People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share Psychological Features (2019)
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
For example, is "market rent" a conspiracy? Is it price-fixing or collusion? Hey, I just caught you making a theory!
I think the main bad thing about conspiracy theories (and other theories that may belong to crackpots and crazies) is that the facts mostly can't be known. If in fact there are conspiracies, nobody who's involved will speak openly and truthfully about them, so I guess just follow the money.
Or don't. Why not concern yourself with living your life, enjoying your family and friends, being a good neighbor, having some recreation time outdoors and stuff. All of these things are known cures for the "cluster of psychological features" that may trouble you.
An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
Insofar as 2 or more people have coordinated, colluded, or planned an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act, a conspiracy is afoot.
In fact, almost all significant illegal, wrongful, or subversive acts include conspiracies to commit said acts.
I think it is safe to say that the present sociopolitical and socioeconomic landscapes are rife with activities, writ large, that are, from some reasonable perspective, illegal, wrongful, or subversive in nature.
To remove the idea of conspiracy as a valid concept wielded by reasonable people is perhaps the most surgical of injuries to society which might otherwise seek to prevent or interfere with these kinds of illegal, wrongful, or subversive acts.
When a couple of people decide to rob a liquor store, we call it a conspiracy. When someone suspects that a global cabal of banks might be colluding to screw the world over, we discredit them as a “conspiracy theorist”. (Libor)
Insofar as it is reasonable to suspect that an individual might be capable of doing something illegal, wrongful, or subversive, it is also reasonable to suspect that an organisation might might do the same.
We are conditioned to protect the systems and individuals that parasitise society, because we do not wish to confront the flaws in the system we serve.
That said, there are plenty of nutjobs out there with outrageous claims. Some of them are delusional, some of them are attention seekers, some of them are merely ignorant or misinformed. But we should call them nutjobs, not conspiracy theorists.
We ignore our civic duty to be vigilant “conspiracy theorists” at our peril. In doing so, we give cover to the lies that are big enough to be easy to believe.
If I was one of the people actually benefiting from a conspiracy that extracts value from society, I would be thrilled about this. I would even work hard to promote it. I would even try to elect political candidates that support or wink at obviously-lunatic conspiracy theories.
Also, that sounds like something a conspiracy theorist would say (lol).
IE, it’s not the rare lunatic fringe that’s the issue, it’s the people in your last paragraph. That said, I think this grace should be given to the lunatic fringe: they instinctually feel something’s “not right” and the rest is all rationalization and theorycrafting divorced from reality. If they had the education and abilities they’d be among the reasonable set. But human instincts honed by millions of years of evolution should not be ignored, even if the rationalized theories are nonsense: SOMETHING really is wrong and needs to be corrected. Instead of ignoring these people we should be asking what in the social environment is setting them off.
Speaking as a formerly-"Moral-Majority-esque" Christian, who still lives in the deep red of the Bible belt, I assure you that this sense that "something is wrong" is _not_ a credit, depending on what the "something" is.
In the county where I lived as a child, the KKK ran the county seat as a "sundown town" as late as the 80s, and only when an Oprah special on the area drew public attention and scrutiny did the KKK lose (official) power. It remains a starkly-white county just outside one of America's blackest cities, and its overwhelming majority is in fervent support of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who calls that area her home.
To that crowd, yes, something is wrong: namely, the whites-only "order" they once enforced is now denied them by the force of both law and social pressure.
And so, they lean _hard_ into white supremacy and "great replacement" conspiracy theories, in pursuit of their racially-homogeneous comfort zone of dominance.
The feeling that something's "not right" is not a credit on its own; that depends greatly on what the "something" is identified to be, and what "right" means to that person.
In your example, of course, this unwellness itself directly manifests as source of the unease. But follow that pathology one step deeper and perhaps there is insight to be gained?
What I am sure of is that we have left our sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems to their own devices without carefully examining their impacts for a long time now. This has left them rife with technical debt and exploitable bugs that some parasitic elements of society are using automation to aggressively exploit.
I’m not saying that engineering them will have a better outcome, but perhaps if we study them with real rigour it is possible that one day it might.
We would do well to remember that these constructs exist to serve humanity, and not the other way around.
Also, it doesn’t have to be secret to be a conspiracy.
Fossil fuel companies more or less openly conspired to obfuscate, deny, discredit, and discourage evidence from their own scientists and the scientific community at large that fossil fuel use could cause significant heating and possible thermal runaway of the planetary climate for over 70 years in order to continue to exploit fossil fuels which they knew to pose a threat to human civilisation as a whole.
Cigarette companies acted similarly. Automotive companies have done similar things many times over.
Naively believing that collective human incompetence makes effective obfuscation impossible ignores a great many examples of successful collusion and implies a very naive optimism about the information dissemination mechanisms within society.
It is more plausible that collective human incompetence makes perfect secrecy unnecessary.
And we know about it. The documents were leaked and uncovered by lawsuits.
> Cigarette companies acted similarly
And again, we know about it.
> Naively believing that collective human incompetence makes effective obfuscation impossible ignores a great many examples of successful collusion
Where? It's not incompetence. Every actor is facing a prisoner's dilemma, and at least one will act rationally and squeal on the rest.
There are multiple tricks employable, one is to keep any single collaborator in the dark aboout most of the conspiracy. That way, any single leak is manageable.
Your conviction of believing conspiracies to be unrealistic is common and helps conspirators a lot. It disincentivises whistleblowers in particular.
Not from those whose job it is to find them. The Manhattan Project leaked to the Soviets multiple times over. Any time the government does something illegal, a whistleblower has leaked it to reporters.
Ya. Some new phrases might help.
Something like the distinctions between science -fiction ("sci-fi"), -fantasy ("syfy"), and -fact (aka "science").
Just sounding it out: Conspiracy-fantasy, -fiction, and -fact.
It does not fit with the other narrative that phones slow down over time, or with the release of a new OS. People love to misunderstand it though.
If John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington didn't conspire, the United States as-is would still be a colony of Great Britain.
Just saying.
Addendum: If Stadhouder Willem van Oranje and likeminded people like Andries Hessels, Jacques Tayaert, Jacob Valcke, Pieter van Dieven and Jan van Asseliers didn't conspire against the Spanish throne The Netherlands as-is would probably still be a vassal or colony of Spain.
Fun fact: the United States Declaration of Independence was inspired by the Act of Abjuration ("Plakkaat van Verlatinghe") in which the United Netherlands declared their independence from Spain.
And I could go on and on and on, but I think you and me both have better things to do on this beautiful Sunday.
There are conspirators against your natural destinies. From profiteers looting government and the populous to secret social and political interests who thrive in the shadow of your refusal to believe.
Incredulity, self assurances, and an indulgent delusion of normalcy obscure and protect these conspiracies.
You are not the America you think you are, you are the America thought controlled.
Which is unfortunate, as the actual reasons are at times much more interesting (and inconvenient) than people's infantilism allows.
There have been real conspiracies (MKULTRA might be remembered, Snowden's leaks were mere consiracy theory pre-leak). And those claiming them to be real were shunned as lunatics.
The (certainly?) currently existing, real conspiracies hide (are hidden?) behind the stigma as well. Is it wise to let them?
> The opening paragraph expresses an idea not present in Lewandowsky's 2013 paper[1], and looks more like an attempt to link dissent with more obviously fringe theories (much like "anti-vaxxers" and "flat-earthers").
Lewandowsky S, Oberauer K, Gignac GE (2013) NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science. Psychological Science 24: 622–633.
A recent example is Epstein. Epstein ingratiated himself to powerful people to preserve his human trafficking operation. Some of those powerful people partook in his sex trade. He may have had connections to intelligence agencies. This was all varying degrees of a conspiracy theory ~five years ago and some people got this right.
But you have to be careful because there's a lot of conspiracy theorists who believe that Epstein's operation was harvesting adrenochrome from children for the benefit of those powerful people. Either as an anti-aging drug or as a satanic ritual, which explains how the powerful people became powerful. Epstein and his associates were/are evil perverts, they're not satanically powered.
The people who manage to avoid the adrenochrome level of theorizing are interesting and may be worth listening to on certain subjects. It's unfortunate that there's not more people in that category. They mostly dodge the label "conspiracy theorist", depending on what they talk about.
A lot of CT is just being skeptical about things and trying to reconcile either "statements against interest" or actions that are not congruent with a person's position in society or the government.
Since CT is usually anonymous as to the person advancing it, is it reasonable to assume that for instance, the "flat earth theory" might be in fact advanced as a form of "false flag" in order to discredit other theories, even on a different subject? A way to "increase the noise to signal ratio" as it were?