For you! Glad you got over it, and I hope you're doing okay now.

A lot of them are clearly stupid and evil. You say the obvious corruption of the president means nothing is off the table ... but they worship Trump like a god, and he's up to his eyeballs in Epstein shit. Dude is the most powerful pederast in the world.

I mean, did you see this?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/qanon-promotes-pedo-ring-conspir acy-theories-now-theyre-stealing-kids

(delete the space in the link ... poetv doesn't want this to get out)

I was giving Trump's obvious corruption as an example of real-world conspiracy that justifies this type of unhinged thinking, that's all. Conspiracy theories surged after Watergate because, well, there really was a conspiracy at the highest level of government. So why not another, and another?

My first girlfriend was an Anthropology Grad Student, and she thought that the government had framed Sid Vicious.

The first time I ever heard of Occam's RAZ0R, I was well over thirty, and it was from Lisa Simpson. That's pathetic. Media literacy is at least as important as reading, from the standpoint of a well informed electorate.

Qanon isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a cult for the utterly batshit crazy. A lot of the members are one screw away from hiding in a trailer home while video taping dew drop reflections as proof that They are targeting their fillings with mind control radiation. (Or if already are, substitute They with SATANIC DEMOCRATS)

Social media has made it possible to funnel, corral and exploit these troubled people for fame and profit. Past a certain size -then- you get the dumb-but-sane people bandwagoning to the movement because “owning the libs MAGA2020 blackonwhiteviolence jewsdid911“ etc

I think Two Jar Slave is right to be charitable, at least that's a good starting point. Rhetorical strategies, whether they are purposefully used or the unconscious structure of one's argument, are hard to pick up on.

Having myself spent sometime in my early 20s with the smash the system types (thanks Santa Cruz!) and having studied a little rhetoric and moral psychology, my sense of how/why the conspiracies work is this:

1. Pre-existing beliefs that powerful people/institutions run everything and the average person has no control and is exploited.

2. Conspiracies leverage (1) to be plausible (confirmation bias) building off the basic premise of (1) to explain it in a new way/provide new information, i.e., "the elite are not only in control but exploiting them in some new way!"

3. The new way in which one is being exploited in (2) actives some inherent moral modules like in group/out group detection, justice/cheating, purity/disgust.

4. The conspiracy beliefs become the basis of group identity, amplify in group/out group sentiment, and allow for the conspiracy to become entrenched.

There probably needs to be a feedback loop in there somewhere. But the way to short circuit the thing maybe requires:

a) appealing to a larger group identity that subsumes the smaller group;
b) showing how the conspiracy beliefs don't actually lead to the conspiracies end to create room for an 'better' explanation;
c) building trust with people and yourself not buying into the conspiracy
d) ???

Nice explanation, simon. I think your steps 3 - 4 really highlight why you can't crack through conspiracy thinking with correct information by itself; believers who have invested some of their morality and social currency in a conspiracy would sooner allow the details of the conspiracy to wriggle and mutate around the facts than divest themselves of the belief and accept their losses. It's never appealing to say you were wrong, less so to say you were morally wrong and risk losing friends to boot. If I hadn't happened to move cities and sever myself from that social group, maybe I would still believe in chemtrails.

This is why I think rhetoric needs to be studied directly and actively in the k - 12 classroom. I know it sounds like some hipster antiquarian shit, like bringing back Latin or fencing, but for all the talk among educators about encouraging "critical thinking," I don't see many actual critical thinking tools being taught until college. Quality of sources, rhetoric, debate, basic social psychology (like some of the concepts Simon was referencing), these are like vaccines against conspiracy thinking. They have the added benefit of being good for democracy; a demagogue is less likely to get stadiums of well-educated people to chant "lock her up."

But also, I suspect a more corrupt and less-unified political culture creates richer soil for this type of shit to grow in. No idea what to do about all that.

As for the feedback loop, isn't it pretty straightforward?

5) Now that one conspiracy theory has trashed your mental immune system, more conspiracies are likely to take hold. If unreasonable thing X is true, why not Y and Z too?

Good summary, simon. And good on you, 2-Jar.

I think a lot of people who go to college, perhaps the majority of them, never do get exposed to critical thinking skills, apart from anemic "what kind of sources I will allow you to cite" rules.

Five stars for starting with being charitable. It's the right way and it works. Like Contrapoints said in one of her videos, if she wants to change minds she has to meet people where they are, not where she is.

i actually do agree with two jar slave, i'm just being a contrarian dumbfuck