Well I do understand the allure of a nice mystery involving sinister men planning covert sinister things. It makes for great fiction, but what I don’t understand is what exactly CTs (conspiracy theorists) actually think they will accomplish.
Now I’m not saying there are no conspiracies at all. ( 19 plus guys plotted and planned to hit buildings with planes)
I’m talking about the huge overblown vast cabal types conspiracy that seem to be so popular with people.
Let’s for a moment say that Aliens who crashed in Roswell are being hidden from the public at area 51, The moon landing was faked, JFK was killed by a vast conspiracy involving several gunmen a grassy knoll and the Cuban/mafia connection, that the US government under FDR either aided in or was aware of and allowed the attack on Pearl harbour to happen, and the 9/11 was actually a domestic plot by the Government of the United States to create a pipeline in Afghanistan. Let’s pretend that somehow they are right. So what?
What do CTs think will happen once everyone accepts these facts? Do they think they can reverse these things, do they believe they will topple the government? What is it that drives them aside from what appears to be a smug attitude that they, and they alone are the bright ones and the rest of us are somehow sheep? Will it change they way we live today?
I mean the search for truth is a great thing, but these folk tend to throw away any tools like logic or critical thinking to keep their beliefs alive.
Why do they fight so hard to keep shoring up their loopy theories? To what greater purpose do they think they serve? Is it just their own personal sense of being an insider or is it an actual paranoia that fuels them?
They just want to cause a stir and see the reaction before they run away without following through. They just want to be the center of attention. Irresponsible.
The whole reason to develop a theory about anything is to understand what’s going on. The more complex the situation, the more complex the theory. When you’re trying to come up with a grand theory of everything people do to each other, the only possible explanation is a vast conspiracy.
They’re just people who need to know someone or something is in control. In previous centuries Conspiracy theorists would have turned to religion, and created choirs of angels to predetermine everything. Now they focus on what people do. (or supposedly do, depending on which side of the fence you sit.)
I think they want to play “hero.” It’s easy to “beat the bad guys” if they are a small, evil group of plotters, manipulating world events for their own personal gain…impossible if they are a large, ill-defined group of people acting based on socio-religious-political motivations that can be traced back for centuries.
Also, there are subsets of conspiracy theorists whose origin is in racism (e.g., believers in the Elders of Zion thing).
Seriously, I can see a certain personality (disordered) type that would gravitate to these things but there are some less nutty folk out there willing to swallow this stuff too. Is it the “being in on the big secret” that draws people to this line of thinking?
Maybe they want what they claim to want – maybe they think effective conspiracies depend on secrecy, and exposing the conspiracy is sufficient to destroy it, or render it ineffectual.
Or maybe they just want some definable group of conscious actors to blame for events they consider undesirable. Because attributing those events to broader social forces and currents would be just too discouraging.
You could probably put either construction on every modern conspiracy theorist going back to Abbe Barruel, who blamed the Freemasons for the French Revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbe_Augustin_Barruel
People want to see order in things I think. They don’t want momentous events to be made seemingly randomly by some schmo with a high powered rifle…or a bunch of mopes with box cutters. It makes (some) people very uncomfortable that seemingly random events by a couple of isolated loons can have such an impact. So…they grope for more complex explainations that point to vast conspiricies by shadowy government agencies. Though its counter intuitive, this is actually a comfort to some people…to think that it was the US government that killed Kennedy or took down the WTC, as opposed to a lone wacko with a cheap rifle or a bunch of raggady ass terrorists from the ME.
JMHO there…nothing to really back it up with but my own thoughts.
IMHO, conspiracy theorists, psuedoscientific kooks, and creationists are all cut from the same cloth.
They all reject observable reality in favor of one that better fits their own aesthetic or ideology.
The president couldn’t have been killed by a single frustrated communist, it would take a grand collaboration of world powers to kill such a great figure.
9/11 couldn’t have been the work of 19 men with knives operating with orders and support from a cabal of raggedy fanatics holed up in the shittiest place on Earth. They couldn’t have gotten that lucky. It had to be a controlled demolition set up by the government.
There’s no coincidences, it’s all planned. There’s no misfortune or failure, there’s forces holding you down.
Reality offends me, so I will reject it, and replace it with one of my own.
A number of years back Dave Barry did one of his long, semi-serious columns on some UFO sightings in south Florida (and, by extension, UFO sightings in general.) He went into the history of sightings, noting that “alien abductions” started being reported right AFTER some magazines had printed stories about alien abductions, and how the physical nature of the alien kidnappers has always followed the lead of fictional imagery in TV, movies, or comics. Prior to that, such tales had never been heard; instead, people reported being accosted by government agents, demonss, or various other nefarious and wholly imaginary foes.
The CT’s aren’t aline nuts (well, some of them are) but it’s much the same thing, and I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. The very scary truth is that the world is really quite chaotic and random, and the remarkably safe and predictable society we’ve built is quite fragile. It’s quite easy for one or a few maniacs to kill a President or murder thousands of innocent people. Everything can fall apart with remarkable ease. It IS possible for a gang of idiots, with only a small amount of luck, to blow up a skyscraper and kill thousands of people. That means that YOU can be killed at any time; the safety nets that we have created in our society - police and firefighting and safety measures and most of all the common social contract we mostly ascribe to that we not hurt each other - cannot, ultimately, save us if our number’s up. And that’s just not an easy thing to accept.
The idea that someone’s pulling the strings from behind the scenes fills a lot of emotional needs. As you’ve pointed out, it gives one the security that the world is ordered and predictable.
Another factor is that in many cases it gives the CT someone to blame for the cruelties and misfortunes life sends their way. On a sympathetic note. I am reminded of poor Whitley Strieber, the author who wrote some good books (including the now-forgotten but magnificent “Warday”) whose psychological problems he projected outwards on imaginary space aliens and an equally imaginary government conspiracy to silence him. His alien-abduction account series, if you read it with a mind towards that, is a remarkable and poignant account of a decent man losing part of his own sanity. On a less sympathetic note, look at the various neo-nazi loons who talk about a global “Jewish conspiracy” or the “ZOG” - much of it is simply an unconscious attempt to blame their own life’s failures on an unseen conspiracy to keep them down.
That could be it. I live and work close enough to the White House to hear Duhbya shoot off fireworks. I know if someone determined to cause a large-scale catastrophe here manages to pull it off, I’ll likely be history along with everyone else.
I think there are probably several reasons, corresponding to several types of people who spread conspiracy theories.
Many of these have been stated already. For example, there are some racists who have elaborate belief systems about how a particular race controls the world, or gets special favors from the government, or whatever. But their motive is likely very different from someone who really truly believes that grey aliens blew up the Challenger. The truly wigged-out theories seem to often be caused by some sort of mental illness.
There are also those who spread conspiracy theories because they think the story is just too good not to share. They may only half-believe it, but share it anyway. The conspiracy theory in this case is really just an urban legend. As an example, recall the urban legend about how the oil companies and the automobile manufacturers are suppressing the invention of the car that gets 100 miles per gallon. I think this counts as a conspiracy theory, but it’s fundamentally different from the “Jews control the media” conspiracy theory.
I myself am fascinated by the sheer VOLUME of stuff written about the JFK asassination. The conspiracy theories have all been debunked, and the offical inquiry (The Warren Commission) has covered everything in detail. The surprising thing: we are almost 43 years on from the incident, and most of the people involved are dead. In no instance (known to me) has there ever been a deathbed confession, or papers from an estate, that have ever given ANY credence to any of the conspracy theories. Will people still be debating this in 50 more years? I doubt it-most HS kids have evry little idea of who JFK was-his influence upon history was pretty slight. In Boston, there is the JFK presidential library, which is lawys organizing shows, exhibits,etc., I can’t imagine that many people will be visiting the place after 2050 or so…Kennedy will then be so far in the past, as Wilson is to us.
I agree with a lot of the stuff already written. The world is a big and scary place, and it’s even scarier to think that One Nut With a Gun could kill the President, so it must be a vast conspiracy. (We’ll ignore the fact that One Nut With a Gun killed Robert Kennedy, paralyzed George Wallace and critically injured Ronald Reagen. We’ll even ignore the fact that, stripped to the basics, One Nut With a Gun started World War I.)
In a way, it’s a charming affirmation of their faith in America. The U.S. couldn’t possibly have been caught with its pants down at Pearl Harbor, so it must have set up the attack. One Nut With a Rented Truck couldn’t possibly blow up a building in Oklahoma City, so the government must have done it. A handful of terrorists couldn’t possibly hijack four planes, destroy symbols of American power and kill 3,000 people in the heart of New York City, so the government must have done it. Even the moon landing – the U.S. had made a promise to land on the moon, and when it couldn’t deliver, it had to put together a convincing fake rather than lose face.
I thought that one was for real. You sure its just a CT???