For 13 thousand For years, the Black Knight, a satellite of alien origin, has been orbiting the Earth. NASA knows this, but will not say it. The Denver Airport, built by representatives of the New World Order, is a global genocide management center and re-education camp for rebels. Finland does not exist, in its place is the Baltic Sea. Finns live in Sweden and all current maps and GPS readings are manipulated.
There have always been thousands of such lunar theories, and in the era of a pandemic, new ones appear - for example, that the new disease was created by crazy ecologists. Funny? To a certain degree. But if you assume that this article will mock conspiracy theorists, then you are wrong. If you expect him to prove that these theories are false, you will be disappointed. Or maybe you'd like me to defend them? Well, you will also be disappointed.
Conspiracy theories deserve to be taken seriously. It's a fascinating phenomenon that says more about our world than it may seem - but not what their followers believe, or what their critics proclaim. So what do they testify to? About something very inconvenient for the elite.
First, for our own sake, let's get rid of the feeling of superiority towards the followers of conspiracy theories. As noted by Joseph E. Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, there is no evidence that belief in them is associated with low intelligence. Moreover, supporters of conspiratorial explanations of history are not some pitiful "others", but also ourselves. "Public opinion polls show that each of us believes in at least one conspiracy theory, and we probably do not want to consider all people mentally ill" - Uscinski writes in his book, Conspiracy Theories: A Primer, published this year. ). In it, he defines a conspiracy theory as explaining events through the actions of a small group of powerful individuals who secretly pursue their particular interests to the detriment of the public.
However, this approach is too narrow. After all, there are theories assuming that a large group of people is involved in a conspiracy and not all of its members are influential - e.g. the flat Earth theory. According to it, every scientist, even a geographer from the University of Pcim Dolny, deliberately conceals the truth about the shape of the world. There are also conspiracy theories that point to people acting out of altruistic motives as conspirators. These include, for example, theories about freemasons striving to create a fully rational and ethical society.
The construction of conspiracy theories is a free American, and in fact their only common feature is to question the official version of events and to believe that the truth has been deliberately withheld. If you think about it, in fact each of us has this kind of belief. Uscinski also claims that belief in conspiracy theories is common today, but is it more common than before? And if so, why?
Conspiracy theories are known to have appeared earlier than scientific theories. Evolutionary researchers consider them to be an adaptive mechanism from the tribal era. The stranger was under suspicion at the time. Believing in his good intentions often meant death, so it was safer to assume he was up to something and count your fingers after shaking hands.
Conspiracy theories did not disappear with the increasing intellectual sophistication of people and the emergence of national communities. Instead, they became more fanciful. Is it more frequent?
Unfortunately, the attempt to compare what percentage of the population believed in conspiracies in 500 BCE, in 1348, in 1978 and in 2020 is doomed to failure because we do not have data. There remains deduction, and this indicates that there must simply be much more conspiracy theories and their adherents, at least in absolute terms. In the world, A.D. 2020 is home to a record number of people who have unprecedented access to information and the ability to publish it at no cost.
Evidence for the above thesis was gathered by Adam Kucharski, a mathematician and epidemiologist from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In his book Rules of Contagion, he builds an analogy between how viruses spread and how information spreads on the web. Both the pathogen and the message need a vector. It is easier to find him in the crowd - for the latter, it is the Internet. A specific type of information, just like a particular type of virus, needs vulnerable people. If old people's homes are a paradise for diseases in the biological world, then in the digital world a paradise for conspiracy theories are "echo chambers", ie communities of people with the same worldview. Once a conspiracy theory enters such a chamber, it is discussed and creatively developed with increasing approval. For some, their creation becomes a kind of social game. All the more attractive as it is devoid of rules that govern science. Building a conspiracy theory is like jumping freely from stone to stone in a mountain stream. It is only up to us which stones (facts) we choose to stand on the other side (formulate a conspiracy theory) and get confirmation from others: "logical!". And if it is logical, it must be true? Not. The logical consistency of a theory is not a determinant of its truth. In addition, conspiracy theorists are massively committing the conjunction error by assuming that the complexity of the theory equates to a greater probability. They would sooner believe that Bill Gates in secret laboratories created a virus and killed the doctor who first reported it, than that he only created a coronavirus. Meanwhile, the more complex the theory, the less likely it is.
Adherents of conspiracy concepts, as a rule, ignore such nuances. They are guided by the motto of the minister of tsarist Russia, Alexander Gorchakov, and do not believe in unconfirmed information. Uscinski gives an example: “When Obama took office as president of the US, conspiracy theorists accused him of not having a birth certificate and hiding the fact that he was born outside the US. He showed a shortened version. They demanded a full one. And he showed this one. Then they found that he had simply faked it. "
First, it is people who choose their friends on Facebook to reject those with opposing views. And the works are completed by the portal's algorithm, filtering out materials that are inconsistent with our ideology, and published by those who somehow passed the initial selection. Artificial intelligence means that we also reach for more and more radical content. On YouTube, we won't be interested in a video in which someone explains that doctors hide from us the wonderful properties of hydrogen peroxide infusion if we've already seen one. The algorithm will be suggested by a video showing that these doctors are also paid Mossad killers and sometimes poison local water supplies. The more emotions such a video evokes, the better, because the chance that we will share it with friends from our group increases. This is why fake news circulates online faster than confirmed news. This is also why - as historian Joseph Roisman of the American University in Washington points out - conspiracy theories find particularly fertile ground in times of crisis. People are just overly emotional. The crisis gives them additional reasons to question official information: they are starting to contradict themselves.
How to believe Minister Szumowski today that the masks help, since he recently said that they did not help? How do you believe expert X at Yale University that COVID-19 is a great threat when expert Y at Stanford University says it's just the flu? The crisis reveals the lack of a cognitive instance that unambiguously resolves doubts. When it turns out that the experts differ in their opinions, the Kowalskis think that they can be experts themselves. "I have conducted a private investigation!" - this is how one of the Facebook detectives starts a post in which he comes to the conclusion that "there is no COVID-19 epidemic, coronavirus, we are being manipulated!". And he gets 597 likes. 524 people commented. 546 shares. The COVID-19 group - a false epidemic (1,300 members) of similar entries is abundant. The same is true for the Stop Compulsory Vaccines group, prepared for us by the Polish Government (23,000 members.) Do these people know something that others do not know? Cass Sunstein, a lawyer, and behavioral economist at Harvard Law School says quite the opposite. They know little and what they do know is mostly false. Moreover, without the education that would give them a tool to navigate in a given field, they draw wrong conclusions even from real information. Experts have a methodology to help spot errors, conspiracy theorists do, so they can't falsify their own claims.
Of course, not everyone is equally prone to believe in conspiracies. More often it concerns those who are convinced that we are not in charge of our lives. If the "control center" is outside, we try to personalize it, because it is easier to blame specific people, eg freemasons and cyclists, for misfortunes than impersonal fate. The belief in conspiracies is also partly explained by the psychological theory of attachment. If someone is the type of person who is overly afraid of losing loved ones, they will be more likely to believe in conspiracies. Like someone who has narcissistic traits and a need for uniqueness, he will then perceive conspiracy theories as secret knowledge available to the elite. People who are impatient, focused on immediate gratification and showing a Manichean view of the world as a battlefield between good and evil, also believe in conspiracies more willingly. Ironically, the fewest people who are convinced that the official versions of events are false are in ... psychiatric hospitals. “The paranoia of the mentally ill are self-centered. They believe that some particular postman poses a threat to them, not that all postmen pose a threat to all of us, ”explains psychiatrist Ken Duckworth of Boston University and the US National Society of Mental Illness (NAMI).
So-called intellectuals often take the easy way and justify the popularity of conspiracy theories with the lack of trust of ordinary citizens in the elite. This is how the psychologist Wojciech Eichelberger explained the belief in the Smolensk attack in 2012 in the pages of "Gazeta Krakowska", and today such an explanation is commonly used in conspiracy theories related to the coronavirus. The easier it is to present them as there are (seemingly) data that confirm them. According to the Political Poznan Laboratory, the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Center for Research on Prejudice at the University of Warsaw, 37 percent. Poles believe that the Polish authorities cleverly manipulate information about the pandemic. Since it is the lack of trust in the elite that is the source of the problem - the intellectual reasoned - this trust should be regained. The range of measures proposed is wide. There is talk of more legal transparency, a more effective fight against corruption, better education, etc. These are good tools, but they will not work if they serve a wrongly defined problem. Yes, mistrust is an important source of conspiracy theories, but not citizens' mistrust of the elite, but the elite's distrust of citizens.
If we do not trust the elites as citizens, it is because they do not trust us. A measure of this distrust is the growing number of decisions they make on our behalf, though not with our consent. We are talking about the process of growing state paternalism, which has been going on for over a century. Its symbolic beginning is 1889, i.e. the introduction by Otto von Bismarck of the world's first compulsory social security system. "Citizen, you are too unreasonable to take care of yourself, for your own good we will force you to be reasonable" - this is the message that legitimizes the successive actions of the authorities, which led to the colonization of other areas of life by law. Paternalism made everything political, and therefore subject to power. Privacy, understood as an individual's zone of autonomy, in which he sets the rules and to which no one has access without his permission, has become a fuzzy, contractual concept. It can be abolished by reference to a force majeure. In the era of the coronavirus pandemic, when our freedom of choice suffocates under the overbearing decree of the minister, this thesis does not need additional evidence. The control center is actually outside today.
So people without the power to decide for themselves begin to question the intentions and methods of those who decide for them. What if the government's intentions are dishonest? And even if they are sincere, what if his methods are ineffective or harmful? Such situations can happen after all. We have a lot of knowledge about political embezzlement and pathological laws. As the philosopher Matthew R.X. Dentith in his book "The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories", increasing the transparency of the political system in democracies paradoxically strengthens our tendency to formulate conspiracy theories, because more sins of power are coming to light. Therefore, it seems to us that the authorities are committing even more of them. Meanwhile, in an undemocratic system, no one would simply find out about them. Have you heard about any scandal with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the lead role? Exactly. Now count the scandals involving Donald Trump ...
It is often said that we ourselves want state paternalism. The present day forces us to make so many choices that we get lost in the diversity of the offer available and we want to get away from it. In this approach, paternalism would not be an expression of the ruling elite's distrust of people, but a conscious ceding of decision-making power to them by society. The growing popularity of conspiracy theories would be a product of a conflict between the increasingly realized need for a guardian and the lack of faith in the existence of a guardian who can be completely trusted. However, the thesis that man does not want to choose is far-fetched. Look around. If people didn't want a choice, the market would only offer cheap, simple, white face masks, no patterns. Meanwhile, we can buy a variety of models, and the most sophisticated ones are sewn not by large concerns, but by small plants or individuals. Diversity appears spontaneously in response to a top-down attempt at uniformity. Besides, it is impossible to show which way this would be ceding the decision-making power to the elite. When did we sign a contract with the prime minister in which we agreed to regulate our sugar consumption by taxes or forbid us to visit friends? Never. Finally, indiscriminately believing in conspiracy theories is simply dangerous. “At their center is a powerful enemy. Conspiracy theories should be expected to motivate their followers to act, writes Joseph E. Uscinski.
If someone believes that all the pharmaceutical companies in the world have colluded over the production of vaccines that cause autism and therefore does not vaccinate themselves and their children, they are unknowingly killing. Take measles, for example. It is a disease so highly contagious that in order to prevent epidemics, at least 95% of them must be vaccinated. population, or 19 out of 20 people. The rise of conspiracy theories in recent years has led to a global increase in the number of cases and deaths from measles. Even the eminent actor Robert De Niro, who in public along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (President Kennedy's grandson) promotes anti-vaccine absurdities.
Conspiracy theories also translate directly into violent acts of violence. Belief in a guided "white genocide" shared the perpetrators of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shootings, 2019 El Paso and 2019 New Zealand's Christchurch mosques, which cost the lives of 85 people. It should not be forgotten that our susceptibility to conspiracy theories is cynically exploited by politicians who discredit opponents ("He is a Russian agent!"), Suppress ethnic minorities ("They eat matzah from newborns!") Or even declare wars (" He's making biological weapons! ”). Yes, believing in conspiracy theories can be deadly. How can I fix it?
Society must trust the elite? Not. It is the elite who must trust society.
Citizens decided that the "control center" was outside of them, which was manifested on the one hand by the constant and high electoral absenteeism, and on the other by the growing support for populists who claim they would take power from usurpers.
How to restore the decisiveness of the pit, which has been confiscated by the mountain in the last century? A sensible classical liberal will say that the state must be slimmed down and the power of power must be diminished. Reasonable leftist to promote self-governance: the closer decisions are made to us, the more influence we have on them. Of course, not all powers can be taken from the government, and not all tasks can be transferred to the local level, so the liberal and the leftist will have to get along somehow, and compromise so far that the ordinary Kowalski regains his "agency", i.e. the feeling that it is him, and not the Davos secret societies rule his life. Will the conspiracy theories disappear then?
Not. However, the number of the most dangerous and detached from reality will decrease, and the ones that will contain a grain of truth will remain. “If the conspiracy theory is true, people should know it. Detaining and holding conspirators to account is a moral imperative, 'writes Uscinski. Conspiracies happen. After all, Julius Caesar's murder during the March Ida was not the only one. The materials disclosed by Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are a mine of knowledge about contemporary conspiracies. Newspapers (including ours) are also so. Almost every investigative article is a conspiracy theory until it is confirmed by evidence. If the articles by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had not been taken seriously, the world would not have known about Richard Nixon's illegal activities against political opponents.
A - I would forget! I have not given the good reason promised in the title for believing in reptilians. I will not. There is no such thing.
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