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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes a child will ask a series of 'why' questions - they want to know how the world works. But more than that, they want to know their place in the world, and they want to know that someone cares about them.

When people adopt conspiracy theories, they are unsatisfied with some aspect of their place in the world and they may feel no one is caring for them properly. Or they feel that the world is behaving improperly and they want it to return to the state they are used to. It is very easy to blame one group. It is very hard to realize that every human is an individual actor with their own emotions and motivations and moral history.

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The world is really crazy - it takes a lot to engage with it on it's own terms.

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I have some sympathy for individuals who adopt conspiracy theories. I have no sympathy for people who use conspiracy theories to enrich or empower themselves.

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> When people adopt conspiracy theories, they are unsatisfied with some aspect of their place in the world and they may feel no one is caring for them properly. Or they feel that the world is behaving improperly and they want it to return to the state they are used to. It is very easy to blame one group.

Either that or something else entirely. I personally know a few people I would firmly place in the conspiracy corner. What I noticed are very different motivations for conspiracy theories (the absurd ones). Some use it for fun, some for boredom, some to get/have an explanation, some to have a sense or a mix of them and there are certainly more aspects to it.

> It is very hard to realize that every human is an individual actor with their own emotions and motivations and moral history.

But you would not deny that conspiracies do exist, right? The term is so widely misused, that I want to make clear that conspiracy theories in their actual meaning doesn't tell you if they are absurd or not. We saw with Iraq war and NSA mass surveillance how this can actually happen and stay clandestine for quite some time.

It's very interesting to me that I've gotten two comments asking if I believe that conspiracies happen. Of course they happen. But it's pretty rare for a conspiracy to be responsible for everything bad happening to a person.

Most conspiracy theories are motivation theories - I believe that this group has a reason to collude for these reasons. If that motivation is real, it's entirely likely that something LIKE that conspiracy is happening or has happened. False Flag operations do exist, but not everything is a False Flag.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that when you start believing them, you start defending them, and that's when families get angry at each other and split and people get cut off from their usual support groups.

> It's very interesting to me that I've gotten two comments asking if I believe that conspiracies happen. Of course they happen. But it's pretty rare for a conspiracy to be responsible for everything bad happening to a person.

Yeah, I actually expected you to mean the absurd, but I wanted to make clear that conspiracy theories are not the same as absurd as this gets too often conflated.

> Most conspiracy theories are motivation theories - I believe that this group has a reason to collude for these reasons. If that motivation is real, it's entirely likely that something LIKE that conspiracy is happening or has happened. False Flag operations do exist, but not everything is a False Flag.

From my intuition I'd say False Flag happens very rarely, yeah (but it erodes trust). And I would go a bit further and say that only because something is plausible doesn't mean it's likely, but the lower bound of my statement would be to not outright deny the possibility.

We are mostly in agreement here to be clear.

> The problem with conspiracy theories is that when you start believing them, you start defending them, and that's when families get angry at each other and split and people get cut off from their usual support groups.

That's not exclusive to conspiracy theories. Everything slightly political can easily make people angry including myself (tho not resentful). One needs to gauge with whom you can talk about political topics even if disagreeing. I personally do this less/not online tho, except for people I know for longer.

I've been trying out "conspiracy fantasies" instead. I'm trying to clarify when my objection is to the plausibility, or lack of evidence, rather than deny the possibility of conspiracy. The 20th century was so much the product of conspiracies that it is childish to deny their power. The Bolshevik revolution, the Nazis, and COINTELPRO were all disturbingly successful conspiracies, and involved many secret plans despite their size.

When the conspiracy fantasy is personal ("they" are out to get me, and screwed me at the DMZ), "paranoid conspiracy fantasy" is traditional.

Not that this solves anything. People discussing ECHELON in the 80s were called fantasists. And many react to descriptions of room 641A the same way despite the pictures. Arendt's concept of reconciliation is a helpful tool for making my own sense of other people's sense-making.

An important aspect of conspiracy theories is that they provide seemingly simple explanations. It’s not difficult to understand a world controlled by conspiracies. It’s much harder to get a grasp on and accept the sheer actual complexity of the world.

> I have some sympathy for individuals who adopt conspiracy theories.

In some sense is this treating them as children? sheep without any intellectual volition? I do not have much sympathy for individuals who adopt conspiracy theories. If they're adults they're able to think critically and they've decided not to. Sure, despots who use conspiracy theories to manipulate the masses are more culpable, but those of the masses who adopt them uncritically also deserve some blame.

I'm sympathetic about the reasons they have decided to not think critically. Also remember that adult does not mean perfect brain.

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To put this another way - Michael Shermer writes and talks about weird things that people believe and shows why they are not true. This is good. But sometimes it seems like he has a sense of superiority about it. It's like atheists telling people there are no gods and that it is silly to believe in god. Do you need a sense of superiority to believe these things yourself? Do you need the other person to feel bad about the wrong thing they believed? At times it may be expressed as intellectual bullying.

I don't think it's infantilizing to recognize that we make assumptions when we are young that we hold throughout our lives. We learn how to process sensations and emotions when we are young. Of course the way we do that processing matures with age, but not all at the same rate; and some things may not mature. People can act very childish when they are denied something they feel they are entitled to, for instance.

They don't believe what you believe so you can have no sympathy for them. I could partly understand if you have no sympathy for conspiracy theories, but no sympathy for a person because of a perceived flaw seems like zebra thinking.

You forget the main reason conspiracy theories happen and get amplified: they are very convenient blankets. Case in point: all the absurd theories about 9.11.2001 made so much noise that it smothered talk about the amazing incompetence of the state security apparatus that allowed the attacks to happen. Many reasonable discussions about that theme can get derailed, and in the end you just don't want to talk about the whole subject... Same with the whole UFO theme: so many inane things drown out information about stealth tech research programs.

Yes. Maybe I didn't say that directly enough, but that was my motivation for writing my comment.

Is the premise here that a conspiracy has never taken place in history?

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