> I'm not a physician, but I suppose a "cancer of the mind" is a sort of 'mental illness'? No, it's a metaphor. :-) I mean if unchecked, then conspiracy theory

> I'm not a physician, but I suppose a "cancer of the mind" is a sort of 'mental illness'? No, it's a metaphor. :-) I mean if unchecked, then conspiracy theory will consume all your rational thinking about some issue and maybe affect other issues. Nothing against irony, but you should first understand that "belief in conspiracy theory" is not about having a particular (contrarian) belief, it's solely about how you process evidence. As I explain above, Chomsky is a dissident (or contrarian), but not a conspiracy theorist. Edit: I should probably also point out that there can be conspiracy theorists within the government as well, that is, not dissenters. Near the end of the cold war, there were people in U.S. government who believed that Russians have invisible nuclear submarines in all oceans, and I am pretty sure there were similar nuts in the USSR as well.