Leaking from the “Lost 411” thread – do people, who believe in Urban Legends at all, tend to believe in several of them? Or are there a lot of people who believe in one, but that one only, and don’t believe in all the others?
I know several people who are UL believers, and all but one believe in a whole cluster of them. Chemtrails, Gun Seizure, how Clinton was going to use the Emergency Broadcasting System to take over control of the country, the Apollo Moon-Landing hoax, the Climate Change conspiracy, the JFK assassination conspiracy, government cover-up of UFOs, Obama is Kenyan, etc.
Not usually all of these at once, but clusters of around four per person. (Imagine how exhausting it would be to believe in 'em all!)
But one bloke I know is a Bigfoot follower, and doesn’t accept any of the others. Is he typical, or a rare bird?
I don’t know whether this is an important distinction or not, but I wouldn’t call the sorts of things you list “urban legends” but rather “conspiracy theories.” And yes, I’m not surprised when a person who believes in one also believes in others. I’m sure there’s a psychological profile of the type of person who’s more apt to buy such things.
I don’t know what’s typical, but in my experience people who believe in just one UL/CT are either absolutely obsessed, or not that serious about it. However, most that I’ve ever met can’t get very far into one of their theories without veering off into another one.
I think it takes a certain mindset to actively believe in urban legends. A mix of skepticism of the government and other authorities, but lack of skepticism of links on Facebook or of forwarded emails, and wanting to feel superior to all the gullible fools who have fallen for the commonly believed lies. So I would think that if you found a person who believed in one urban legend, they are more likely to believe in others, or at least not dismiss them as easily as other people do. It would be very strange for someone to believe that chemtrails are real, and that the government is using them to poison us, but otherwise dismiss all the other urban legends and conspiracy theories as crazy. If you think the government is covering up what they are doing with chemtrails, you probably don’t think that the government is otherwise trustworthy, you think that they are covering up other things.
Bigfoot is different, since it takes different beliefs for that. He could believe that the government isn’t actively trying to poison us and hide evidence of UFOs and that the moon landing is fake and other conspiracies, but could still believe that there are mysterious creatures out there that we just don’t have 100% proof of. Believing in Bigfoot and believing in chemtrails come from different places. But I’d be surprised if Bigfoot was the cryptozoological thing he believed in, that he might say that the Chupacabra or Loch Ness monster or something like that was real.
I agree. Someone might have a pet cause, like with chemtrails, and that’s the main thing that they want to talk to you about obsessively. But if you asked them for their thoughts about other conspiracy theories, they’d either believe in them as well, or not want to dismiss them completely.
CT believers tend to believe most of them. If they don’t believe in a particular one it’s probably because they don’t know about it yet. With maybe some extra leeway for folks who’ll believe CTs that demonize Republicans but not those demonizing Democrats or vice versa.
ULs are a different matter. It still takes a certain credulousness to believe that a duck’s quack doesn’t echo, or that Target stores hate veterans. But that credulousness doesn’t have to be so tinged with raging paranoia.
The Unified Theory of the Crank (a.k.a. crank magnetism) has demonstrated that believing one CT is highly correlated with believing many of them. I have not seen this proven for harmless urban legends (like ghost stories, or the mall parking lot slasher who hides under a car) but it seems likely.
I thought this thread was going to be about Underwriters Laboratory.
Some conspiracy theories and urban legends are almost necessary as ways to explain each other, or the implications of one lay the groundwork for the next. It’s very hard to believe in UFOs and not also accept a massive government conspiracy to keep them secret. Once you believe that governments are involved in that level of deceit, why not believe in Kennedy assassinations, chem trails, 9/11 and banking conspiracies? Having already bought into an imaginary organization that can achieve the impossible, what can’t they do?
I think it’s an important distinction. An Urban Legend is like the Choking Doberman; a whole different sort of thing from chemtrails and Trutherism.
I’m not sure most people “believe” in urban legends, so much as simply repeat them, since they’re good stories. CT believers are passionately devoted to their issues.
Conspiracy theories take a certain kind of credulousness combined with a certain kind of paranoia and inability to evaluate evidence correctly. I mean, not only do you have to believe the government is doing something sinister via chemtrails (the credulous and paranoid part, in that you have to believe that the government has the wherewithal to put it in jet fuel and keep it secret, and that it intentionally does so), combined with the inability to actually read the debunking about the fact that chemtrails are just ice crystals, and that chemtrails would be spectacularly ineffective and wasteful as a method of <whatever> due to the extreme dispersal and tiny amount of active ingredient that anyone would actually get.
Urban legends just take what I’d consider a lack of skepticism and a willingness to believe that something might be true. I mean, I’ve met people who believed that there were gang members who would shoot at you if you flashed your headlights. They weren’t paranoid about it, but they genuinely thought it was something to keep in mind when out driving.
There are a lot of gray area things that are both conspiracy theories and urban legends, and the real dividing line between the people is the degree of paranoia- the more paranoid, the more likely they are to believe in most or all of them.
The person in the OP seems to be a right wing UL believer. Thus they would not believe in the left wing ULs. In my experience chemtrails are often a left thing as well.
