I was reading this article on CNN concerning moon landings were faked CT, and it got me to thinking…do these things ever die? Do they gain in strength over time? From what the article is saying, this particular one seems to be on the rise. Looking at the Kennedy assassination CT, it seemed to be dieing out, and then JFK comes out…now there is a whole new generation of kids who think that the movie is based on fact. Same with the Roswell incident…it had died down, now there are TV series about it, and references dropped into movies and popular literature such that a surprising number of other wise lucid people just assume there must be some truth to it. The various crazy 9/11 CT’s also seem to be picking up steam again (we just had a long thread on this one in GD recently, and it still hasn’t totally run out of steam yet), as they go through their own cycle of waxing and waning. According to friends of mine, there are supposedly a lot (maybe on the order of 20-30%, though I personally doubt it’s that high) of Europeans in particular who believe this one. I’ve recently seen some references to some of the 9/11 CT stuff in TV shows (I can’t remember which off the top of my head…it was about the buildings brought down via explosives, told as if that’s what really happened).
For debate then, do these and other CT’s ever really die, or do they just gain in strength over time? Will these CT’s just stay with us, growing gradually as new generations are exposed tidbits thrown in to our collective popular media, or even full blown movies that show the CT in a believable way (such as JFK)? Eventually, will these things become generally accepted not only by the public but by real historians (I’m talking hundred of years from now), who see smoke and think fire? What long term effect with these CT’s have on our society and our history?
I think with the internet this theories are here to stay. Its getting so much easier to get people to read some baloney you made up, or voices/aliens/angels/the devil/etc. told you. Just write a blog and there you are. It’s just so much easier to pull some werid stuff out of this air then to actually prove something.
Hm. Google ads here tell me here right now:
“Adolph Hitler’s Real Fate
Was it suicide, murder, or escape? Compelling facts reveal the story!”
They’re never going to go away, especially since they fulfill a very basic psychological function.
The world is, essentially, chaotic, dangerous and uncertain. Bad things happen all the time for little or no reason. Being able to create a conspiracy narrative puts everything into place. Kennedy didn’t’ die because some wackjob decided to put a bullet into his brain, he died because of a carefully orchestrated government plot. The WTC wasn’t down by a handfull of men with box cutters flying jets into them it was a secret government/Jewish/Israeli conspiracy.
Not only do they give order to things, they also make people feel powerful and in the know. After all, if they can convince themselves that they’re one of the few who Knows The Truth then no matter what else is going on in their life, they’ve elevated themselves by their supreme wit and knowledge, without having to actually do anything.
Which bring up another point, in that CT’s feed into people’s desire to blame someone else. It’s not that you’re unable to get the kind of job you want because you don’t have the training/talent/personal hygiene, it’s because the Jews control the global economy and save all the good jobs for other Jews. Your inability to get racism passed off in polite society as a valid viewpoint isn’t because society has evolved, it’s because the Protocols are correct and the Jews have created a multi-cultural society simply to fuck up decent, honest, white Christian culture. Homosexuality is no longer seen as a mental disorder and a horrible social aberration? It must be because agents of the Homosexual Agenda have infiltrated government and media and are trying to legitimize homosexuality.
But no matter what, your faults, failings, and lack of influence is because of someone else, and you’re made better, stronger, wiser, and superior by having realized that this conspiracy exists.
WTC Conspiracy Theories always amuse me, because here we have a case where the perpetrators were actually part of a secretive global conspiracy with ties to several powerful governments and at least one family of powerful millionaires, a cryptic name (Al Queda=“the base”), a bizarre and difficult to understand mission and ties to an ancient religion. Dan Brown would have difficulty making something like this up, and yet Conspiracy Theorists still find the need to come up with far less interesting and much more cliched stories about the US government or Zionists or whatever.
There was a thread about this not too long ago, but it’s good to bring up the subject again because of the pervasiveness and destructiveness of many people’s obsession with conspiracy theories.
The popularity of conspiracy theories disgusts and depresses me, and it goes way beyond the sloppy thinking and waste of time this activity involves. It is also damaging to basic societal institutions and sense of community. If it’s believed that the government is out to get us, government’s good works or ignored or trashed. When scientists, doctors and other educated people are thought to be heavily into plots against the masses, people withdraw and either ignore or actively work against the good that highly trained and dedicated people are trying to accomplish.
A prime example of this is antivaccine activism. Antivaxers tell us that Big Pharma and the government promote immunization because they’re greedy for profits (ignoring the reality that vaccine production is one of drug companies’ least profitable lines) and that all the abundant research showing that vaccines are safe and don’t cause autism is compromised for the same reason. As a result, we’re all put at risk.
Lastly, as Finn notes, we can’t ignore the bigotry that hides behind promotion of conspiracy theories. I don’t think that people who obssess over one particular conspiracy are necessarily racists/bigots. As involvement in “researching” and promoting conspiracy theories gets more massive, however, the odds that the person is a bigot increase. The most common bogeyman is The Joos, of course, but blacks, gays, Catholics etc. get their share of nutball attention as well.
My partial solution to this problem is the Jackmannii Critical Thinking course, to be made mandatory in American high schools. Students will learn about the fallacies of argumentation, how to detect and avoid mass hysteria and delusional/conspiratorial thinking, the difference between real science and half-baked research, and how to prevent onself from falling for scammers and deceptive ads of all types.
The Internet is important in the increasing spread of conspiracy theories, because devotees more easily get to feed off each others’ fears and fantasies, and share instant feedback about the news of the day.
Given that we still have CTs about the Illuminati and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion I’d say the rest will be with us a long time. CTs about specific events like the moon landing and 9/11 will probably fade first as the relevance of the event declines.
As long as there are people who refuse to think what they are told there will be conspiracy theories.
As long as there are people that are stupid there will be people who can’t figure out the obvious.
Of course the Moon business and 9/11 are rather funny since they both involve Newtonian physics. Science education in the nation that put men on the Moon is really bad. It must be the teachers.
Slightly off topic, but has there ever been a long running “conspiracy theory” that had a small but devoted niche following (ala 9/11 truthers, holocaust denialists, USS Liberty, JFK, moon landings, Roswell, Elvis, etc…) that actually turned out to be true? (True in the sense that it is basically now universally held to be true).
http://www.tuskegee.edu/global/story.asp?s=1207586 As long as the Tuskegee Experiment lasted 40 year4s and did not escape out into the public, it is possible to believe a cover up could really work. The people involved were not just trained soldiers, but nurses and many others. It can be done.
Simply false.
It was publicly published in 1954.
That nobody knew about it at all before then is possible, but unlikely.
It wasn’t a conspiracy of silence, it just wasn’t popular knowledge any more than you know what chemical formula Dow Chemicals is currently experimenting on.
Conspiracies are possible (Watergate is a decent example); long-running successful conspiracies (especially those that escape public notice) are exceptionally rare. By the time something has been thorougly chewed by the conspiracy theorists the odds that there’s anything left to debate are dim (prime example being the Kennedy assassination, about which true believers will be fulminating well into the next century).
Conspiracy theories are just so flashy and tempting to believe, people overlook what is actually involved in most alleged cases - slip-ups, goofs, wishful thinking, misinterpretation of intelligence and scientific evidence and low-grade CYA coverups.
It is always bizarre to me that a federal government that is constantly shooting itself in the butt and leaking news all over the place, could manage to maintain decades-long conspiracies over things like “chemtrails” (which the government is using to experiment on/sterilize/sicken the masses, doncha know, while mysteriously having perfected ways to protect itself and all the friends and relatives of the government ops who are responsible for spraying the stuff).
As an aside, does anyone know what happened to the curezone.com website, which has not been accessible for a couple months or so?* Curezone used to be a great place to check out the latest loon-bag conspiracy theories, complete with links to nutty websites and YouTube videos.
*yeah, I realize there’s a very dark and sinister reason for this, which They don’t want us to know.
That pretty much covers it, all right. It’s a perfect illustration of what I was getting at in the OP, namely that these things are like a disease and there simply doesn’t seem to be a cure. You, for instance, will never be convinced, regardless of the mountains of data provided to you in the latest 9/11 CT thread…you are simply immune to logic or reason, or, sadly, facts. C’est la vie. I do wish you would move the specific arguments about the 9/11 CT back to the 9/11 CT thread, however…while this OP does peripherally touch on the 9/11 CT, it’s not specifically about it.
:smack::eek: