The question nobody's asking: WHY are people so dissatisfied with the conventional truth that they feel the need to seek out any alternative?
The terrible thing that happened to me does not feel like "secret knowledge" or a "conspiracy theory" at all. It is very real and the consequences I deal with are relevant to every minute of every day of my life.
I don't feel depressed. My life is fulfilling and I find a tremendous amount of meaning in the work I do. I know many others who are prone to considering "conspiracy theories" who are the same.
You seem to be confusing "people in power abuse said power and never face consequences" (true) with Hilary Clinton operated a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza place" (not true).
People in power face consequences all the time. I never denied that. It just takes a long time for a reckoning to happen. Often decades, or lifetimes.
And I doubt QAnon conspiracy theory is as simple as "Hillary Clinton operated a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza place".
You are oversimplifying my point, turning it into a false dichotomy, and assuming the QAnon conspiracy theory is only the idea that Hillary Clinton operated a pedophile ring. My point was that depressed losers aren't the only people open to controversial theories about people in power.
I don't know many details about QAnon, and I don't care much to research it and come to an understanding myself. I have much more important things to spend my time on. But I do know from random posts I've encountered by QAnon people is that there is a wide range of beliefs regarding who is involved and to what extent. Actually, I haven't seen anyone accuse Hillary Clinton of involvement in a few years now.
There seems to be a growing consensus that child sex rings exist, corruption is involved, and something needs to be done about it. But it also gets blown out of proportion by less careful minded people. Isn't Jeffrey Epstein and "pedo island" considered to be part of QAnon? Isn't Epstein's involved with child sex trafficking generally accepted as true now?
> I don't know many details about QAnon, and I don't care much to research it and come to an understanding myself.
Cool.
> Isn't Jeffrey Epstein and "pedo island" considered to be part of QAnon?
No. They falsely took credit for bringing him down, when it was journalists in the "mainstream media" (specifically one reporter for the Miami Herald named Julie Brown) that broke the story and brought him down. To be clear, they had nothing to do with his downfall.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwnjx4/people-tell-us-how...
The reverse is also true, if someone has to say they are important, then they are likely not actually important.
Applying this to the QAnon 'motto' of 'Where we go one, we go all', I think you can conclude that if they have to say it, then it's not true. Most adherents are then, mostly, alone.
The feeling of community and belonging that these people get is obviously missing in their lives otherwise. That they find these feelings via image macros, chat boxes, and videos speaks to the depth of loss they feel in their lives.
It's not an issue of misinformation, but I think, loneliness.
I never understood that as a moto. Right wingers are known for being hyper-individualistic, WWGOWGA seems like some quasi-socialist slogan.
But you are right, there are multiple crises of poverty, loneliness and poor education in the US. The thing that really baffles me are the "Q" followers that are none of these things, and aren't American.
I think you're discounting the number of people involved with such conspiracies for whom that discription is not true.
Everything he is against doesn't affect his life one bit, its like hobby to him and it gets good reaction from others. His conspiracy theory articles can be debunked in few minutes and then he throws in even bigger article and he hasnt even read those, so if you keep pushing he has nothing to say.
But typically the person feels like they have no control, so inventing this universe that makes sense to them allows them to retain some (fictional) control. Or they may feel worthless or low-status, and if they imagine they "know" things that most people "don't know" that would restore them some of their perceived status. Or they may completely disagree with how the world looks like and the direction where it appears to be going, so let's invent this other world that's more satisfactory.
I mean, if all of the above (and similar) explanations fail, you'd just have to assume the person is not very intelligent. I'm not sure what else could possibly explain it at that point.
Or religions.
Then the internet fragmented that, providing real time alternative narratives, around the same time that 9/11 and the wars afterwards happened. So people got very interested in the news and it was very obvious that the mainstream news was lying right now.
Now your entire worldview start falling apart, how do you know what's true and who's trying to kill you? You need to find someone else who can tell you what's happening. You aren't quite sure how this whole "critical reading" thing is supposed to work, never learned that stuff in school, but you did find some trustworthy folks who are a lot like you online who seem very confident about what's happening. Even more like you than the old people at the newspapers, and more certain about things, which means they are more likely to be right! This is great, now you will be safe and you actually understand what's happening, unlike those people who keep making things so bad.
QAnon (like all conspiracies) start with a grain of truth, but it seems to also want to frame Donald Trump as a savior of a sick and broken system instead of its greatest and more literal manifestation.
Conspiracy theorists have plenty of actual material, but they seem to like to make shit up instead of seeking the truth of the matter.
Since this need for alternative narratives is a media market you get grifters who say what makes the most money and not what they actually believe. Not surprising at all, so expecting Alex Jones to seek actual truth completely misunderstands what he is doing and what he knows he is doing.
But if you have a political plan and it requires some people to believe a specific thing, but it is hard to convince people (for example, because it isn't true) you have a problem. If you are smart you start to think about how there are these professional convincers who are very popular and their business model is "say things that make me money" and you come up with a pitch for them.
It's not exactly news that one of the most prevalent types of actual historical conspiracies involve plans to spread untrue conspiracy theories as propaganda, but it does have that perverse ironic flavor to it since it means saying things like "no, no, these conspiracy theories are spread as part of a conspiracy"!
The root of much of conspiratorial thinking is attempting to make sense of a chaotic world by assuming that everything is being organized and controlled by a small group. The feeling of being "in the know" about the "way things really work" gives adherents a sense of control.
Put another way: modern conspiracy theory could be seen a coping mechanism for information overload.
I think that it's at least in part rooted in epistemic heuristic, and I suspect that the reason people engage in conspiracy theory today is exactly the same reason ancient humans imagined the movement of the sun and the tides as being controlled by anthropomorphic deities. Of course this isn't the complete story, there are social aspects as well, but it is a very large part of it.
I personally believe it is. Or at the very least it's closely related.
This hard pull towards conspiracy theories is happening in contrast to a period of about 100 or so years of relative enlightenment supported by mainly centralized liberal institutions(not saying that doesn’t have a cost), but this pattern is as old as civilization itself.
But why now? IMO it’s modern day mythology created by a tremendous lack of trust in fragmented and unreliable cultural and political institutions. Authority and expertise to explain and deal with the events around us been either drowned out by false prophets or ignored after committing enough reputation suicide as to be rendered untrustworthy.
It’s hard to see the path out of this dark forest.
Impossible really.
Maybe on a small scale, village level. Now the village is global, and that's what makes the whole thing extremely dangerous.
> It’s hard to see the path out of this dark forest.
Agreed.
There never was. Don't limit yourself to the concept of a single objective truth.
I always believed they work, even when the government first lied about that.
Embrace... falsehood?
Masks work to help stop the spread and hydroxychloroquine has no evidence that it helps anyone who is sick.
There, was that so hard?
Internet or no, those people were always going to be misinformed. Because they choose to be.
(+) What happened to mass shootings? Have they just vanished from the news cycle from outside the US, or vanished under the high covid death rate, or been ended by lockdown?
It's not Fort Knox to need defending.
What really happens is - it turns out a significant portion of human beings are vulnerable to what, for lack of a better term, could be called bullshit. It's part just plain ignorance, part honest mistake, part willful deception. As long as only a few fall prey to it, as long as times are not too trying, as long as the bullshit doesn't make them do crazy and/or destructive things, then it's more or less okay - I mean, that's basically the default state of humanity since forever.
But when those conditions are not true anymore, some feedback loops need to be activated.
The 40-year project to undermine expertise and specialization of all kind magnifies this effect in some, and brings it out in others for whom it had only been latent, but it's not the real driver. The real driver is that people feel slighted and ignored, operating in a supposedly egalitarian public sphere and seeing other "ordinary" people gain extraordinary status, but unable to do so themselves without taking risks.
Next best guess: the conventional truth is inconvenient.
Who has time to peruse dozens of papers of technical jargon on COVID? Who's got the time to read a book by Chomsky, compare and contrast with a conservative writer on the same topic, a historian, while looking at the experts' interpretation of these things?
Out best understanding of things is just as fragmented as the wild conspiracy theories, with the difference that the experts debate minutiae that requires deep knowledge and patience.
We cannot deeply research more than a couple of things at a time, at best. We crave easy answers and grand narratives.
Anecdote: I am in a privacy group where everyone likes to talk about the three letter agencies and big companies in a grand manner. Some of it is possible, other seems plausible and some part is a joke. I don't think everyone knows which part is which though.
How about we aim for just plain old un-modified "truth" and realize that it can be quite elusive?
The idea of a separate objective truth outside ourselves is a relatively recent development.
We generally credit the Ionian Greeks with adding this idea to human civilization and there has always been push-back against it.
I remember watching this as a child and thinking it was the least important episode, but upon reflection I realized it was the most important one.
Humans have thought patterns like this by default. We invented things like science to _prevent_ us from falling into those traps.
Flat earth, anti-vax, Qanon, etc. are more of the same. If there's a difference it's the scale and speed afforded by social media.
Worse, for a lot of people their social media feed is their main or even only source of news.
I realize that "privilege" is a very overloaded word these days so perhaps I'm just not understanding its use in this context.
I don’t have hard laws to point towards, but laws are made based on culture. The US is in the midst of a cultural revolution. The majority is realizing that we should have a society that treats people fairly. That is pissing some people off.
https://www.businessinsider.com/true-government-conspiracies...