Pardon me for this comment, I'm low on coffee this morning. It's going to be mostly rambling, but I'll try to keep it short.
I remember reading and hearing that one of the reasons young people get addicted to things like heroin, etc., is due to the fact that schools, parents and government told them that things like beer and marijuana were deadly in any amount - then they would go on to have a few beers at a party, and maybe smoke a joint, and when they wake up the next morning with no negligible negative effects, they reject everything else they've been taught - including warnings about things that are that dangerous.
This was certainly my experience to some extent, though I am having trouble connecting it to the conspiracy theory thread. It's a basic credibility problem – if the grown-ups lied to us about weed, why should we believe them about heroin? etc.
And how do you reconcile your condescending dismissal with the reality that some conspiracy theories, even some pretty grand ones, have turned out to be true?
To look at it the other way, the unwillingness to accept "alternative" theories is probably gated more by emotion than by logic. We need to believe in the basic good of humankind, even in spite of such aberrations as genocide, syphilis experiments, etc.
But, when we look at history, it is probably more logical to be skeptical. Our history is replete with Massively Bad Things that are nearly unbelievable in scale, and we would certainly prefer not to believe humans capable of such things, if given a choice.
At the same time, we also know that there are people with a vested interest in creating certain beliefs and outcomes.
So, what I find interesting is people's determination to believe something, simply because it is offered as the "official story". These stories don't require nearly the same degree of evidence, or even plausibilty to be accepted, as long as they are mainstreamed as official. The logic gate is then not even activated by the masses. Yet, the moment an alternative is posed, it is immediately (and often angrily) seized upon by those same people who now suddenly require a massive degree of evidence.
I believe that a default position of skepticism is far healthier in a society than blind acceptance of official stories. Where I believe skeptics get into trouble is when they move beyond questioning to actually posing an alternative story that is no more provable than the official one.
> Where I believe skeptics get into trouble is when they move beyond questioning to actually posing an alternative story that is no more provable than the official one.
Those are not skeptical. They are believers, just like the people that believe on the official version.
> ...the moment you start believing in one you will start believing in most of them.
Maybe what you're seeing is more like belief in the possibility rather than belief in the fact.
For instance, after I learned about Operation Northwoods and a half a dozen other cases, I am completely open to the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job. (edit: And people who are not open to that possibility seem completely illogical to me.)
An "inside job" comes across like the government explicitly set the terrorists on the path they took (or some of the terrorists were government agents). It seems more likely to me that certain elements in the government could have become aware of the plot and turned a blind eye.
The necessary element is not what you call it, but rather that the event is presumed to be evidence that the implied compact between government and the governed had been violated in some way by the government.
Loyalty and support in exchange for protection. Scholarship and industriousness in exchange for liberty. Moral behavior in exchange for justice. Voluntary taxation in exchange for uniform public benefits.
You need not show that the government was directly involved, if you can support the assertion that the government did not effectively use its granted authority for the benefit of the public. Conspiracy theories are primarily useful for convincing those people who demonstrate too much faith in their public institutions that they should be a bit more skeptical.
Whether you think that 9/11 was the work of Al Qaeda terrorists or CIA terrorists, the facts remain that the efforts of the government were ineffective to prevent the deaths, injuries, or destruction of property, and the resulting public grief and outcry was used inappropriately to justify almost entirely unrelated shifts in policy.
The idea that someone, somewhere might have said, "That many deaths? Hooray! We can go have a war now!" is just grossly abhorrent to me, and I can't shake the feeling that it actually happened.
The U.S.A government is known to fund and train terrorist groups. There isn't exactly a shortage of CIA-funded/CIA-trained terrorists out there.
I don't put it outside the realm of possibility. There is a lot of motivation to invading Iran/Iraq under a guise and what better way to usher in a surveillance state than "preventing terrorism and keeping you safe"?
People in power have a lot of motivation to remain in power. That includes keeping "the masses" ignorant and satisfied with their lives. Satisfied people don't rebel or overthrow systems of power that appear to be working in their favor.
After hundreds of years of history repeating itself with same/similar stories over different time periods. I find myself thinking people are completely ignorant of history when they full trust their own government at its word. I will always entertain the possibility my government did something bad. Because history proves that it isn't all that unlikely...
Now entertaining the possibility of and actually believing it occurred are two different things. I cannot disprove 9/11 being an inside job - and I can see motivations as to why a government may do it (if I didn't see why a government would, I wouldn't entertain the thought). The fact that, as an individual, I can see motivation for a government to commit an act against its own people means the government itself might reach this same conclusion. So the idea is possible.
Do I think it was? No. I think it was simply government negligence. Failing to respond to warnings we received from Russia (2001 wasn't much past the 90's) and general disorganization.
Talking about the government as if it were a single unit seems inappropriate. There are many groups and many people within the government and within the military and the intelligence agencies. I don't think it would be very hard for a determined group to infiltrate and hide within the government.
I do think it's a lot more complicated than "the government" knew or "the government" did not know.
What I always found "fascinating" about conspiracy theories is how educated, smart people can be convinced by some of them. It's just something that I can't understand.
Well, after many conspiracy theories turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg of truly heinous government actions it's not hard to understand why previously skeptical people now think twice about immediately dismissing crackpot ideas.
Some of us have also worked, through ignorance I will add, for heinous government contractors and sat with people having discussions on how best to kill lots of people efficiently without a thought as to any ethical consequences of their actions.
What seems to happen is that you come across a compelling set of evidence. The evidence is faked, or skewed heavily, but it might be hard to know this. And, as presented, the cases are usually pretty good. If you're unable to immediately dispute them, it isn't totally irrational to think they might be real.
This is the reason I don't watch documentaries on modern "issues". The story presented is all very manipulated and you're certain to get an incorrect set of evidence.
What is boggling is how smart people _stay_ convinced by conspiracies, after contradictions are pointed out. But changing your mind is a hard thing to do, so perhaps it's not that surprising?
An effective tactic to prevent people from looking into something is to promote obviously false information, bonus if it's offensive, and associate it with information that can be verified. Another related tactic is for people who have a long track record of promoting false information promote something that's verifiable. That way people will dismiss real information that has been associated with bs. There is a paper, by a good friend of mine on this "Discrediting By Association: Undermining the Case for Patriots Who Question 9/11", and links to much more info in my profile.
And I agree, there are many documentaries on modern issues that are pure junk.
> This is the reason I don't watch documentaries on modern "issues". The story presented is all very manipulated and you're certain to get an incorrect set of evidence.
That's true of essentially any source but I don't know that becoming ignorant of anything that happened during your lifetime is the right answer.
>> educated, smart people can be convinced by some of them
I love this implication that you're probably dumb if you think the government sometimes engages in conspiracy. Like mass surveillance. Or bacterial experiments in San Francisco.
No, you're dumb when you turn and twist the available evidence to considerable degrees to get to your crazy conclusion. Snowden is an educated and smart man with the proper evidence to back his claims (mass surveillance). What was exposed in this case is proper evidence (bacterial experiments in SF).
What is dumb is seing a few bright pixels in a New Horizons image and saying "that's a swarm of alien space ships", when in fact it's just a cosmic ray distorted by the JPG lossy compression algorithm.
Sometimes the more you know, the more possibilities could be out there. We are not in a 100% transparent world. A single signal could mean a lot that one is not able to see. So based on some signals we could observe, there come related explanations. We could label a category with different tags. Conspiracy theory is one of them. Though I do believe that conspiracy theories weigh people's motivations more, which is not quite fit to most of mainstream perspectives. Hopefully, I won't get downvoted too much with this comment;p
Yeah, I think you are kind of circling around a central issue. Some evidence emerges of something untoward happening and the conspiracy nuts jump on it. There ends up being a lot of noise on top of a little bit of signal. People who fancy themselves rational dismiss it while the nuts keep amplifying it. Then much later more/most of the story comes out and sometimes it's a lot worse than the nut jobs even speculated.
I have read somewhere that conspiracy theories are the pattern matching algorithms in our brains running wild, seening connections where there aren't any. The thing is, our brains are really good at detecting patterns. So good, that sometimes, in fact, we will see patterns where there aren't any. And that's where paranoia and conspiracies and conspiracy theories come in.
For my comment I received many downvotes and also many upvotes (net change was downward, but my karma has been jumping around for about 5 hours now), for pointing out a fact that I find baffling, without criticizing anyone in particular. I'd like to understand why this happened, if possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf0khstYDLA
It's one of the many conspiracy type videos out there, and I don't endorse the content in any way.. I just find this stuff fascinating