this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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My pet belief: It's because conspiracy theories (the modern parlance) are for unexplained things. Everyone knows that cabals of corporate cat-crushing cunts exist and are evil exemplified, but the truly crazies (who will be the visible and audible ones ranting about a conspiracy) aren't going to latch on to stuff that's easily explained by facts. They want to be the masterful mind who metes wisdom to the misled masses, and that takes leaping ahead of evidence (which is a good thing in science when you base it on evidence, and simply posit something that can be tested with the goal of discovering whether it's true or not, rather than just wholeheartedly believing in your conspiracy theory and refusing to consider evidence against it).
Also conspiracy communities attract sociopaths who seek easily manipulated people, and this often takes the form described here of touting oneself as the megamind who has been silenced by the establishment. I'm thinking of the Weinsteins specifically, who actually claim that between the 2 brothers and 1 of their wives, they deserve 3 separate Nobel Prizes but have been stifled by conspiratorial forces in academia and government.
Nah, it's because evangelicals have coopted conspiracism to the degree that actual watergate/iran-contra style whistle blowers literally have their own classification, whistle blowers.
Follow the sources far enough for the dumb shit that dominates conspiracy theory culture nowadays and you'll find some evangelical lunatic saying it's that way because genesis or revelations say so.
I think it is also due to societal pressures (in the US at least) because we are obsessed with never being wrong, never claiming fault, always trying to show off, and never show compassion because it is weakness. So we have to fall back on believing something instead of knowing, testing, and verifying something. Everything has to be a conspiracy "theory" because they hold no understanding that a theory must be tested and really they're obsessed with hypotheses they can't prove nor accept they lack evidence for.