I believe it's particularly hard for people whose profession is to think, design and engineer, to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history.
Except the stuff people actually care about like purchasing power, bills, wages, and housing are manipulated by purposely designed economic policies and not by randomness.
Should we subsidize industry X is rarely a question decided on economic merits alone. And so it goes with individual interests shaping the entire global economy in surprisingly profound ways. Extreme ultraviolet lithography for example shapes industries, but has a history steeped in various public/private partnerships and global politics.
We're not talking about facts of nature like gravity or the speed of light. You don't exist in a truly random system but one where you're playing by the rules made by someone else, rules that can change on a whim, as the government intervenes at every level to manipulate the scales, for better and for worse, resulting in it picking winners and loosers.
I would note that the public conspiracy theorists tend to be "exactly wrong", though. Claiming that everything is a conspiracy, without evidence, except the things that have documentary evidence about the conspiracy.
Because where is the fun in that? If something is documented, your brain is not doing any work; it's where the canvas is clean, that you get a sense of satisfaction by firing synapses in original ways.
Conspiracy-theorism, at its core, is fundamentally a creative endeavour. It's not a coincidence that, in the '90s, that world overlapped pretty hard with fandoms of open-world franchises like Star Trek, where it's easy to expand and enrich the original content with your own productions.
1. It's something for bored people to do and to believe.
2. It's something that offers supposed explanations for various real or imaginary events or states of affairs at a lower cost than actual explanation.
3. It gives people something more satisfying than "shit happens", and in this way, gives people a feeling of the possibility of control over the unpredictable (superstitions like astrology and fortune telling have the same motive).
4. It allows people to rationalize their misfortunes, dissatisfaction, and grievances, and to deflect responsibility from themselves, or to give their envies the appearance of a moral basis.
For example, the loudest Epstein conspiracy theorists have spent the past ten years screaming about a conspiracy of pedophiles in their specific outgroup, while ignoring every hint of evidence that indicated their preferred leader was somehow tied to the mess (remember when Trump appointed Epstein’s sweetheart-deal prosecutor to his cabinet during his first term. Wtf!) They were led by the nose to a conclusion that anyone could have seen was highly questionable, because their reasoning and judgement absolutely sucks.
"anti-conspiracy theorists" aren't claiming that conspiracies don't exist, so no. I don't think anyone is actually "debunking" Epstein other than conspiracy-minded Trumpists who were laser-focused on the Pizzagate/satanic cabal/Monarch deprogramming bullshit until for some reason they decided Epstein was a cool guy who did nothing wrong. Many such cases.
99% of the time, this is the same picture.
Peel back the layers of just any popular conspiracy theory, study its origins and the people who started it, and eventually you'll get to the part where "it was the Jews all along."
This seems a bit of a contradiction, no? "folk" beliefs seem like the opposite of religion (which, to my ear, requires organization and some sort of canon).
And the CIA definitely creates some things/narratives.
But on the note of natural development, I do agree. You can call it conspiracies or incentives, its the same, really. If its not democratic its conspiratorial by definition.
They use tax money (and drug money, possibly) to do this, so they have a lot of funds. If you watch the video I link he talks about HOW they actually do this.
He doesnt claim they sit down and brief professors, he says they built an apparatus that simply filters through them and fund the right ones.
He talks about how its hard to find jobs if you dont peddle the right narratives and topics.
The more realistic claim is that CIA promoted abstract expressionism which is a primarily American 1950s art movement which is of course a sub-movement in modern art.
The wider claim is that they controlled the dissemination and narrative around art and the humanities in the US and around the world in order to inflate the opinion of the United States while promoting narratives about the Soviet Union that even the CIA knew were false, as stated by them in released memos.
This is the claim: that large sections of the art and humanities were funded and controlled by the CIA for propaganda purposes.