Does anyone have any reflections on the psychology of conspiracy nutters?
I have two friends who will believe pretty much anything that involves the government/corporations and nefarious activities. Evidence is strictly optional. Indeed, evidence to the contrary is not sufficient to disprove these theories. Or its just part of the conspiracy.
The funny thing is these people are otherwise quite intelligent and capable of rational thought. They have decent careers and neither are social outcasts.
If they had failed careers/relationships etc I might understand it as a coping mechanism to internally justify failure. But that is not the case here.
I dont understand why they believe these things. But then I dont understand how faith works for religious people either.
People who label them as "conspiracy nutters" more likely to be conformist and closed minded. They will be more like to believe "the big lie", because everybody else believes the big lie, so you become crazy if you don't also believe the big lie.
The collective mind of society doesn't always get it right. Being "Cassandra" would be a miserable existence.
Intelligence and rational thought are orthogonal. I would say that cats are generally more rational than most humans I have met.
Intelligence is not a prerequisite for having a decent career or not being a social outcast. Society prefers people with high IQ's, as opposed to true geniuses, who are more likely to struggle to fit into society.
Being crazy means that you are completely different from the rest of society. It doesn't mean that you are wrong.
All of recorded history is pretty much a "conspiracy theory". Who really knows if it is true or not?
But the majority of society simply accept it as fact, so it's no longer a conspiracy theory as defined by society.
The fact that someone believes something which you do not believe does not mean that they have a mental health problem. If that were the case, we (atheists) could say that there were a billion or more insane Christians out there. But everyone knows someone who has religious beliefs.
Everyone, no matter how mainstream their opinions, has a worldview which is comprised of a set of beliefs. Everyone. Now, it is just the nature of beliefs that rational arguments and evidence do not readily alter them. No matter how widespread, or how fringe the belief is, or whether you judge it to be 'crazy', or whether the belief has a scientific basis. Those are the default nodes in your cognitive framework. You just don't change them very easily. Any more easily than I change my beliefs.
One thing that you may not realize, or perhaps may not accept as fact due to your own worldview, is that the 'conpiracy theorist' label has been historically, and still is, a tool used to suppress dissent by ridiculing opponents who accuse an establishment of wrongdoing. Here is a Wikipedia article about it.
> As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions code menaces to authority as mental diseases during political disturbances.
>...In the 1970s, Martha Beall Mitchell, wife of U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, was diagnosed with a paranoid mental disorder for claiming that the administration of President Richard M. Nixon was engaged in illegal activities. Many of her claims were later proved correct, and the term "Martha Mitchell effect" was coined to describe mental health misdiagnoses when accurate claims are dismissed as delusional.
I anticipate that most people with mainstream beliefs in the US would assume, based on their worldview, that political abuse of psychiatry only applies to other countries, or to other times. I think this is wrong, and part of the general myth perpetuated by the establishment that it rarely (or at least, not in contemporary times) does anything that can't be morally justified.
While many people like to make fun of and dismiss conspiracy theorists, they don't realize that some conspiracy theorists have been following particular events closely for many years and are making connections between events that are decades apart. Whereas the opinion of someone who is less informed on certain things would be that a current event was a standalone anomaly.
When you mention making connections between events rather than thinking of them as standalone, the first thing that comes to mind is the way that government and media sources always portray the wars in the middle east as being isolated instances rather than as being part of a larger strategy and ongoing campaign. Its not just less information. Its misinformation oftentimes too. Such as war propaganda. Every one of these wars has a supposed explanation, which is never given as being strategic or connected to a larger campaign, always some bullshit about 'weapons of mass destruction', 'humanitarian crisis', 'freedom fighters' etc. which is always later revealed to be lies.
I mean, to me its pretty obvious that the US has a long term campaign going on. Just look at a map. We invade and occupy a country on one side of Iran, then the other. Then the Egyptian president, who just happens to have been blocking US plans to invade Libya (one of the strongest remaining Iranian allies in the area) since the 80s, is removed by way of an amazing 'spontaneous' democratic online uprising (which to me looks like propaganda, information/cyberwarfare). Then Libya is taken over by US-backed 'rebels'. And now Syria, the other Iranian ally, is being taken apart from within by more 'rebels'. All countries in the same geographic area, with the same types of prized resources, one after another, all opponents of the US.
The problem is that the mainstream media lies about the motivations for military action are always accepted by the majority. In the context of the previous lies getting us into war, they are obvious deceptions. Yet they blast the propaganda from all angles with the same bullshit over and over and it becomes the closest thing to reality that many people have.
> Does anyone have any reflections on the psychology of conspiracy nutters?
I'm sure we could collect as many theories about conspiracy freaks as there are conspiracy freaks, on the ground that most of psychology is speculation.
> Indeed, evidence to the contrary is not sufficient to disprove these theories.
That's one of the attractions of conspiracy theories -- most of them can't be conclusively disproven, because most require proof of a negative, which is an impossible evidentiary burden, for reasons given here:
Conspiracy theorists and crackpots have a lot in common. One thing they share is the idea that, unless their critics can disprove their beliefs, the beliefs must have merit. In other words, they hold the opposite of the null hypothesis (the idea that an idea with no evidence is probably false) -- they also unfairly shift onto others their own burden of evidence.
> The funny thing is these people are otherwise quite intelligent and capable of rational thought.
Intelligence is no assurance of reasonable thought processes. For that, one must understand logic and certain scientific principles, like accepting the burden of evidence for one's own ideas, and being willing to sincerely doubt one's own conclusions. I have always suspected that conspiracy theorists (and crackpots) never learned the basics of evidence and research.
When I was about 9 years old someone gave me a copy of an Erich von Daniken book, which I inevitably thought was the wonderful thing I had ever read. However, doubts started to creep in after a while and eventually I worked out that it was complete nonsense - but for a while I really wanted that stuff to be true and got quite angry that people weren't interested in this wonderful truth.
That experience left quite a mark on me - I still have a tiny bit of guilt at believing that stuff for a short while, even though I suspect it probably made me much more level headed and skeptical when I got older.
One key factor seems that if you "know" something that everyone has been duped into ignoring and which "they" spend great effor to suppress, it makes you special, more enlightened and important than the average guy. I guess it's one way of dealing with feelings of inadequacy in your life.
And if you actively work on "uncovering" the conspiracy, why, that makes you a hero, bravely thwarting evil powers!
Although neither one is perfect. The latter doesn't miss the opportunity to promote the author's own libertarian point of view. Which is fine, but it distracts from the point of the book. The former also takes a few shots at things that are not conspiracy theories, but pet dislikes of the author. Neither are nearly so bad as the one-star reviews though - clearly both touched some nerves.
Central to both is the idea that people feel a need to think that things happen for a reason, and aren't just strictly random. And a bad reason is better than no reason at all.
My grandfather was into a lot of that stuff, and your description is quite apt: he was a really smart engineer, and a good guy, in general. But he loved all kinds of these theories.
The human brain is a remarkable pattern-recognition engine with an adaptive bias to favour false positives over false negatives. Michael Shermer gave a fun TED talk on why people are so inclined to believe weird things:
I have two friends who will believe pretty much anything that involves the government/corporations and nefarious activities. Evidence is strictly optional. Indeed, evidence to the contrary is not sufficient to disprove these theories. Or its just part of the conspiracy.
The funny thing is these people are otherwise quite intelligent and capable of rational thought. They have decent careers and neither are social outcasts.
If they had failed careers/relationships etc I might understand it as a coping mechanism to internally justify failure. But that is not the case here.
I dont understand why they believe these things. But then I dont understand how faith works for religious people either.
Anyone have any insight to this?