The usual paranoid nonsense from the 'leisure class of the stupid and often resentful easily led'. It often includes a bit of antisemitism and racism married to a white supremacist mentality. Conspiracies are attractive to people with little real education and a desire to understand a world too complex for them. Life has controllers, a deep state somewhere, kinda like the current Russian kleptocracy, but instead of a cognizance of reality it points its finger at certain people. I often wonder how the thoughtful can counter a kind of groupthink that feeds on itself? Cults, as Scientology demonstrates, always find people seeking to belong even when belonging is ultimately giving up your freedom of thought. Stuff below for those who want to remain free but aware.
"I want to argue for something which is controversial, although I believe that it is also intuitive and commonsensical. My claim is this: Oliver believes what he does because that is the kind of thinker he is or, to put it more bluntly, because there is something wrong with how he thinks. The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how they interpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal. I want to suggest that this is fundamentally a question of the way they are. Oliver isn’t mad (or at least, he needn’t be). Nevertheless, his beliefs about 9/11 [or deep state schemes] are the result of the peculiarities of his intellectual constitution – in a word, of his intellectual character."
The intellectual character of conspiracy theorists | Aeon Essays
The Problem With Facts
"But when we consider the beliefs of other people? It's an epistemic shit show out there. Astrology, conspiracies, the healing power of crystals. Aliens who abduct Earthlings and build pyramids. That vaccines cause autism or that Obama is a crypto-Muslim — or that the world was formed some 6,000 years ago, replete with fossils made to look millions of years old. How could anyone believe this stuff?! ... No, seriously: how?"
Crony Beliefs | Melting Asphalt
Brain washing -
How cult leaders brainwash followers for total control | Aeon Essays
"Some of the ones that I focus on in my own research include aspects of causal reasoning, which relates to explanation, but also diverges from it in various cases; also, aspects of moral reasoning. Why do we have the particular moral beliefs that we do? How do we evaluate when someone is blameworthy and when they should be punished? You also see this in many other cases: aspects of language, aspects of how we think about other people's minds, aspects of how we think about social structure. These are all topics that we benefit from the insights of both philosophy and psychology." Tania Lombrozo
Learning By Thinking | Edge.org
"I say it to you now, knowing full well that you will agree with me (that is, understand) only if you already agree with me." Stanley Fish
