Conspiracy by Contrapoints
Notes • 401 Words • Politics, Sociology, 2025 • 03/31/2025 • View in graph
What are conspiracy theories? Why do people engage with them? Can conspiracists be reasoned with?
There are 421 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 3 minutes to read it.
This article was published 2025-03-31 00:00:00 -0400, which makes this post and me old when I published it.
conspiratorial thinking seems to be like religion where we say that things happen for a reason and that reason is that someone has willed it
we are trying to explain anomaly
why is it easier to accept intentionalism then that somethings just happen randomly? is it scary to confront?
- denial of chaos
- proportionality (big effects must have big causes)
- scapegoating (blaming things makes us feel better — psychic homeostasis)
dualism (black and white thinking)
- me and not me —> in group out group
is assigning agency and intentionality to events some kind of evolutionary misfiring of ascribing agency?
is this the god instinct firing in a new way? instead of religion we have conspiracies?
- Popper would agree
is conspiracy meaning making?
- we understand the world by imaging it as a reflection of ourselves (we can only think in terms of what we know and experience)
pre modern thought (evolutionary thinking) to modern world (very complex and impossible to understand all causes and effects of things)
- people can’t blame systems or don’t want to believe in systems they just want to blame individuals or groups
conspiracy thinking is fun
- like an ARG
- a game designers analysis of Q Anon
conspiracy explains things that scientific determinism cannot
- Relief from fear (fear is inherent in politics) —> meaningful instead of arbitrary
- inflated self esteem (it make you feel special and smart, gives them a noble purpose) Chuuni thinking
- Revenged humiliation (people will accept you in a grifter circle or you get radicalized from scorn taking revenge on fact itself, feelings of persecution can be redirected/recontextualized)
God doesn’t cut it (he mostly explains why Good things happen)
- but what about the bad things?
- i am not swayed too much by the logical problem of evil, but i am bogged down by the evidential problem of evil in regards to faith and religion
- Modern Abrahamic Religion with an Omni-Benevolent God doesn’t seem to explain much about things going wrong in the world
- why doesn’t God just take care of Satanism and the Global Elite?
conspiracism is a kind of divination, like tarot
- tarot doesn’t tear apart families like conspiracism does though
- divination has a place as long as it knows its place
- bias fuels divination which can be bad when it is anti-bias
conspiracism can be simpler to understand or accept than the truth? sometimes its projection that we aren’t fully conscious of