Conspiracies

Not just about the government or the banks or big Pharma, but even sports when YOUR team loses! “The refs were crooked, it was rigged.” 9/11 was an “inside” job, and we never landed on the moon. Key elements: belief in a pattern underlying the event; provocative and deliberate plans; coalitions or groups are involved, even disparate ones; there is a clear and present danger; secrecy that is hard to justify or believe by non-conspirators. Groups blamed are typical targets: wealthy, politicians, business leaders (especially bankers), historically stigmatized minorities, such as Jews or Roma. Conspiracists defy pragmatism and evidence, e.g., “Princess Diana actually killer herself or faked her death.” The threat of lack of control forces insecure people to find cause and effect outside of their control that explains their fate. (THEY are out to get me/us.) Paranoia is a key element, involving perceived victimization, social isolation, and the refusal to admit that others succeed by their talents and hard work. Paranoia generally starts individually but then lends itself to “groupthink.” Conspiracy thinking, or the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, shares several characteristics with paranoia. Both involve ideas that harmful outcomes can be attributed to malevolent agents rather than to more benign or non-agentive causes. Other similarities in concept are notable, for example, both paranoia and conspiracy thinking represent suspicions that can be hard to falsify and may concern events or theories that later emerge to be true, for example claims about pandemic demands by the government that, scientifically, were incorrect and ineffective. In an increasingly volatile age, without confirmations of power and control, people default to these “settings.” This will become worse. Perhaps paranoid to begin with, see this as a conspiracy, though I doubt that Trump ever did.

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