A maniac goes on a rampage in public with a gun, killing people before commiting suicide. Conspiracy theories sprout up it was orchestrated to create support for gun control.
But instead of going for the easiest to believe and most rational conspiracy theory, say that the government became aware of some unhinged maniac and simply ignored any reports to the authorities, or secretly supplied him with guns through and agent and allowed the rampage to happen.
NOPE!
The theories will be about how the maniac and all the victims were actors under deep cover who had been in their role for a decade, everything was faked and their grieving family members are in on the charade and paid off. The actors were tranquilized and whisked away to Tahiti where they are now living under assumed identities.
I don’t get why you would do a sort of reverse Occam’s Razor and make your conspiracy theory as convoluted and complicated as possible, making it that much less likely to be believed.
Because it’s inherent in CT thinking that simple explanations are wrong. Also, leaps of logic and hidden causes are necessary to get around obvious flaws in the chain of events.
Say, Bigfoot. There’s a large anthropoid of some sort in backwoods Oregon. But because no one’s ever seen one…he must be very shy and reclusive. And always retrieves his dead to hide for burial. Or he decomposes instantly into inert matter. And he has telepathy, so no one ever gets a picture of him.
But, oh, wait, we have pictures of him! And they’re real, so he has to be intelligent, and chose to reveal himself.
And on and on. The system gets built up, layer by layer, to account for every possible detail of any possible objection. In the end, this grotesque contraption is so unwieldy, no rational person can have any respect for it.
And that leads the true believer to the next step: paranoia. The authorities know the truth, but there’s a huge cover-up to deny it!
The effect is sometimes called “system building.” The believer constructs more and more elaborate systems of explanations, including explanations for the systems themselves!
…that covers all the known facts… usually is. An unwillingness to believe a lone nut could kill a president leads to endlessly complicated scenarios that reject the simple premise.
The classic old conspiracy theory that Nixon’s team reached out to the North Vietnamese in 1968 to thwart the Paris Peace Talks for the Vietnam War was highly convoluted, and turned out to be true, albeit less convoluted. Nixon and team were traitors who tried to prolong the war to defeat Humphrey and get Nixon elected. Just like Nixon’s craziest enemies said for decades. Kissinger still roams free.
One of the key attitudes of CT believers is that they understand something ordinary people don’t; they see more clearly or more accurately into the underlying reality.
As a result the thing they see must be at least complex enough that they can plausibly believe ordinary folks *can’t *see it.
It’s precisely *because *the simplest explanation is too simple that any more complex explanation is needed.
Given their already-loony nature, this baseline impetus towards at least a modicum of complexity gets elaborated out into baroque fantasies of plots within plots within plots.
There is also some general oneupsmanship within the folks who post and forward and popularize such theories. Recall they all see themselves as in a soft competition to see the “true reality” more clearly than the next CTer.
Because every fact that disproves a CT has to be verified with another fact to explain it.
Stephen King shot John Lennon. That’s his photo getting Lennon’s autograph.
But Stephen King had a full beard and mustache at the time!
Oh. It had to be a fake beard and mustache.
A conspiracy theory starts with the irrefutable fact that there is or was a conspiracy. From that point on there have to be increasingly complex explanations for the all the lack of evidence for a conspiracy and even more complex explanations to refute all the evidence that there was no conspiracy. On top of that conspirators often have multiple motives, kill and pay off witnesses to their evil acts, destroy evidence or plant false evidence, and take advantage of the public’s gullibility and blindness. There are no simple explanations for conspiracies because conspiracies have to be complex. If they weren’t complex there wouldn’t need to be a conspiracy. If Lee Harvey Oswald could have shot JFK all by himself he would have just fired a gun from the Book Depository instead of being a patsy for the FBI, CIA, KGB, Fidel Castro, the mob, the Masons, the Knights of Columbus, and the Girl Scouts of America (where did you think the money from those cookies goes?).
I think it’s because the conspiracy theory mindset requires not only a conspiracy, but a chain of clues that are readily accessible to the public but ONLY the person spinning the theory is smart enough to figure out. So, if the government were to become aware of a homicidal maniac but ignore it, there would either be no clues that any such thing had ever happened (if all of the relevant conversations took place in person or over the phone), or they would be inaccessible clues (documents filed away in somebody’s office somewhere). You could SAY that someone had seen the documents or leaked a conversation, but you would have nothing tangible you could claim as “proof.” On the other hand, if government officials were hiring actors to fake a massacre and rehoming them in Tahiti, there’s a lot more room for the conspiracy theorist to discover photos, documents, time discrepancies, etc., that he or she can pass off as “evidence” of the conspiracy, even if it’s something a normal person wouldn’t consider to be evidence.
Well, just PRETEND that the 9/11 attacks weren’t really pulled off by Osama Bin Laden and his followers.
If you accept that premise, well, how COULD the whole thing have been pulled off? SOMEBODY had to have stolen and destroyed those planes. SOMEBODY had to have rigged the WTC and the Pentagon to detonate.
If you don’t accept the simple solution, you HAVE to embrace a complicted solution, because ONLY a lot of very important and very powerful people could have pulled off the 9/11 attacks any other way.
That the Warren Commission didn’t consider that the heights and inward location of the jump seats the Connolly’s were sitting in is very significant here. Put the governor at a lower height and slightly inward and one bullet is fully credible.
Oswald was a time bomb waiting to go off, and may have had a bunch of nudging from any number of people pretending to be Cubans, and Ruby’s assassination of Oswald is beyond highly suspicious. I don’t see any good evidence of other shooters other than eyewitnesses, which are not necessarily reliable. The nature of killing social reformers always raises suspicion of conspiracy in me, and that the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr. were all assassinated at the height of their campaigning for social reform of entrenched establishment positions suggests we have the problem of the Gracchi in these cases. Oswald claimed he was a patsy and Ray claimed he was a part of a conspiracy and named “Raoul”. Oswald was certainly shut up like he was a conspirator/patsy, others on this board elsewhere have made a strong case that Ruby was just a lucky coincidence, which I don’t buy. He did manage to be there at exactly the right time and place when supposedly it was a random move. But the event itself strongly suggests a planned assassination.
True, but you don’t complicate the explanation unnecessarily. So when the simple answer doesn’t work then sure, something more complex and exotic may be needed. Not too surprising that the CT crowd prefer to skip the mundane and jump straight to exotic.
I would say it helps create the ‘wall of text’ style as an attempt to make it harder to follow and therefore harder to refute.
Also, if you only give say 3-5 details, maybe those could be easily refuted. Give 300 and even if people poke holes in a few you can still say “Well, these other 250 details could be/are still true!”