When I say “kooky conspiracy theories”, I acknowledge that some conspiracies are true. The Watergate scandal and its cover-up was a conspiracy, for example. The Night of the long knives and any coup d’état was a conspiracy. Few will doubt that several people can agree to secretively perform an illegal, subversive or immoral act. By their very nature, conspiracies tend to be difficult to detect.
Yet, conspiracy theories like those about 9-11 or the Learned elders of Zion seem to be in an altogether different category as are their supporters.
When I say “why”, I mean both in terms of the psychological and sociological causes as well as the purpose of that belief for the conspiracy theorists; In other words, what does a conspiracy theory do for the believer?
If someone can enlighten me, I’d also like to know how one comes to adopt such beliefs. I imagine conspiracy theorists don’t go to bed rational and wake up the next morning thinking: “The Jews did it”. So, what is the process of falling for conspiracy theories?
It gives you an easy feeling of knowledge. Learning the reality about a situation would take a lot of effort. But if you learn a conspiracy theory in an hour and that lets you dismiss all of the real knowledge on the subject. A person who decides a Jewish banking conspiracy is running the economy can dismiss a scholar who got his economics doctorate at Harvard because everything he learned is a lie.
I think it gives some people a feeling that they are privy to knowledge that the vast majority of people don’t know. Believing in these conspiracy theories makes them feel like they are part of an exclusive club and everyone else isn’t smart enough to get it. Of course, mental illness could also be a factor in some cases.
Also, it makes the world seem a little less scary. Saying “[Bad thing] happened because [conspiracy] made it happen” implies that 1) we as people have control over all bad things that happen, 2) bad things happen for an understandable reason, and 2) we could in theory stop bad things happening by stopping the conspiracies.
Saying “[Bad thing] happened because bad things sometimes happen” makes the universe a scarier place, knowing that a bad thing could happen at any time for little to no good reason at all.
An episode of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit showed another factor in their UFO episode. You join a community. The guys who made a stake out at (well, as close as they could get to) Area 51 were really just going on a camping trip.
My dad has a coworker who believes in a ton of conspiracy theories and goes to events where people tell each other their latest ones. His primary way of making friends is to share his stories. Even if all he does is get people who rebut him, he enjoys the company.
People don’t want to believe that one lone nut could possibly assassinate a beloved leader like JFK or MLK. It’s more comforting to believe that it was a cabal of specially-trained operatives working for some shadowy organization like the KGB, or the CIA, or the mafia. It’s even more comforting if you can link the cabal to Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson, because then you can focus your anger at someone you already hate. “Traitors in our midst” is more satisfying than “some faceless group of foreigners”.
The UFO conspiracies let you fantasize about escaping from your drab life and soaring among the stars. You can hope that some fabulous new technology will rescue you from your drudgery, and that wise beings will save the environment and end hunger and war and whatever else you worry about.
Agreed, imagine if George Bush really did choke to death on a pretzel. How many people would accept that the ‘most powerful man in the world’ could shuffle off this mortal coil from something as mundane and ordinary as that?
The conspiracy theorists would still be having a field day about it.
This doesn’t really answer the question, but perhaps gives one way of thinking about it:
I see “othering” in the conspiracy theories. People are engaging in the discursive construction of “the other”. It creates an ingroup and an outgroup, and the ingroup feels privileged in their access to information (in their own view), while perhaps also feeling persecuted. So I think it’s related to identity formation, and the need to belong to a group.
It’s just one element, I suppose. It doesn’t tell you why they wake up one morning thinking a particular bizarre thing. I suppose that particular bizarre thing could just be a part of a narrative they are exposed to, but then that doesn’t explain the origin.
There is function to it, of course, because as stated in the OP, sometimes there are conspiracies. You might have to rise up against this conspiring “other”, you’ll need to mobilise the ingroup.
The dysfunctional part relates to the sad fact that the conspiracy-shouters never seem to uncover any real plots on their own. The stuff they obsess about is oft-debunked swill.
In addition to avoiding the effort to learn what’s really happening/already occurred and the feeling of superiority derived from not being one of the sheeple, getting heavily involved in conspiracy theories provides good cover for one’s bigoted views. Or so they believe.
Funnily enough I do have a CT about that incident. It is to the best of my knowledge original to me, although I wouldn’t be surprised if others had thought of it too.
Around the same time that Bush had his pretzel-choking incident Cheney also appeared in public with some facial bruising, claiming that his dog had jumped up and hit him in the face with its head. Knowing the personalities of Bush and Cheney I wouldn’t at all be surprised to learn that the two of them had a fistfight over something or other and the pretzel story was concocted to provide a distraction for the media and public.
Now, I’m not particularly emotionally invested in this theory, I don’t pop onto random messageboards to spread it and frankly it makes no difference to me or anything else whether it’s true or not. It just seems like a more plausible explanation than choking on a pretzel.
Intellectual laziness. Many people would rather hear a simplistic explanation for something than go to the effort required to make an informed decision.
You should look at the effort people put into calculations of jet fuel involved in 9/11 and such, or the elaborate theories about exactly how and why big pharma wants to inject our children with poison. It’s not lazy and simplistic. It’s wrong and stupid, but lazy and simplistic doesn’t quite fit.
This thread started out as “Ask the Conspiracy Theorist” before it was merged with another and subjected to entire novels’ worth of crazy, veering, nonsensical rambling. Still, if anyone can find something of value in its insight into the mind of a CTer, have at it.
I read somewhere - I think it was actually on this board - that it has to do with the innate human tendency to find patterns. In some people, that tendency is overdeveloped, so they see connections and patterns where none exist. It’s a feature of schizophrenia, for example. Conspiracy theorists see a bunch of events that seem unconnected to most people, and their minds connect those events into patterns.
I’m pretty sure the post where I read it had a link to a really interesting article about this, but my Google skills aren’t finding anything.