefs, dogmas, or ideologies onto that information. If one is already convinced the world is out to get her, it's not difficult to locate information that could be interpreted to support that pre-existing belief. In essence, *everything* can be interpreted as evidence to support a particular viewpoint when one has already made up their mind.

People who are victimized in some way or who experience traumatic events often times come to the wrong conclusions about the world, based on their individual, subjective experiences -- they project them onto the world, thinking that if the world is a dangerous place for them, it must be for everybody. It's totally understandable. We're all largely a result of our environmental influences, and these events shape our attitudes about the world, but often times this leads to a distorted view.

It's not a matter of getting a new pair of binoculars -- it's a matter cleaning off the existing ones.