… and one of the easiest ways to refute it, is that, if you only accept one or two simple premises, everything else makes perfect sense.
There is a diary up about the role of the neoconservatives in managing the decline of this country. I read it, and it all held together just perfectly. In my head, I brought up case after case to try to refute it, and they all fell like dominoes. I was immersed in angst, in hopelessness.
And then, click. If it makes perfect and total sense, we’ve got ourselves a really great Conspiracy Theory.
Because the real world, and real people, and real situations, are never perfectly sensible. When you’re working with real explanations, they never cover all the information. People do weird things, and stupid things, and creative things, and totally unpredictable things, all the time. There are a huge number of factors that impinge on any given situation, and the larger a situation is, and the longer it runs, the less likely it will be that the initially predicted outcome, whatever it was, will happen.
What makes CT so incredibly addictive?
Well, for starters, it simplifies things. It almost always means that it simplifies them in a negative way, because it’s always about the reasons that things go wrong, but it does simplify them. And in a world where the information highway is more like an information firehose, the temptation to settle for a simple/simplified explanation is almost irresistible. As long as you get excited enough about it that you don’t realize that accepting it leaves you not only down, but feeling helpless.
And if you want to believe that you’re helpless to influence events, then a set of premises that leaves you feeling helpless cuts down the cognitive dissonance tremendously, and lets you simplify your thinking even more. Of course, that leaves you less able to cope with anything outside a small set of known circumstances, and in turn increases the us/them dichotomy in your thinking, letting you be more paranoid about anyone who does not accept the same premises, and increasing the echo-chamber effect.
Conspiracy Theories are Ouroboros worms; they feed on themselves, and opt in larger and larger event sets each time around, until somehow they invade and corrupt your whole world. They are closed-ended. Once you allow them headspace, your most likely outcome is to sit in a corner and shiver, or blindly strike out against the supposed creators in fear and rage. The last thing they do is open you up to new experience, new ideas, new solutions. They attempt to pre-empt all useful, practical solutions short of bloody revolution by presenting The Enemy as ultimately powerful.
Can we please stop this shit? The very rich are just as stupid as you and I — or perhaps a bit more so, because so many ideas simply require money, rather than intelligence, to implement. Seeing them as elite conspirators is all very well and good for those people who hope to raise rage as the most effective change agent they can conceive of. But it’s not useful if you want to accomplish anything substantive, and it’s not true. It’s not even a good fantasy, unless you’re one of the people who thinks they ought to be part of some elite group that could pull off something that would allow the world to genuflect to your great wisdom.
CT is the mind numbing, IQ decreasing counterweight to creative thought and positive action. Accept one, and you can’t have the other.
/end rant