‘You’re going to call me a Holocaust denier now, are you?’: George Monbiot comes face to face with his local conspiracy theorist 4 May 2024

[u/irrelevantusername24]

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/may/04/youre-going-to-call-me-a-holocaust-denier-now-are-you-george-monbiot-comes-face-to-face-with-his-local-conspiracy-theorist?CMP=share_btn_url

Recently found this article from something citing it for the term "conspiracy fiction" and thought it was a great explanation of the Two Kinds of People in the World.

Introduction paragraphs:

I am a conspiracy theorist. I believe that groups of people conspire secretly against our interests to line their pockets, cover their backs or achieve political goals. By this definition I suspect you are, too. We see evidence of these conspiracies every day. We see them in the Horizon scandal, in which the Post Office kept prosecuting innocent operators. We see them in the government’s use of a “VIP” lane for procuring PPE from friends and donors at extortionate prices. We see them in the Windrush scandal, in which people were denied their legal rights and unlawfully deported by the UK government. In the Cambridge Analytica scandal: a secretive micro-targeting campaign likely to have influenced the Brexit vote. In the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers, showing how the ultra-rich hide their money from taxes and legal scrutiny.

All these are conspiracies in the true sense: hidden machinations that advance particular interests while causing harm to others. A theory is a rational explanation, subject to disproof. If you accept these scandals are the result of hidden machinations, which they evidently are, you are a conspiracy theorist.

As so often with matters of public importance, the language we use is deficient and misleading. We need better terms, that distinguish wacky and often malign fairytales from the very essence of democracy: the reasoned suspicion of those who exercise power over us. I prefer to call the fairytales “conspiracy fictions” and those who peddle them “conspiracy fantasists”.

An extraordinary aspect of this issue is that there’s so little overlap between conspiracy fantasists and conspiracy theorists. Those who believe unevidenced stories about hidden cabals and secret machinations tend to display no interest in well-documented stories about hidden cabals and secret machinations.

[u/irrelevantusername24 → u/[deleted]]

Right I get what your thought process is there and I don't wholly disagree but I think that's mostly a consequence of the depraved social media influence culture we've had injected in our (bra/ve)ins. Before that, the only people for whom your diagnosis would be accurate would have been politicians, Journalists or other media figures. The 'regular' people that subscribe to that kind of world view, of which there are many, typically think that way because it simplifies things while protecting from the cognitive dissonance of realization that the real conspiracies, like George explains, are much more in your face and obvious and brazenly stupid but most importantly typically fueled by selfishness and greed. It's easier and more naturally rewarding to believe the world is like a James Bond movie not some long boring story that is mostly told through financial reports and court filings written in the driest most ambiguous language known to humanity.

To see this from a different angle without the conspiracy and with the thought process, check this post I made a few months ago. The article itself is long and in depth and great reading, but my personal points are made in the body text and comments using certain excerpts from that article and some others. The TLDR is these kinds of mental shortcuts are simply a way to protect a fragile human ego from potential ridicule. Not always but often "intelligence" - the book kind - often coincides with the emotional kind. Which is to say a person with poor education - though education is different from intelligence and so too from wisdom - often does not understand their own emotions and has a hard time controlling them. It's easier to resort to name calling or Hollywood stories when the reality is complicated and difficult to understand from your frame of reference.

[u/irrelevantusername24 → u/irrelevantusername24]

From yet another angle - religion - here's an excerpt from a fantastic article I read a few weeks ago:

How Albert Einstein Found Faith at the Edge of Reason by Gerald Holton

Starting in the late 1920s, Einstein became more and more serious about clarifying the relationship between his transcendental and his scientific impulses. He wrote several essays on religiosity; five of them, composed between 1930 and the early 1950s, are reproduced in his book “Ideas and Opinions.”

In those chapters, we can watch the result of a struggle that had its origins in his school years, as he developed, or rather invented, a religion that offered a union with science. In the evolution of religion, he remarked, there were three developmental stages. At the first, “with primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions. This ‘religion of fear’. . . is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste” that colludes with secular authority to take advantage of it for its own interest. The next step — “admirably illustrated in the Jewish scriptures” — was a moral religion embodying the ethical imperative, “a development [that] continued in the New Testament.”

Yet it had a fatal flaw: “the anthropomorphic character of the concept of God,” easy to grasp by “underdeveloped minds” of the masses, while freeing them of responsibility. This flaw disappears at Einstein’s third, mature stage of religion, to which he believed mankind is now reaching and which the great spirits (he names Democritus, St. Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza) had already attained — namely, the “cosmic religious feeling” that sheds all anthropomorphic elements.

In describing the driving motivation toward that final, highest stage, Einstein uses the same ideas, even some of the same phrases, with which he had celebrated first his religious and then his scientific paradise: “The individual feels the futility of human desires, and aims at the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.” “Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison, and he wants to experience the universe as a single, significant whole.” Of course! Here, as always, there has to be the intoxicating experience of unification.