What kind of person is drawn to conspiracy theories?

[trenton]

@zurew Thank you for your input.

The way I approach it, I don't even look at ridiculous conspiracy theorists that talk about things like lizard people or things of that nature. I think attacking the category "conspiracy theory" logically doesn't make sense. Conspiratorial thinking is justified in some smaller contexts aside from a global scheme with extreme organization. I think it would be fair to say that we should not make drastic claims which outpace the evidence. This is the core argument that applies to most false conspiracy theories that make up elaborate stories.

There is probably better language we can use to describe what is being criticized if "conspiracy theory" is technically the wrong category to be attacking. Instead we should probably attack the category of "elaborate delusional conspiratorial thinking with no basis in reality and without sufficient evidence." Aside from this category, maybe "conspiracy theory" as a category is fine within narrow or smaller contexts with strong evidence such as a church hiding a sex scandal.

[Shermaningeorgia]

People who claim to be aware.

Edgelords who want to be right

People who distrust power.

[Adrian colby]

I have a friend coming over tomorrow who sent me a video of JFK ‘making a speech’ ten days before his assassination. 
 

ive told him before to stop jumping in with assumptions based on the framework other people sell to him that is highly reactionary and emotionally provocative. He claims he knows it’s nonsense but it’s telling that he would send me the speech because a part of him is not sure still. 
 

the speech obviously goes on about ‘secret society’ and ‘control over American citizens’ but in this decade it can sound like he’s talking about the ‘current’ conspiracy narrative Maga, Qanon and a lot of spiritual people have fallen into “the great awakening”. A lot of spiritual/ceremony community spaces have that print map by the artist “champ parinya“ draped across the wall like some kind of prophetic bible.a concoction of narratives by conspiratorial groups with no connection…

tomorrow I’ve to sit him down and explain ‘context’

who was the audience JFK was addressing?( journalists)

what year was this speech made?(1961)

what was going on globally at the time?( Cold War, covert operations , information control, espionage, communism etc)

Was he talking about the evil satanic cabal? No! He was talking about the culture of secrecy and lack of trust between nations. The tension between national security and transparency, freedom of the press v state secrecy.

the interpretation is constrained by…

’context!’

it’s the difference in a narrative driven cognition and a detail driven cognition. If the narrative takes priority, it tends to make a person fit the details into it by picking some and ignoring others rather than looking at evidence and allowing those details ( all of them) to form the basis for any real conclusion.
 

if you go with narrative first, it reduces complexity, gives something a quick ‘meaning’ and sense of orientation which is great as a stabilisation mechanism for the mind ( albeit a deception). Someone who is automatically reactionary is going to look to stabilise something that is chaotically senseless by making it ‘feel’ like it is internally coherent.

part of human survival is ‘pattern recognition’ like recognising faces, finding threats and finding meaning so for the most part ‘fear based’. This is a normal and valid human function but it overextends itself when linking things that have no causal connection to create that ‘certainty’ to alleviate the fear and claim to be ‘in the know.’ It’s not irrational but a misuse or overreaching of a valid survival function. 

it’s not about challenging someone but illuminating the ‘structure’ of how meaning is constructed. ( a projection on reality not a constraint from acceptance of reality) 

my friends repeated exposure to being sent these stories or it being brought up in new age communities can make it start to feel plausible because it becomes familiar. He doesn’t ‘beleive’ it but doesn’t know how to dismiss it either… enter epistemic responsibility… to look at how you think, not ‘what’ you are thinking about. Examine the method rather than defending the beleif.

It’s not whether it is true or false but rather what kind of thinking produced this? Then moving into discernment: are you noticing patterns that are actually there or are you building a pattern by connecting incomplete pieces? One is properly grounded. If the connection isn’t solid then you need to learn to tolerate “I don’t know”. That’s the antidote to conspiracy thinking. 

I’ve noticed some spiritual spaces can drift into this because once you start questioning surface reality, it’s easy to keep going and start questioning everything without always grounding it again.So instead of dissolving illusion, it can turn into building new ones that just feel more meaningful. ( delusional) and naive psychedelic users in these spaces are highly susceptible to it. Way too many facilitators peddle this as a true worldview connected to being spiritual. 

a lot of conspiratorial narratives use language that is conflated with spiritual language like ‘awakening’ and ‘seeing behind the veil’, ‘good v evil’ etc. so rather than deconstructing reality to get a glimpse of the source, they get caught in narrative within the illusion. 
 

most people in spiritual spaces don’t know what spirituality is and are actually there for trauma resolution, personal development and ways to figure the improvement of their health/life. If you think there is a conspiracy against you, it can certainly redirect your attention and bypass understanding your own mental mechanisms, conditioning and emotions … that would otherwise lead to improving your life.