Conspiracy theories: Why the outlandish ones that don't even sound remotely real?

In My Humble Opinion
1

If one wanted to promote a fake conspiracy theory, ISTM one would want to make it as believable as possible.

An example of a believable one would be: Pharmaceutical companies are sitting on a cure for cancer because they can earn more money by “treating” cancer over a patient’s years than actually curing it in one fell swoop of a dose. Although the theory is clearly false, it at least has coherent logic and reason behind it.

Another believable CT would be the one that Oswald wasn’t the lone assassin and there were in fact more conspirators trying to take out JFK, or that China deliberately engineered the coronavirus in a laboratory, etc. Those all sound reasonable, even if wrong.

But…many CTs are downright outlandish. Things like: Reptilian humans are secretly controlling the universe, or the Earth is flat - stuff that would be downright laughable even to a child. Stuff that wouldn’t be believable for 0.5 seconds. Why didn’t the people who created such CTs try to go for something more believable and swallow-able by the public?

2

First off, the ones you propose that “sound reasonable”, in fact, do not sound reasonable at all. If the Chinese government were making a biological weapon, they would certainly be doing so in a lab dedicated to that purpose and would definitely have safeguards against it being released to the general public. While China is not the most modern country on the planet, they do have some of the most modern things here. And although their government is certainly corrupt, here’s a maxim I think I may have coined (sadly, I probably didn’t): corrupt does not mean incompetent.

Your example about the cancer cure definitely is the opposite of “sounds reasonable”. That one depends on the drug companies being more interested in profit. If that were the case, they would not be working on any other cure for any other disease and certainly would not be working on various vaccines.

The one about Oswald does not pass the smell test either. That would require a number of things to already be true, none of which happened or were even possible.

Let’s face it, those who believe in conspiracy theories do so because they want those CTs to be true. And why do they want them to be true? From what I’ve noticed from CT supporters I’ve seen both online and in real life (sadly), they are simply bigots, specifically anti-Semites with a side-order of white supremacy chucked in. They believe that nonsense because they want to blame someone, specifically Jews. They simply do not want to believe that something bad happened because an evil SOB did so all on his lonesome and thus some “powerful group” must be behind all the bad stuff in the world.

Of course this completely disregards the number of their target group who are not involved in the supposed benefit said group enjoys and it also completely ignores the reasons why their target group may seem to be heavily represented in certain fields. That last also requires some rather creative accounting. And by “creative accounting”, I mean “pure unadulterated ignorant horseshit and pulling numbers out of one’s tush”.

There is no coherence or internal logic to any CT other than prejudice. Look at the nonsense spread even today about Jane Fonda, Obama, Omar, Antifa, and BLM, to name just a few recent ones.

No, the reason the bigots buy into the “clearly outlandish” CTs is, again, because they want them to be true and the only “logic” they care about is their prejudice. Seriously, how many CTers have you met who are not also bigots? For me, that number is zero.

3

By “reasonable,” I mean reasonable by CT standards, compared to outlandish ones. They are of course not reasonable by non-CT standards.

4

Here’s a fun example of the cruddy “logic” employed by those bigots. A coworker his a rabid anti-Semite. I asked him once why he hates Jews so much. His response: “They killed Christ”. Yeah, right. The guy in quesiton is an atheist as were both his parents. So if the death of the historical Jesus upsets him, he should be upset with Italians, specifically Romans, not Jews. And it’s not like the Romans did not kill a lot of other innocent people either. So what’s left for his hatred of a certain group? The answer, of course, is bigotry. He’s an ignorant bigot just like the CTers under discussion here.

5

There are no “unreasonable by CT standards” standards. By definition, the idiots buying into the nonsense buy into the nonsense no matter how outlandish. ALL CTs are outlandish.

6

But then you get a real conspiracy just as outlandish as the crackpot ones. I’m referring to the Guy Fawkes plot.

In grad school, an otherwise outwardly reasonable fellow student never met a CT he didn’t buy into wholesale. He really had some issues.

7

No, no, no. You don’t understand lying. The way to successfully lie is to make your lie so OUTLANDISHLY RIDICULOUS that nobody would dare to make it up because it would sound completely foolish. Therefore it MUST be the truth. That’s how you sell a lie.

8

I have close relationship to a CT’er.
He’s a smart, well educated, nice young man. My Son, in fact.

What I’ve discovered ‘For Him’, is his mind works overtime. He gets deep down rabbit holes and doesn’t want to believe logic. So he twists and turns things to make them fit. A tiny bit of truth and he’s off to the races.

Otherwise he’s perfectly normal. Has a good job and a nice wife and kids.
We sorta look over his one idyosyrcracy.

Except when I prank him with it. He’s outstandingly easy to prank.

9

There’s a “conspiracy theory” I’ve seen invoked a number of times on Twitter that claims there’s no such thing as a left-wing conspiracy theory, as all left-wing conspiracy theories are true. The only people who debate you on this are part of the conspiracy to make it seem like left-wingers aren’t 100% right in their beliefs.

10

Velocity: “An example of a believable one would be: Pharmaceutical companies are sitting on a cure for cancer because they can earn more money by “treating” cancer over a patient’s years than actually curing it in one fell swoop of a dose. Although the theory is clearly false, it at least has coherent logic and reason behind it.”

It’s actually incoherent and lamebrained, plus in many versions as weirdly nutty as the “farthest out” CTs (i.e. the ones proclaiming that Big Pharma is out to depopulate the world).

Even if you were to believe that everyone in pharma (researchers, lab workers, execs etc.) was willing to sacrifice themselves and their loved ones for the sake of filthy lucre, the fact remains that actual cures like the ones for hepatitis C exist and are highly profitable. A highly effective cure for, say, colon cancer would make many billions of dollars and push company shares into the stratosphere.

11

I think it’s simply free-market consumerism; you can choose any flavour you like (as long as it’s antisemitic, perhaps). My CTer Facebook friend doesn’t peddle the David Icke lizard stuff (which is rather out of fashion now maybe), but is very brand-loyal to QAnon awfulness. And while the lizard shape-shifter thing is plainly ridiculous, it’s just the Sci-fi theme CT. It’s no less believable than the Horror theme CT, where every Hollywood liberal and high-ranking Democrat is a child-sacrificing vampiric paedophile, with Trump some sort of heroic Buffy character.

12

There’s a LOT of this.

Especially now that CTs are a profitable business, creative people are making them up to sell books, youtube channels, etc. The more exotic they are the more they stand out from the noise and attract more eyeballs. Which is why the OP is seeing what he sees.

And of course Russian government trolls are hard at work trying to turn the US into an ungovernable hypercynical idiocracy. Those folks are pretty knowledgeable about what works and are endlessly creative.

This too.

The real world contains lots of inconsistencies. Real people do things for a myriad of overlapping and contradictory reasons. Any human event has multiple people or factions pushing and shoving in different directions where the outcome is a not-quite random result of that scrum.

The hyper-logical mind recoils at that messiness. Everything is (in fact must be!) a simple single-cause-yields-single-effect chain of “reasoning”.

And of course the simple stories told in TV and movies almost all have a clear “narrative arc”, where they carefully show us the plot tidbits we need to “connect the dots” and follow the story. Literature has more room for including tricky side alleys that lead nowhere. Movies less so and TV not at all; there isn’t time. So folks raised on TV think the real world works the same way: each tidbit we see is (must be) connected to an overarching story arc; we just need to connect the dots properly to discern the story.

Add in a large dollop of intellectual overconfidence and factual undersupply and you get Dunning Kruger applied to current events.

Funny enough the hyper-logical thinker and the completely illogical thinker both get to the same foolish credulous place, just by vastly different routes.


Not good.
13

On this, you’re mistaken. Accidental lab releases are not uncommon. A very good book which was recommended here is renowned epidemiologist Michael Osterholm’s Deadliest Enemy, about pandemics and worldwide responses (with a new forward updated for CV-19). He believes it unlikely that the current virus escaped from a lab, but since it can’t be definitively ruled out, it sounds plausible to a lot of people.

Google “pathogens escaped from labs”.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2002/04/anthrax-escapes-lab-room-usamriid-one-worker-exposed

14

A reasonable conspiracy theory would be that government agents create outlandish conspiracy theories that only the highly gullible fall for so that the public think conspiracy theories are all bullshit.

IE, government agents push the theory that the earth is flat so that the public writes off conspiracy theories like iran contra or mass surveillance.

15

Jackmannii, you are right. However, most people do not understand economics, and really do believe that a one-time (or, 3x/day for 10 days) cure would bring in less profit than a treatment that needed to be taken daily over a lifetime. They fail to understand everything from “people won’t use medicine they can’t afford” to what coming up with a cure for a cancer (not “cancer,” since it isn’t one thing) would do to a company’s stock value.

They even fail to grasp that you might get cancer multiple times if you can survive it easily. People rarely got strep throat more than once before antibiotics. If you’d have told someone in 1870 that in the future, people got the disease that caused Scarlet Fever multiple times over a lifetime, but survived it every time by taking pills for 10 days, they’d laugh at you. That’s where the cancer-cure conspiracy-theorists’ heads are. In spite of the fact that the proposition on the table is an easy fix for cancer, the theorists are still in a world where cancer is a cataclysmic, once-in-a-lifetime struggle.

So, I think to a certain mentality, just, there are conspiracies that make more sense than others.

There’s a whole swath of people in between the types who fall for theories, and people who understand why the suppressed cancer cure is just as ridiculous as the reptilians, and those are the people the OP referred to. They Understand why body-swapping that lets reptilians hide in fake human bodies is unlikely, but still failed economics.

16

A couple of factors when it comes to conspiracy theories:

  1. Proportionality Bias - According to the Skeptic Dictionary “The proportionality bias is a tendency to believe that causes are proportional to effects in magnitude . Extreme events with momentous consequences have extreme, momentous causes. Mundane events have mundane causes.” Theories about the Kennedy assassination and events of that sort can largely be explained by this tendency to believe that great events must have great causes.
  2. The need to be important, and what can be more important than A Great Secret?
17

So it’s conspiracy theories all the way down? Is that it Professor?

18

About that, there is one pseudo-CT that sounds reasonable to me: That the military in the end does love to have people believe that UFOs with aliens are out there.

Sure, they do make an effort to debunk many sightings, but because of secrecy a lot of those efforts are very incomplete or they ignore reports. They do not mind much that CTs about aliens grow in that environment because then there are less people demanding to know where our taxes are going to.

19

I agree with the OP. I can “get” the idea that the Air Force doesn’t know what “UFOs” are and are keeping sightings secret. But in no conceivable way can I get behind the idea that an alien spacecraft crashed, we reverse-engineered antigravity, and we now have experimental antigravity craft. It just doesn’t add up to a meaningful idea in our “real world.”

20

The outlandish ones are cost-efffective in the current economic paradigm.