Conspiracies All the Way Down | Hacker News Reader

Conspiracies All the Way Down

city-journal.org

9 pointsBostonian6 comments

>“Conspiracism is a sort of creed,” author Jonathan Kay told Rolling Stone. “It’s the idea that there is a secret power in the world that can’t be changed by elections, that it has evil motivations and that it’s trying to destroy our way of life.”

I mean, this seems accurate to me. Clearly there's a loosely-affiliated group of hyper-rich, hyper-influential elites that push and shove around US and global politics to suit their needs, and their desires end up mattering a lot more than anyone's vote does.

Good article though. Author is brave to actually accurately describe the sickness devouring modern journalism, where everything is about catering to ideology. And there's some interesting stuff here overall.

>The conspiracy-minded, Kay says, “come to see the world as presented by the mainstream media and other institutions as sort of a counterfeit hoax.”

It IS. It literally is. That's the most accurate description of modern "journalism" I've ever seen. For the millionth time, we stopped trusting "the system" because it was addicted to lying for profit (and influence). Sooner or later people catch on.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." — William Casey, CIA director 1981–1987

While the description of the trend is on point, detached analysis leaves out very legitimate disillusions that people have with the system that cause them to head down these paths.

Stating that the WTC was brought down by bombs is going too far (without hard evidence to the contrary, of course). Stating that the government let it happen is going too far (it's still invoking an active conspiracy based on no concrete details).

But stating that the military industrial complex benefited greatly from 9/11 is accurate. Stating that the motivation of Al-Qaeda was due to previous US Government meddling in the Middle East is accurate. That's mutual interdependence.

If the average person would have thought this way back in 2001, rather than the overwhelming groupthink of taking the attack personally, we might have avoided the government launching us into a 20 year domestically-destructive unwinnable war. But rather such thinking was dismissed as "conspiratorial" while the mass media blared out full on support for the wars. Remember Clear Channel's list of banned songs? That fucking "support the troops" dog whistle? To the extent that the political environment wasn't the result of a bona fide conspiracy, it's prudent to consider it an emergent one.

Democratic theory insists that by people talking to each other, sanity will eventually gain critical mass and win out. But this is hopeful thinking and not reality - it was basically impossible to debate this at the time. And while the democratic process eventually "worked" twenty years later, that's still twenty years of harm.

It's completely rational to mentally distance one's self from that harmful system, draw a boundary around it as an unfriendly system, and reason by yourself based on what ought to be. Of course you need to keep from being led into easy answers (eg the two bits I said were going too far above), that are non-actionable or worse, self-harmful. And unfortunately, that is also something masses of people seem unable to do.

So either way herds of people are seemingly always going to overshoot, and what really matters is whether a given conspiracy is productive or not. And ideally we'd all be less tied to monolithic results that create such remainders in the first place.

Still the trouble of learning history to reason what ought to be... STEM education leaves that out. In the US you need to actively research recent history to even know we did anything in the middle east, barely know anything about the relatively recent Desert Storm let alone Cold War operations.

> In a poll conducted prior to the 2020 election, 44 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats said that there would be “at least ‘a little’ justification for violence if the other party’s nominee won the election.”

Damn.

For every person, there exist sentences that are false (or misleading, or create false implications) but appear to be really, really true. It turns out engagement maximizing sentences are a subset of such false, seemingly true, sentences.

Thus, modern internet platforms optimize for connecting you with sentences that are false but appear to be really, really true (or are misleading or create false implications).

I've been on leftbook and liberal reddit. I've been on conservative reddit, Trump mailing lists, gnews, and other hyper-right-wing sites. I strongly believe you can sell crazy, unfounded beliefs to anybody if you dress it up just right.

Humans are like computers with no firewall, and we just connect willy nilly over the internet. All it takes is one youtube channel or subreddit that pushes the right buttons on your psyche.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com