Current survey on belief in conspiracy theories published 30 Dec NPR

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/30/951095644/even-if-its-bonkers-poll-finds-many-believe-qanon-and-other-conspiracy-theories

With regard to the influence of education here, that is why I think that it is important to have public educators going out and contesting falsehoods in the public discourse, making sure there is an argument about them and they don't just go unchallenged, even as dangerously close to authoritarianism as that might veer, because freethought is by its very anti-authoritarian nature paradoxically vulnerable to small pockets of epistemic authority arising out of the power vacuum, and if that instability goes completely unchecked, it can easily threaten to destroy the freethinking discourse entirely and collapse it into a new, epistemically authoritarian regime; a religion in effect, even if not in name.

In the absence of good education of the general populace, all manner of little "cults", for lack of a better word, easily spring up. By that I mean small groups of kooks and cranks and quacks each with their own strange dogmas, their own quirky views on what they find to be profound hidden truths that they think everyone else is either just too stupid to wise up to, or else are being actively suppressed by those who want to hide those truths from the public.

Like all these conspiracy theorists.

Meanwhile, those with greater knowledge see those supposed truths for the falsehoods that they are, and can show them to be such, if only the others could be engaged in a legitimately rational discourse. But instead, these groups use irrational means of persuasion to to ensnare others who do not know better into their little cults; and left unchecked, these can easily become actual full-blown religions, their quirky little forms of ignorance becoming widespread, socially-acceptable ignorance, that can appropriate the veneer of epistemic authority and force their ignorance on others under the guise of knowledge.

Checking the spread of such ignorance by challenging it in the public discourse is the role of the public educator. The need for that role would be lessened if more people would actively seek out education, but not everyone will seek out their own education and so some people will continue to spread ignorance – and even those who do seek out their own education may still accidentally spread ignorance – and in that event, there need to be public educators to stand against that.

But that then veers awfully close to proposing effectively another "religion" to counter the growth of others.

I think there is perhaps an irresolvable paradox here, in that a public discourse abhors a power vacuum and so the only way to keep religions, institutions claiming epistemic authority, at bay, is in effect to have one strong enough to do so already in place. But I think there is still hope for freedom of thought, in that not all religions are equally authoritarian: even within religions as more normally and narrowly characterized, some have their dogma handed down through strict decisions and hierarchies, while others more democratically decide what they as a community believe. I think that the best that we can hope for, something that we have perhaps come remarkably close to realizing in the educational systems of some contemporary societies, is a "religion", or rather an academic system, that enshrines the principles of freethought, and is structured in a way consistent with those principles.

What semblance of that we may have once had in America sure seems to be failing nowadays, at least. — Pfhorrest

I can not praise what you said enough, but I add very valuable information to what you said.

We adopted the Prussian military-bureaucratic order because it is so much more efficient than the bureaucratic order we had and the public services we have today would not be possible without this change. Although what we call the German model is very powerful and efficient, there is a problem with it. Sara H. Fahey quoted the poet and seer India to raise awareness of the problem at the 1917 National Education Association Conference.

"Whatever their efficiency, such great organizations are so impersonal that they bear down on the individual lives of the people like a hydraulic press whose action is completely impersonal and therefore completely effective in crushing out individual power and power."

You can conclude from that in 1917 the US government was not organize

I want to provide a better explanation of the change in bureaucratic order that has been adopted by all institutions including schools and hospitals and others. This change in bureaucratic order profoundly changed the focus of an education.

Here is why our reality today is nothing like the time of our forefathers. I am copying from a college text Public Administration and Public Affairs by Nicholas Henry. In reading this one might give some thought to Eisenhower's warning to not be too reliant on the experts. We might also consider if the arguing between the left and right makes sense when the common issue is a lack of personal control.

We have been suggesting in the preceding paragraphs that bureaucracy grows in large part because technology requires expertise, and bureaucrats are the political actors who have been saddled with the responsibility of interpreting and translating complex technology and social problems into policy. By adopting this explanation of the reison d' etre of the bureaucratic phenomenon as our primary thesis, we have posited a fundamental tension between bureaucracy and democracy. On the one hand are the bureaucrats-as-experts, the specialists with knowledge about particular professions and technics. On the other hand are "the people", those who represent what are considered human values. To carry Thithis dichotomy even further, we have the "computers"- the "technocrats" - squaring off against "humanity". This dichotomization, which obviously is grossly overdrawn, is nonetheless of the root tension between "the bureaucrats" and "the people". — Nicholas Henry

To summarize my op, it is not reasonable to hold right wing beliefs in America anymore. But instead of changing their beliefs, which for many amounts to ego death, the right changes something far more fungible: their reason. If reason produces the wrong results, change reason, not the desired results. This is the conspiracy theory mindset: alternative reasoning, to complement alternative facts. The right political class has therefore become peddlers of cheap conspiracy theories to a base of insane people.

The right political class has therefore become peddlers of cheap conspiracy theories to a base of insane people. — hypericin

And the left, the home of Russiagate and Hunter Biden's laptop as Russian disinformation, are the modern rationalists? I'll take the other side of that proposition.

The problem with the phrase "conspiracy theory" is this. Someone asserts that the earth is flat and that the world is run by lizard people. They get called conspiracy theorists. Then later, the government wishes to lie the country into war. They assert falsely that Saddam has WMDs or that the North Vietnamese attacked a US naval vessel at the Gulf of Tonkin; then they label political dissent as conspiracy theories, to smear legitimate dissent by association with nutballery. That's the move you're making here. You define conspiracy theory as any idea you don't like, or any idea that conflicts with the official status quo that you happen to favor.

LOL
On the one side you have QAnon, the Orwellian "Stop the Steal", 1000 voter fraud conspiracies, Fake News (the conspiracy of the entire media against Trump), Covid Hoaxers, Climate Hoaxers, RussiaGateGate (aka "investigate the investigators"), UkraineGate, Sandy Hook, etc. But that's just scratching the surface. The right wing is a witches cauldron of conspiracy, new ones bubble up faster than anyone can keep track.

And for the other side the best you could muster is RussiaGate, corroborated by US intelligence and the republican Senate, and something about whatever right wing promulgated conspiracy hunter biden's laptop was.

And you prefer the first one. What a sad joke.

What a sad joke. — hypericin

Nice having an intelligent chat with you.

Conspiracy theories serve the believers. They permit them to believe what their reason would otherwise cause them to abandon, and avoid suffering the consequent ego loss.

But conspiracies serve another master as well. Once the conspiratorial mode of thinking is adopted, the believer can no longer be reasoned with. Just imagine trying to argue a QAnon true believer out of their belief. Obviously impossible. The mind of a conspiracist is much more flexible than a rational person's: their main epistemological criteria is, “does the answer come out right?”. Any mooring with reality is unimportant, which gives the conspiracist tremendous rhetorical latitude. Foolishly attempt to debunk a conspiratorial claim, hydra-like, 7 new claims will spring from nowhere to replace it.

As they are imperturbable to logic and facts, conspiracists are fanatics. They are the core of Trump's notorious base, the reason his approval never went much below 40%. Having fanatics on your side is solid gold for politicians. Is it any wonder that conspiratorial thinking is so encouraged?

The American right, by their lunacy, have forced their adherents to conspiracy theories. And since their reason is shut down, the right is full of fanatics. Paradoxically, the more ludicrous the right has become, the stronger it has become. To believe them, reason must be surrendered, and so fanaticism is required, a devil's bargain the right wing masses have accepted.

Once the conspiratorial mode of thinking is adopted, the believer can no longer be reasoned with. — hypericin

There seems to be no chance of reasoning with you and the low regard you have for the right.

Someone should set up some ghosts for those QAnon people to chase. :D
The elusive "Anti-QAnon organizations" that perform magical rituals to deprive them of their souls, and eat their children with a good Chianti, ...
Actually, it seems they're already chasing their own ghosts.

The only part of conspiracy theory that is questionable is two or more people.
If an individual murders a person, (oh I don't know, Seth Rich for example)
and Seth had access to all of the dnc emails, and was very angry that his candidate
(Bernie Sanders) was screwed by the dnc, that may be worth investigating.
The fact that Seth's screen name was Panda and Hillary was recorded in a speach saying sometimes you have to kill the Panda (holding the Ming vase) two nights before!
and the fact that assange and several others have given accounts of the transfere of Emails
from Rich to Wikileaks as well as the fact that his murder was considered a robbery and nothing
was taken.
and even though a group of america's most respected retired intelligence officials
stated that the download was too fast to have happened from outside the building.
Yea, it must have been the Russians.. The veil of Ignorance approach
Or maybe there should have been an Investigation?

You can be intelligent and believe conspiracy theories. Intelligence, at least in the psychometric sense it is used in research on intelligence, is mostly about processing speed. Provided you grow up in a developed country and avoid disease and injury, it's mostly genetic. It can be measured pretty robustly.

In layman's terms, I'd say there is a big difference between intelligence and wisdom. Wisdom isn't something we measure in psychology or neuroscience. It's probably a mix of things we study; personality and intelligence. I'd imagine that people who tend to have high levels of the Big Five personality traits "Openess to Experience," and "Conscientiousness," along with high IQs tend to be "wiser," and generally more resistant to conspiracies. Knowledge is a huge factor too. If you actually work or have closely participated in politics, the idea of shadowy elites who always get their way is pretty laughable. Things are often a mess and generally no one involved is happy.

Probably the most dumbed down and insulting OP I have read on here. Politically motivated and not in any way related to philosophy, just a sad attempt to flamebait really.

This should not be posted here, try twitter.

A conspiracy theory can be defined as a rational type of abstract thinking about a secret plan or agreement between persons (called conspirers or conspirators) for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as but not limited to, murder or treason, usually but not always with political motivation.

They are as old as civilisation itself and at times serve an important purpose. If you have a problem with that, then I'm not sure you are not beyond redemption.

Great example here. The "DNC hack was local," was actually an intentional hoax made up by a troll in the UK. The story ran in many major outlets because VIPS (the former intel officials you mention), signed on to it. Most never even published corrections. It's hard to find a hoax that has been more fully debunked than this one, because the person who ran it was found, and their methods uncovered, but it lives on.

There is a step by step analysis of what happened linked below if you're interested. It is interesting because normally someone doesn't get so completely caught, but in this case you can see step by step what happened. If you read it, let me know if it changed your mind at all.

Essentially, a tech worker in the UK falsified evidence that the DNC download was fake. He did it sloppily. He has been involved in similar antics in the past. His report on the "local download theory" was published under a fake name. He sent it to VIPS. VIPS has actually since admitted they were had and that this was a hoax. In fact, many of the members never wanted to associate their credibility with the report

The guy doing the hoax targeted William Binney, a disabled former NSA employee with a grudge against the agency. He has helped keep the conspiracy alive by continuing to advocate for it on podcasts, even after VIPS retracted their support for the theory. They pressured Binney into admitting that he had absolutely no technical qualifications for vetting the report. However, it seems a desire for fame and getting another big break and hit against his former employer, the way VIPS did with Iraq, eventually got him out pushing the conspiracy again. He's waffled on it depending on the venue.

The guy who did the hoax has also been involved in circulating EU leaks attributed to Russia. He could knowingly be a Russian asset, or just someone who likes to be involved in espionage and is easily used as an asset. In the history of espionage lots of recruits are made just because people want to be involved in something "cool" and feel important. This seems even more true in the digital age. The best assets are actually the ones who don't know who their handlers work for, and who see their handlers as on the same level as them, or even beneath them.

The meeting the Trump campaign had with Russian intelligence officials is a great example. Perhaps no one on the Trump campaign is lying and the meeting amounted to nothing. However, they showed up for a meeting with a Russian intelligence officer whose cover was already blown specifically to discuss "dirt on Hillary," a few weeks before the email leaks. Just them showing up looks suspicious and causes chaos. That alone is an amazing intelligence coup. They never had to get the campaign to collude, getting high level campaign figures and the President's son involved in suspicious activity is good enough. Sort of like the Hunter Biden saga, or Bill Clinton being paid $1M to do a speech for UBS shortly after Clinton settled a fraud case with them for State. If it looks bad enough, that's enough to spread discord. It helps too that top federal positions and Congress are exempt from the level of corruption law that state and local officals in most states are subject too. For many states it is illegal to engage in activities that give the perception of corruption, even if your aren't doing anything untold.

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252445769/Briton-ran-pro-Kremlin-disinformation-campaign-that-helped-Trump-deny-Russian-links

The problem is not the conspiracy so much as conspiracy theorist. — Banno

According to the Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, “The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.”

It happens to be the case that P.T. Barnum, or whoever it was who claimed a sucker is born every minute, underestimated the frequency with which suckers are born. Suckers abound. But it comforts all those of us disappointed in life for one reason or another to believe our disappointment is the result of a conspiracy, and we're not to blame. And disappointment has become something of a habit, or even a way of living, in these dark times.

I'd add that the American left has also had a penchant for ridiculous conspiracy theories as well. They've largely been able to pull back from this owing to the fact that the Trump Administration's infamies were so outrageous and numerous that there was plenty of real scandal to cover. I certainly remember the Bush II era though, when it wasn't uncommon to hear the narrative that the administration had invaded Iraq largely for personal gain (remember the Halliburton) and knew full well that their nuclear program was dormant. Indeed, while there was clear evidence of the politicization of intelligence, there was virtually nothing on the diabolical scale that pundits threw out there.

Not to mention the "9/11 was an inside job," or "Bush let 9/11 happen so he could do some war," theories, which had little evidence but wide appeal. Hell, Noam Chomsky got popular on screeds ascribing Manichean evil to the US defense apparatus that would get him laughed out of an undergrad IR seminar. No review of policy maker's memoirs, interviews with principals, or reviews of declassified or leaked documents required. "The US bombed a medical facility in Sudan, and there is no way it was an accident as claimed because it seems suspicious!"

To date no evidence has ever come forward from what would be a major conspiracy involving far more people than could be expected to hold such a secret, while plenty of documentation shows how the botched strike occured, but of your a Chomsky reader this is all evidence of a cover-up.

Well I've been set straight, all dems honest, all repubs dishonest.
This is why I do not rely on posts.
I only rely on videos and audios of the actual subjects.
I believe politics and media has become synonymous with organized crime.

74 million americans believe the media is lying, because you can not believe what they are saying and vote for Trump.
74 million is the largest number of votes any president has ever gotten,
and yet he lost to the oldest, most cognitively impaired president we have ever had!
a man that has been running for president for forty years and never won a primary because of the scandals throughout his 48 years in office.
I'm guessing that is also a conspiracy theory.

If you actually work or have closely participated in politics, the idea of shadowy elites who always get their way is pretty laughable. Things are often a mess and generally no one involved is happy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thank you for your camouflaged compliment and plausible deniability

Without it, just like religion, this enterprise (The extreme American neofascist corporate oligarchic movement ) would collapse. — hypericin

Yes, but isn't that itself a conspiracy theory? How do we know that the world is run by "extreme American neofascist corporate oligarchs"? Do they run Communist China too?

Don't forget that Marxism is based on a conspiracy theory that claims that the middle class has conspired to suppress the working class, or in its more modern forms, that there is a conspiracy by whites to suppress blacks, by men to suppress women, by capitalists to suppress communists, by Christians to suppress Muslims, and so it goes on and on. A never-ending spiral of conspiracies. Like a religion, without which the Left's neo-Marxist narrative would definitely collapse.

As I suffer from Psychosis, an ailment that does engender a certain degree of paranoia and mania, particularly as it relates to the analysis of information, I think that people fail to take into consideration the psychological and sociological factors that play into conspiracy theories.

For starters, people who adhere to them are often socially isolated and alienated, often through little to no fault of their own, and, though there is an odd kind of persecution complex and delusion of heroic grandeur that comes with believing in conspiracy, I think that we ought to be willing to extend a certain degree of the benefit of the doubt to people who usually suffer from mental illness and have been marginalized by that account.

Within various contemporary activist movements, there were any number of conspiracy theories that became enough of a cult phenomenon for most people to note. Some of them were evidently anti-Semitic, some implicitly so, and some not at all, though often characterized as such purely because of that they were conspiracy theories. Though I do think that it did create a serious problem for people to endorse what were ultimately anti-Semitic conspiracies, I found for the general tendency to disseminate things like Kymatica to be relatively benign. When a person has a fairly limited set of information to go on, is fairly isolated from society, and particularly prone to either paranoia or manic episodes, conspiracy theories, though often dizzying, can present a cohesive enough depiction of the world to construct their own interpretation of it, based off of what they haven't considered is entirely suspect evidence. Though unfortunate, I think that this is entirely understandable. Rather than assume that such people are just simply crypto-Fascists or quote unquote insane, I think that it would be better to offer them a clear and succinct depiction of a world that is just simply complex. I, for instance, would recommend that they read Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire. I would do so because of my own political inclinations, but, for whatever anyone else's are, I would suggest that there is probably a comparable text. This, at least, is what I would recommend for either the Anarchists or Libertarians that I have encountered who had taken up such ideas. Though, as I admittedly do tend to relegate my reading to the libertarian Left, I don't know what the equivalent text for the Right would be, I would bet that there is one.

What is far more troubling to me of the alt-Right is its reliance upon thought-terminating clichés, particularly in the form of internet memes. The general proliferation of these images on a certain former home to Anonymous is not only effective, but also dangerous enough for me to be so inclined to think that Interpol should force the Federal Bureau of Investigation to shut the aforementioned website down, and, as an Anarchist, I am the sort of person who would generally like to avoid the FBI on more or less every given occasion.

From a philosophical perspective, I think that the reliance upon such images should serve as evidence that Hannah Arendt was correct about the banality of evil. It is extraordinarily disheartening, to me, that such a low form of political praxis could be so effective.

They should be angry about the factors actually causing them those circumstances. They already have a populist mindset where they feel like they are cheated by so called “elites” and they are not wrong they are cheated by capitalism. The alt right also panders to alienated white males in their mid 20s who are unemployed or doing a dead-end job, tormented by unrequited love, and isolated from the world outside of their forum; and this sense of personal aimlessness and despair seeps into their views on the world in general. They redirect the pain from that circumstance onto women or people of color instead of the system which actually oppresses them.

I know an upper (1%) class, northern, married couple, both well educated (but not Liberal Arts) who are off the deep end. I'm also surrounded by rural, ranching, blue collar northern types who are all-in with dummy. A lot of dummy's appeal is simply that he hates the same people they hate. That's it. They will overlook the fact that he's a dishonorable coward and a liar, and a man they would never let baby sit their kids, simply because he trolls the people they hate. Because of all this, they frequent the confirmation bias echo chambers and pick up on all the conspiracy paranoia. The first guy went so far as to admit we both drink our respective Kool aid and we must live with it. He lost site of the notion of not drinking any Kool aid all. Some scary shit. He actually believes there is a cabal that is out to get the likes of him.

The thing that bothers me most, though, is there is an element of the insurgency that is not racist, or nationalist, or fascist, or conspiracy nuts, but who actually believe the Capitalist/Freedom/America vs everyone-else-and-their-slippery-slopes-to-Communism BS. Anyone who is not them is an existential threat. These guys see dummy as a useful idiot and they don't like Republicans any more than Democrats. Some of these people are trained up gray men, doing the real damage, without trashing capital buildings or marching and whatnot. Some are outside, but many are inside. Getting rid of them takes a leader and I'm not sure Joe is up to the task. I hope so, but it's a big ask. We need some hard corps, old-school ass-kickers to shove these people back under the fridge where they belong. Right now all we have is a bunch of law-abiding, patient, "it'll all work out" people who are not seizing the moment.

End rant.