Philosopher Lester Hunt has a crack at explaining the unfortunately ongoing fascination with conpiracy theories. "I’m trying to figure out," says he, "[why] these seemingly mad ideas are so powerful, and so popular. What the Hell is going on there?"Why do people prefer conspiracy theories with all their flaws to real theories that actually do explain events and integrate all relevant facts? Both conspiracy "theories" and real theories purport to explain things, says Lester, but the chief difference psychologically between them -- given that the chief difference in reality is that conspiracy theories are patent nonsense -- is that "real theories mean work. It takes work to understand them. They are abstract, difficult. They always use often use a highly specialized conceptual apparatus, and math symbols that only those who have spent long, boring hours of study can understand. And even after you understand them, they assign you more work."
How dull. The law of supply and demand, for example, takes time and skull sweat to fully understand, and brings with it the lesson that "if you don’t like gradually rising gas prices, you have to get off your butt and find more sources of fuel." Much better and (if neither skull sweat nor getting off your couch are really your thing) much easier to take a colourful position against Big Oil, the Jews, the Freemasons, the Bilderberger, the Brethren, Haliburton or whichever villain du jour you wish to castigate (Knights Templar and Dick Cheney are always good; every decent conspiracy should have the Templars or Cheney somewhere), and even as you shout and wail at those bastards you feel liberated -- you can celebrate that you're off the hook. After all, if someone else is doing this to you -- those incredible, underhanded bastards -- then "there is nothing at all that you can do about it," is there! Ingenious!
But that is actually liberating: Nothing to do! You’re off the hook! The power rush was from the insight itself, realizing what the real cause was. You’ve penetrated the Veil of Maya. Actually gaining and using real power – that’s just more work!And who really wants work, especially if it involves turning the brain on, eh?
LINKS: Conspiracy theories: What's really going on there? - Critical Mass (Lester Hunt) [Hat tip Stephen Hicks]
RELATED: Nonsense, Philosophy
3 comments:
The irony with another academic attempting to explain conspiracy theory is that they too are part of the conspiracy theory movie. The essential difference between what is considered "real" as opposed to "conspiracy" theory is the source. More people are likely to believe in non-government or non mainstream sources than to believe in the machination that is government and big business. I suppose at a deep level people are inherently distrustful of the motives of both.
Regarding conspiracy theories - someone a lot smarter than me once said:
"three people can keep a secret, as long as two of them are dead."
Might have been Ian Wishart
The obvious local conspiracy theorists I am aware of are Keith Locke and the rest of the Green Party members.
Here are some familiar lines:
#1) All forms of marketing are evil. This means that the marketing of coke cola, McDonald & fast food to children are bad.
I heard Sue Kedgeley saying on TV last week that she wanted the government to poor more money to the Overlander and increase the level of marketing of the service so that more people will pay to use the service.
#2) The US & UK are evil, since they are conspiring to intervene militarily in other countries to steal their oil & wealth.
Keith Locke has just been quiet about the situation that is currently happening in Dafur, Sudan. This quietness from Keith Locke means that he wishes that the US & UK would intervene in Sudan.
#3) Big corporations are evil, since they are conspiring to dominate our lives.
I read on the Herald last year (2005) that Nandor endorsed his new Hewlett Packard laptop computer and said he loved the new StarOffice open source software that came pre-installed with the machine. Well, first of all, Hewlett Packard is the type of Big Corporate that Nandor derides. Also, StarOffice open source software was a product of Sun Microsystem where they have made it open source. Sun Microsystems is also a big corporation.
When are these anti civilization advancement nutters & tree huggers starting to produce something useful for the society? Such as if they are anti-pollution, they should form a company to manufacture cars, which run on pure water with no carbon emission? They should form a company to develop their own software or manufacture their own computers so that they can freely criticise the likes of Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Intel and so forth? Everything in the world that they are against, they should produce those things themselves.
Greenies are parasites in today’s modern world, where they take advantage by using the technology produced by innovators and the same time deriding the way that those producers are going about producing those technologies.
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