Memories of the 28th Century

I have wondered about conspiracy theories for quite a while. Why do people believe them at all, and why do they believe what they believe. Today a believer sat down near me at Starbucks and started running off at the mouth. It is usually a mistake to try to silence such a person, so I listened in the hope that I might learn something. That particular person seems to believe that Jews are the root of all evil (he is one himself, so he should know), and there are persons controlling or overseeing human behavior for reasons that are not clear.

I spent roughly an hour listening to him expound his opinions. I know how difficult it can be to engage people like this logically. After leaving I considered the matter more and concluded that he regards himself as flawed in some way, so he isn’t a good Jew, which he regards as good, because he hates Jews, because they are so selfish. He knows better than I do, so I won’t disagree. After more careful consideration, I think that this individual was generalizing from his own personality to all Jews. I have known non-Jews who regarded all Jews as evil, but they also were generalizing from a small sample.

I think that the larger – something controls behavior – feeling that he had was an idiosyncratic belief that there is something god-like, if there isn’t an actual God. People have been reporting that and hazy memories of an afterlife for a very, very long time.

My conclusion as to why some people believe conspiracy theories is that the theories are simple explanations and are easier to understand than an infinite universe, which is the alternative. In the cases of particular events that are sometimes thought to have resulted from conspiracies the principle of simplification still applies.

Apparently it is easier for some people to believe that steel can’t bend until it melts than that steel starts to soften and become flexible at three hundred degrees, and it becomes very flexible by the time it becomes red-hot at about 1600 degrees. And that explains why there were no accelerants or Thermite in the buildings that fell as results of the 9/11 attacks,

The lack of adequate data, or of relevant data, also allows conspiracy theories to develop. This may be why some people believe that FEMA has built camps around the country to be used as death camps, that will be used as population reduction facilities (or something like that), link below. In fact, there are some camps that are designed as flood evacuation facilities, but nearly all of the locations listed as FEMA Death Camps are something else entirely.

If someone were making TV shows like Rod Serling’s’ “Twilight Zone, then show of some people making a tour of an alleged death camp, a tour intended to prove that it was something else. The last building the tour group would go to would be large and blank outside. It would be described as a theater, and they would enter to find a set of passages that were only large enough for one person at a time, and they would lead to a concrete room with a garage door on one side and a guillotine in the middle. The narrator would see the bodies of the four who preceded him and their heads would be on a shelf. The narrator would bolt for the garage door, get through it and into the truck parked there. The last scene would be of the police puling over the stolen truck.

One problem for those who believe conspiracy theories is that they haven’t read Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Eco completely shredded all conspiracy theories in this great novel. Eco’s works involving literary interpretation are also useful in finding over-interpretation in works tat purport to being non-fiction.

As a whole, there is no single reason why people believe conspiracy theories, unless inadequate thinking is taken as a reason. Inadequate data, poor logic compulsive or delusional thinking, trust in an authority that is wrong, traditional think, these can all be causes for people to accept conspiracy theories, and even excessive data can can result in conspiracy theories, as is the case with the assassination of JFK; more than five people have sworn that they were responsible.

If there is a general reason for conspiracy theories to be accepted, it might be ignorance. Ignorance of the specific situation and/or ignorance of how to learn more about the situation.

Then there are the matters of straight-forward fact that have been presented as conspiracy theories to grab the imaginations and emotions of the general population. The obvious example is the way that climate change has been presented. Since the early 1970’s various groups of people (scientists and not) have presented ideas about climate change. It appear that the idea was taken up by radical environmentalists, but their involvement has only been since about 1990, before that the people involved were mostly trained meteorologists and climatologists and students in those fields. The early researchers found signs that there might be another mini-ice-age in the near future, but that work was soon ignored and a widespread movement toward runaway warming became the norm for the next thirty years, and during that period more glaciers have receded to show mines and agricultural fields that were buried under the ice of the Little Ice Age. I won't flog this any more now, but the methods of conspiracy theories, marketting, and propaganda are closely related, and they can be seen in the behaviors of scientists and news reporters.

And how much difference is there between a political campaign and conspiracy theory?



http://nohoax.com/index.php?option=c...d=64&Itemid=43
http://www.snopes.com/tag/fema-camps/
http://www.popularmechanics.com/mili...12805/4312850/