To think that conspiracy theorists are everywhere

[CobbldyCook]

I recently acquired a dog and so now make small talk with lots of people I probably wouldn’t have spoken with before. Not because I would avoid them or anything, just because I wouldn’t run into them. Conversation usually starts normally enough but there seems to be about a 1 in 3 chance that the chat suddenly takes a turn for “mRNA experiments”, “turbocancers”, “contrails”, “chip totality”… you name it! It’s particularly prevalent in men it seems. I never had these kinds of conversations before. What changed? Is this all because of lockdown and/or people spending so much time on the internet/social media? Aren’t there enough real issues in the world to be interested in/worried about without making stuff up? Why are people so credulous?! How should I counter it?!?

So a critical thinker is a conspiracy theorist? Right... 🙄

If anything your response has perfectly highlighted how people are so quick to shout down any sentiment that even vaguely challenges the status quo.

You know it's attitudes like yours that give rise to conspiracy theories/ists, right?

I was appalled at the vitriol directed at anyone who expressed vaccine hesitancy on here, they were instantly labelled an anti vaxxer conspiracy theorists. People seemed to lose their minds.

I was fully vaccinated after weighing up my risk factors for serious illness from COVID vs the possibility of an adverse vaccine reaction but if I had been 20 I might have felt quite differently.

Conspiracy theories, belief-systems, alternative views - all flourish in an information vacuum.

Societies with few trusted sources of fact-based, scientifically-proven information are vulnerable to this.

Everyone has their own disparate sources - many of which have zero integrity and dubious motivations to influence people for various goals (ideology, financial, political gain)

We need a new enlightenment - and an information revolution where the majority of people turn to the same trusted, credible, verified, sources of information.

Right? But that 'theory' was quickly disproved once people started using them. Obviously.

People are allowed to hold one view of a new invention - then change their mind or affirm their belief once sufficient time has past. I'd say that's perfectly normal human behaviour - not a conspiracy theory.

You might want to look into why you're so triggered by others having a different opinion to you.

We used to trust our politicians and the media to tell us the truth.

Now that that trust has been irretrievably broken, it is no longer possible to have one, universally accepted baseline of truth.

Facts remain facts. For example: the earth is round, or you cannot change biological sex. But despite this, you can choose to believe whatever feels true to you and you will be able to find a corner of the internet with other people to reinforce that belief. Then that becomes the framework of 'truth' from which you operate.

You could argue that it doesn't really matter. Until those beliefs start encroaching on the rights and freedoms of other people- eg: allowing men into women's sports or banning abortion because of religion.

Oh totally - I saw that too.

Ironically, though, all that reaction did was cause the hesitant to harden their resolve and not take it.

To be fair though I should imagine that if there were such a term as “conspiracy theorist” many years ago, it would have been used on those that said the the earth was round. There are a number of other so called “conspiracies” that have been shown to be anything but.

Also, you're always going to need those alternative thinkers and those voices of dissent. Otherwise you just have a load of people all thinking exactly the same - which is dangerous and more open to manipulation and abuse in the wrong, powerful hands, IMO.

CTs weren't just warning of caution around potential side effects from a new vaccine, though. That would have been perfectly reasonable. They were claiming the government was deliverately trying to kill us off via the vaccines and that we'd all be dead within 18 months. Many are still attributing every sudden death to the covid jab, and claiming that sudden deaths, particularly those from heart issues, didn't happen before the covid jab, which is nonsense. When my friend was in hospital and almost died from covid, she had lunatics posting on her Facebook page telling her it was the jab that had made her ill - she hadn't had the jab! The sudden death of a young actor announced in the media had them all shouting about the covid jab until it turned out he'd taken his own life. When they are proven wrong about something, they never acknowledge it, just move on to the next conspiracy.

Another friend who posts non stop conspiracies was thrilled to see the northern lights the other day. She posted pictures saying she'd always wanted to see them, her number one bucket list item, a lifelong dream come true. Her CT friends instantly piped up telling her they weren't real, that it was a test by HAARP, only an idiot would think they were the northern lights, etc. Her response was interesting; she was clearly torn, knowing what she'd seen, but unable to turn down a good conspiracy. She deleted her pictures. Sad really.

I find conspiracy theories interesting. Just to hear others views on things. The majority I don't agree with, but there are some things that really make me think. The one event I'm not fully on board with (no pun intended at all!!!) is 9/11. The twin towers bit yes, it's the pentagon bit I find odd. Only 1 piece of video evidence for that whole important building? And it's not a building in the middle of nowhere. No other video evidence at all? The plane would have had to fly from such a distance low to the ground. Doesn't sit right with me. But always happy to be proven wrong!!

But there are plenty of people that believe things that have also been disproved e.g. flat-earthers, that insist on conspiracy theories that simply not only don't exist, but can't exist. And while many are harmless, those that lead to e.g. people avoiding medical treatment, can be downright dangerous.

For what it's worth here's my take on it from what I've experienced in the last few years.

The worlds is becoming a more complex and troubled place. The more prevalent the internet has become, the more people are able to see this. Mental health and anxiety are skyrocketing and people are desperate to make sense out of chaos, even when that's not realistic.

Conspiracy theories take all of that chaos and wrap it up in a neat little bow with enough grains of truth and (on the surface) logic that it's comforting. There is absolutely corruption in the world, there are absolutely conspiracies happening in different places and for different reasons. Power is being abused all over the world. I think it's good to question and to look beneath the surface. My problem is that when some people try to find answers, they end up going down rabbit holes into communities that try and connect all of this into absolutely wild, vague and mostly contradictory wider conspiracies and suddenly people who were asking rational, valid questions are now zombies, mattering talking vaguely about "them".

Once people get to that point, their standards of evidence get progressively worse. Where they would have been doing real research on individual topics, now they're directing me to a blog or a video of a rant by one of their compatriots as "proof" that blood drinking monsters are secretly coordinating every element of day to day life.

My Aunt is fully down he rabbit hole. She leaned over the table at lunch one day and asked me quietly whether I knew that "they" were softening children up by normalising paedophilia. She showed me a post which had a snippet of this picture book that was allegedly being given out in UK schools today. The post showed two pages which were along the lines of "uncle tommy's gets in into little Timmy's bed at night" (can't remember the exact words) with cartoons to illustrate. No other context. I Google'd some of the text when I got home and found the whole book eventually. It tells the story of a kid from an unhappy home who's parents fight a lot. His uncle molests him when he comes to visit and he grows up to be gay. He visits a doctor who cures him because being gay isn't a thing. It's a response of a child looking for the love he didn't get from his father. Paedophilia is only a sub-plot and it's actually a wildly anti-gay piece of work by some guy in the USA in the early 90's. Yet my Aunt sees this post with 2 pages out of context and gives it credibility because it comes from her new community who "see the truth" like she does. She also sold her flat and, for a while, tried to buy a plot of land up north that she could retreat to when "they flip the switch".

Believe in conspiracies by all means. They do happen. But for fuck sake, don't surrender your own ability to reason and hand it over to others.

When I was looking for people who opposed lockdowns as I do, I joined a resistance group. But as soon as I did, I was shocked at the pure vitriol against those who had taken the jabs in good faith, and I very nearly left the group on the spot. The irony was that they used almost identical language to those on the other side:

"Look at all those stupid lemmings queueing up for the jab, they're all going to die, it's very sad."
versus
"Look at all those selfish refuseniks, they're going to prolong lockdowns, they're going to kill granny, and they're going to die, it's very sad."

The thing is sometimes they are right. When COVID first kicked off it was the CT who said that the virus escaped from a lab. Then guess what? Many people have been injured by the vaccine. Speaking as someone who is fully jabbed I am starting to wonder about the safety aspects. I think that people need to keep an open mind.

Like I said upthread, there will always be the flat-earthers etc. I think it's widely agreed that those people are conspiracy theorists and will always be conspiracy theorists.
But that's not what we're talking about here. The topics OP cited aren't remotely conspiracy theories, they are facts or, as someone else on here so eloquently put it, 'inconvenient truths'.

Doesn't make someone a conspiracy theorist for daring to ask questions. This rhetoric is what we need to get away from.

I mean, when people are talking about conspiracies in the context of the pandemic and what a lot of new information means for those conspiracies, it depends what conspiracy you subscribe to.

Did COVID escape from a lab or didn't it? We might never know because it could be in certain parties interests to deflect onto other narratives. If that's the case, it would require a conspiracy to make that happen.

Were the jabs less safe than we believed and have they caused harm? Probably. There are risks with any medication and never in human history have so many people been vaccinated at the same time so we're obviously going to be seeing those side-effects in much greater numbers all at the same time. Did drug companies try to minimise or hide facts? Did governments enact the right policies? Did they do more harm than good? Again, we may never know because people in power will inevitably manoeuvre to protect themselves and again, it would need some level of conspiracy to achieve that. Probably multiple conspiracies at different levels which could be coordinated or connected but maybe not.

For me, that level of questioning is in the realms of healthy and balanced, and I wouldn't label people who believe there's something to uncover beneath those questions as "conspiracy theorists". It's when people try to connect the totality of what happened, add some wild, unsubstantiated links and suddenly COVID was all a planned, coordinated global plot to assert control and to inject things into the worlds population to either kill us off and reset society or install technology so we can be controlled by our new overlords. COVID is the perfect example but the same applies across the board to other "theories", most of which completely contradict each other depending on which version you're hearing.

In my experience, that was the exception rather than the rule, or at least it was in the beginning. The vitriol from the sceptics side came in response to the frankly vile abuse toward anyone who remotely questioned anything.

During the pandemic, I literally had someone say they hoped I'd die because our area had suddenly gone into Tier 4 and I wanted to go to my regular supermarket that was in Tier 3! Sorry, but you don't get to be that abusive and not expect the same back!

If people can be that nasty about something so trivial, imagine what it was like for anyone questioning the jabs. MN in particular was wild!

This is one of the best explanations I've seen. Thank you. 👏👏

Conspiracy theories have been around forever, but social media has allowed them to explode and spread way faster than they were able to before. 30 years ago if you happened to hear someone talk about the flat earth then you'd regard them as an isolated loon. Now there's a whole ecosystem of flat earthers, spinning ever more elaborate stories among themselves, grifting money and gaining status.
Flerfers are easy to ignore. It gets more serious with the likes of QAnon where the conspiracy theories are influencing people's political views and voting decisions. That whole dumb thing about 15 minute cities meaning we'd not be allowed to travel was a conspiracy theory stirred up for political reasons which the gullible fell for hook, line and sinker. The influence these things have, and the ease with which they can be invented and spread, is worrying.

“Facts”

Please expand and I’d also be really interested to know to what level you took your post-graduate scientific studies.

During the pandemic, I literally had someone say they hoped I'd die because our area had suddenly gone into Tier 4 and I wanted to go to my regular supermarket that was in Tier 3! Sorry, but you don't get to be that abusive and not expect the same back!
If people can be that nasty about something so trivial, imagine what it was like for anyone

Anyone else wondering how conspiracy theories can take hold should look at some of the old pandemic threads on here.

I remember posters telling other posters they deserved to die because they bought chocolate at the supermarket and it wasn't an essential item. Or people suggesting melting butter into tea rather than buying 'non-essential' milk.

MN was objectively batshit insane during that time. Although I bet if you'd asked each individual poster they would have sworn they were the only sane one.

The outcome of this is that the loudest, strongest, most powerful group will dominate, and force their beliefs on others.

Facts + trust + science are there to help the less powerful. Perfect objectivity does not exist, but we don't do any favours by down-talking organisations attempting to put out trusted information, such as the BBC. They are at least trying in the right direction.

I used to work with the BBC and I don't trust them as far as I could throw them. Especially not after Savile.

Are you saying you don’t believe a Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon? So what happened to that plane and the people on it, and what caused the explosion(s) at the Pentagon that killed over 100 people?

Bluntly, you’re showing a lack of critical thinking here. It should be obvious that there probably isn’t much video footage taken in the area around the Pentagon, given that it’s the home of the CIA. Also, in the pre-smartphone age, most people weren’t walking around with a video camera to quickly record a plane that was flying unusually low. The only reason there is footage of the first plane hitting the World Trade Centre is that a documentary was being filmed about a fire crew on that day. Then by the time second plane hit, there were news crews filming the area.

And what do you think about the people who were killed and their grieving relatives? Do you think they are all fake? There was an awful conspiracy theory about the Sandy Hook school shooting where a talk show host claimed the parents who’d lost children were actors, and it had never happened. Hideous for the grieving families who were harassed by conspiracy theorists as a result of this talk show host’s claims. That’s what conspiracy theories can lead to.

Do you live in Totnes?