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Comment by b_tterc_p | Hacker News Reader

Most conspiracy theorists are just mentally ill. Take flat earthers. Most of them suffer from extreme distrust and paranoia and tend to believe only foremost anyone who tells them they’re being lied to.

Saying that mentally ill people who believe in evil government conspiracies could be dangerous isn’t that unreasonable. Maybe specific individuals in the movement are passive, but what about those that they ignite?

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I disagree that most conspiracy theorists are mentally ill, except maybe in some extremely loose definition of the term, where mere illogic is equated with mental illness.

I like this quote from Michael Shermer: "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." Smart people frequently get involved in conspiracy theories through a combination of confirmation bias and the spinning-wheels-in-the-sand effect where they become more entrenched in their beliefs by being forced to defend them.

Being illogical is not necessarily mental illness. Sometimes, it's just pig-headed stubbornness.

https://michaelshermer.com/2002/09/smart-people-believe-weir...

Calling it mental illness is just making normal human behavior a pathology. Almost everybody believes in a widespread conspiracy of some kind, every tribe has their boogeyman. So if there’s any mental illness involved it’s not the belief itself, it’s the willingness to isolate oneself socially and other social factors. But with the internet even the wackiest conspiracies such as flat-earth don’t lead to social isolation.

You seem to be asserting that believing a conspiracy theory does not make you mentally ill. That’s true, but not what I’m saying. I’m saying conspiracy theorists are overwhelming just mentally ill to begin with. There was a great piece a while ago about a journalist who interviewed people at flat earther conventions. They pretty much all cited significant emotional trauma or betrayal of trust.

I appreciate your clarification, but the assertion that "conspiracy theorists are overwhelming[ly] just mentally ill to begin with" is exactly what I'm refuting.

I suppose part of it is a matter of definition, since there is a spectrum of belief in unproven "conspiracy theories". Is a "conspiracy theorist" one who believes in a conspiracy theory, or one who creates conspiracy theories? Is someone who believes that there may have been a conspiracy associated with the JFK assassination a "conspiracy theorist"? They're certainly not on the same level as someone who willfully defies all evidence and logic to continue to assert that the Earth is flat. There's a spectrum of the amount of deviance from logic and evidence as well of a spectrum of the strength of one's belief in these "theories".

I think that a large number of people subscribe to some sort of unproven "conspiracy theory" and that it is incorrect to assert that this population is overwhelmingly mentally ill.

If you use people who go to a flat earth convention as your basis for a representative sample of the mental health of conspiracy theorists, I think you're going to get a very skewed result. You're skewing very high on the spectrum of deviance from evidence and logic, as well as very high on the spectrum of strength of belief.

I would probably agree with your assertion if my definition of what constituted a "conspiracy theorist" met a minimum criteria of a certain threshold value on those two spectrums, but I think that the term "conspiracy theorist" is very nuanced and therefore problematic and even dangerous, especially when we start throwing around phrases like "conspiracy theorists are overwhelming[ly] just mentally ill to begin with". Here's an interesting article on the topic of "conspiracy theory" as a dangerous misnomer:

http://theconversation.com/in-defence-of-conspiracy-theories...

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