Let me tell you about one of the least believable conspiracies I saw firsthand. Back in 2007, during heated competition for the Democratic Primary, John Edwards’ Finance Director quit the campaign and moved out of his wife’s house, to help raise his illegitimate child with his mistress. It was very sad and sort of bizarre, and on the strength of this and nothing else, some conservatives started speculating that really this was Edward’s illegitimate child.
This theory was both terrible and laughable. Edwards had not had a string of affairs, and seemed very devoted to his wife Elizabeth. Whatever was going on in the Finance guy’s life, it just seemed a very messy and very human situation and it was wrong to pick apart their emotional detritus just to slime a politician these conservatives didn’t like. Any evidence outside the National Enquirer was based solely on dislike for his sort of sleazy Southern charm. The theory was pretty much ignored by anyone serious until after the primaries.
…after which, it turned out that all of this was true. Edwards had asked his Finance Director to even fake a DNA paternity test for him, and there was a powerful cult of personality around Edwards that made all this possible. (If you can’t tell, I supported Edwards in 2007 and feel pretty bad about all of this.)
The lesson is that sometimes even really bizarre conspiracies, one you had no particularly good evidence to believe, turn out to be true. A mature understanding of the world can not be based on “weird conspiracies are never true.”
And yet, conspiratorial thinking is extremely unhealthy and usually and endstate of ideological spirals. It’s not a coincidence that people who are very politically obsessed usually have some “hidden conspiracy” they believe is true, and they want the sheeple in society to “wake up” to.
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Conspiracy theories aren’t something to get mad at, even when they’re about something as hot-button as Sandy Hook or whatever. They’re more sad than anything. Such theories simply emerge when an event has such a psychological impact that facts cannot fully account for it.When people say the moon landings were faked, for example, they are referring to what the event symbolized: the utopian dream of Star Trek, and visiting Jupiter within our lifetimes, and whatever. All those things failed to materialize, obviously, and most people would conclude that the whole thing was overhyped.A conspiracy theorist, struggling for an explanation, simply believes that hype - so it’s the facts that must wrong. We could have (and should have) colonized Europa by now, so why haven’t we? The only explanation is that someone is preventing us. If we can choose to go to the moon and do the other things, then someone has clearly chosen not to. They faked it, out of laziness or some other corruption.Ridiculous as the claim are, there is a grain of truth: there is something wrong. We should have nice things. It’s just that conspiracy theorists blame some craven figure like the satanist, or the jew, or George Lucas, for the theft, when the lazy coward who chose not to go to the moon is none other than their own self.
The key thing is whether a conspiracy becomes necessary for your entire explanation of the world. In the case of our current election, Trump goes to these rallies where thousands of people cheer for him to take his rightful place as ruler, and his entire identity is based around Trump Meaning Winner, and so the only way for his identity to still make sense is if someone is “stealing” the election that is rightfully his. So conspiracy is his way of making sense of the world, and any attempts to take that away from him will be psychologically damaging.
There are a lot of conspiracy theories around this election, both from the right and the left. “Hillary is hiding secrets about her health.” “Russia is helping Trump with hackers.” “Women are making dishonest claims about how Trump touched them.” “Voting booths are being rigged.” “The Republicans never wanted to support Trump and are engineers his destruction.” “The Republicans are using Trump as a stick to make their extreme fiscal policies seem more palatable.” Now we’ve got this firebombing in North Carolina to be grist for the mill.
Most of these will be wrong, do not place your reliance in them not being true. But I bet at least some will be right, or have a kernel of truth (IMO, particularly the first two.) Do not make your entire worldview dependent on crazy shit *not* having happened backstage.
What’s concerning is the political views that _depend_ on those various conspiracy theories. That’s when you can’t accept the horror that… maybe people just disagree with you and your policy preferences, and that’s why you are not winning.
“ The ethical struggle to sustain the meaninglessness of the catastrophe is the topic of Atom Egoyan’s masterpiece The Sweet Hereafter, arguably THE film about the impact of a trauma on a community. Mitchell Stephens, a lawyer, arrives in the wintry hamlet of San Dent to sign up the parents of children who died when their school bus plunged into an ice-covered lake. His motto is “there are no accidents”: there are no gaps in the causal link of responsibility, there always HAS to be someone who is guilty. (As we soon learn, he is not doing this on account of his professional avarice. Stephens’ obsession with the complete causal link is rather his desperate strategy to cope with the private trauma, which is sorting out responsibility for his own daughter Zoe, a junkie who despises him, although she repeatedly calls him demanding money: he insists that everything must have a cause in order to counteract the inexplicable gap which separates him from Zoe “
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