5 ms·

The question nobody's asking: WHY are people so dissatisfied with the conventional truth that they feel the need to seek out any alternative?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tinalumfoil 6y ago
On the other hand why are people so scared of distrust of authority? If it's true why does it require censorship to defend?
- aNoob7000 6y ago
  Because every fact is disputed. There's no truth anymore. Look no further than the use of masks and hydroxychloroquine in the United States.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    > anymore There never was. Don't limit yourself to the concept of a single objective truth.
    - aNoob7000 6y ago
      With regards to my comment about the mask and medicine, what's not truthful about it? There are still people that don't believe that masks help, and that hydroxychloroquine will help them.
      - Lammy 6y ago
        Not in regard to just that but to people in general. People are telling you the world as they perceive it. I don't live in the anti-mask-pro-HQwhatever world either, but I have found it much more effective to let people have their truths than to get in a never-ending fractal of battles that just make people dig their heels in and hate each other.
      - LHxG 6y ago
        The fact that the truth monopolists first declared that masks don't work and now they do? I always believed they work, even when the government first lied about that.
    - Florin_Andrei 6y ago
      > Don't limit yourself to the concept of a single objective truth. Embrace... falsehood?
      - Lammy 6y ago
        You're still doing it! All truths can be true simultaneously because they are a property of the observer.
  - seppin 6y ago
    > Look no further than the use of masks and hydroxychloroquine in the United States. Masks work to help stop the spread and hydroxychloroquine has no evidence that it helps anyone who is sick. There, was that so hard?
    - aNoob7000 6y ago
      I completely agree with you but there's a huge swath of people that don't.
      - seppin 6y ago
        Then they ignore evidence to believe what they want to, not what is most logical. Internet or no, those people were always going to be misinformed. Because they choose to be.
    - btgeekboy 6y ago
      For many, yes. That’s the problem.
- willis936 6y ago
  It doesn’t. We don’t see that in practice, either. We see deliberate misinformation censored. It just so happens that the authorities on topics are also right a good amount of the time. Misinformation necessarily has to attack authority. You don’t need to be spreading misinformation to challenge authority.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Because this particular kind of conspiracism feels likely to get people killed. Not just the pizza parlour, but a lot of this stuff gets cited by mass shooters (+), and racial misinformation in particular, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in onwards, has been involved in most genocides of history. (+) What happened to mass shootings? Have they just vanished from the news cycle from outside the US, or vanished under the high covid death rate, or been ended by lockdown?
- Florin_Andrei 6y ago
  > If it's true why does it require censorship to defend? It's not Fort Knox to need defending. What really happens is - it turns out a significant portion of human beings are vulnerable to what, for lack of a better term, could be called bullshit. It's part just plain ignorance, part honest mistake, part willful deception. As long as only a few fall prey to it, as long as times are not too trying, as long as the bullshit doesn't make them do crazy and/or destructive things, then it's more or less okay - I mean, that's basically the default state of humanity since forever. But when those conditions are not true anymore, some feedback loops need to be activated.
willis936 6y ago
Equal rights means lessening the privilege of some. They’re having something taken away from them and need some way to convince themselves they are in the right to push back. You need to do some serious mental gymnastics to seem just in wanting to maintain an unjust advantage.
- gwright 6y ago
  I think you need to be clearer about what you think of as "rights". Unfortunately that word is used to mean many things but at least at the level of "natural rights", it isn't a zero-sum game.
  - willis936 6y ago
    Some people benefit from subjugating a minority. It isn’t necessarily economic. If you believe you are above others then you will push back against being told that you are not. Taking away those privileges by giving equal rights to the minorities is a zero sum game.
    - gwright 6y ago
      I see what you are saying but I'm having a hard time understanding why there is a prerequisite to "take away ... privileges" in order to ensure individual rights are being protected. I guess I just wouldn't use the word "privilege" to describe something that is an impediment to protecting the individual rights of any individual. I realize that "privilege" is a very overloaded word these days so perhaps I'm just not understanding its use in this context.
      - willis936 6y ago
        African-Americans have faced disenfranchisement consistently since reconstruction. That is why they are poor. Being able to afford college is a privilege. Being able to pull yourself out of poverty is a privilege. The “American Dream” is that there is a fair meritocracy at play. We’re finally making moves towards that and those who benefit from it are pissed off. I don’t have hard laws to point towards, but laws are made based on culture. The US is in the midst of a cultural revolution. The majority is realizing that we should have a society that treats people fairly. That is pissing some people off.
1propionyl 6y ago
Because reality is complicated, messy, nuanced, moves extremely quickly, is sometimes seemingly contradictory, and feels completely out of control. The root of much of conspiratorial thinking is attempting to make sense of a chaotic world by assuming that everything is being organized and controlled by a small group. The feeling of being "in the know" about the "way things really work" gives adherents a sense of control. Put another way: modern conspiracy theory could be seen a coping mechanism for information overload. I think that it's at least in part rooted in epistemic heuristic, and I suspect that the reason people engage in conspiracy theory today is exactly the same reason ancient humans imagined the movement of the sun and the tides as being controlled by anthropomorphic deities. Of course this isn't the complete story, there are social aspects as well, but it is a very large part of it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/
- cosmojg 6y ago
  Could this be the same phenomenon which motivates theism, at least in part?
  - 1propionyl 6y ago
    Aha, I didn't see your comment until I submitted my edit suggesting more or less the same thing. I personally believe it is. Or at the very least it's closely related.
    - pfraze 6y ago
      To take the religion analogy further, I think people use information, not just to support views they want to hold, but to organize. Q anon is a community. The accuracy of the information is much less relevant than the membership and the mission.
wgx 6y ago
Theory: huge swathes of people are hugely dissatisfied with their lives; long hours, poor pay, lack of social mobility, poor education (as others have said) and they feel there must be some thing tangible to blame for this. It’s fertile ground for conspiracy theories to grow.
- Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
  Exactly. This is how Brexit happened.
- TaupeRanger 6y ago
  I think that's part of it. I have also noticed that it tends to satisfy a deep desire in susceptible people for "secret knowledge". They thrive on the idea that the world is more dangerous and mysterious than it actually is, perhaps stemming from the malaise and depression that comes from those things you mentioned.
  - wavepruner 6y ago
    I'm prone to consider "conspiracy theories" because something terrible happened to me that is adamantly denied by those in power. The terrible thing that happened to me does not feel like "secret knowledge" or a "conspiracy theory" at all. It is very real and the consequences I deal with are relevant to every minute of every day of my life. I don't feel depressed. My life is fulfilling and I find a tremendous amount of meaning in the work I do. I know many others who are prone to considering "conspiracy theories" who are the same.
    - seppin 6y ago
      > I'm prone to consider "conspiracy theories" because something terrible happened to me that is adamantly denied by those in power. You seem to be confusing "people in power abuse said power and never face consequences" (true) with Hilary Clinton operated a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza place" (not true).
      - 6y ago
StreamBright 6y ago
Or more like what triggered their dissatisfaction. https://www.businessinsider.com/true-government-conspiracies-2013-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/true-government-conspiracies...
- luckylion 6y ago
  I believe that's a good point. Most times I talked to someone that I found to be "out there" (and I have somewhat of a tolerance in that regard), they seemed to go from obvious-ish lies/corrupt deals etc of politicians to "now they and their apparatus have zero trustworthiness". Essentially they jump from "Iraq's WMD were a lie" to "everything the federal government says is most likely a lie".
cosmojg 6y ago
Best guess: the conventional truth is boring. Next best guess: the conventional truth is inconvenient.
- Daishiman 6y ago
  Conventional truth is tedious, not just boring. Who has time to peruse dozens of papers of technical jargon on COVID? Who's got the time to read a book by Chomsky, compare and contrast with a conservative writer on the same topic, a historian, while looking at the experts' interpretation of these things? Out best understanding of things is just as fragmented as the wild conspiracy theories, with the difference that the experts debate minutiae that requires deep knowledge and patience. We cannot deeply research more than a couple of things at a time, at best. We crave easy answers and grand narratives.
jfarmer 6y ago
That's not how conspiracy theories and magical thinking work. I grew up around folks who thought fluoride was in the water to brainwash us. I had an English teacher who thought the major news media was hiding the fact that we discovered the remains of Noah's Ark. Humans have thought patterns like this by default. We invented things like science to _prevent_ us from falling into those traps. Flat earth, anti-vax, Qanon, etc. are more of the same. If there's a difference it's the scale and speed afforded by social media.
- drewcon 6y ago
  Scale is the truly terrifying variable here. We’ve always believed in ghost stories when we couldn’t explain the phenomenon. But now those ghost stories are displacing explanation and at massive speed and scale. So worrying.
vkou 6y ago
Because the truth is messy, and is always less satisfying then a neatly packaged lie.
drewcon 6y ago
This. This hard pull towards conspiracy theories is happening in contrast to a period of about 100 or so years of relative enlightenment supported by mainly centralized liberal institutions(not saying that doesn’t have a cost), but this pattern is as old as civilization itself. But why now? IMO it’s modern day mythology created by a tremendous lack of trust in fragmented and unreliable cultural and political institutions. Authority and expertise to explain and deal with the events around us been either drowned out by false prophets or ignored after committing enough reputation suicide as to be rendered untrustworthy. It’s hard to see the path out of this dark forest.
- seppin 6y ago
  > It’s hard to see the path out of this dark forest. Impossible really.
- Florin_Andrei 6y ago
  > but this pattern is as old as civilization itself Maybe on a small scale, village level. Now the village is global, and that's what makes the whole thing extremely dangerous. > It’s hard to see the path out of this dark forest. Agreed.
gwright 6y ago
I'm trying to wrap my head around the phrases "conventional truth" and "alternative" truth. How about we aim for just plain old un-modified "truth" and realize that it can be quite elusive?
- rjkennedy98 6y ago
  To quote T.S. Eliot: "Human beings cannot bear very much reality". To expect anyone to strive towards truth is just not realistic. That's what makes genius so special.
- RichardCA 6y ago
  Human beings have existed for several hundred thousand years. The idea of a separate objective truth outside ourselves is a relatively recent development. We generally credit the Ionian Greeks with adding this idea to human civilization and there has always been push-back against it. I remember watching this as a child and thinking it was the least important episode, but upon reflection I realized it was the most important one. https://youtu.be/AiYGFZcD1h8 https://youtu.be/AiYGFZcD1h8
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Be careful with “conventional truth”. From Epstein alone we learn that our government does conspire (conspiracy) against us. We’re only finally starting to learn the truth about that situation and Q people have been talking nonstop about it for two years.
freshhawk 6y ago
Because there used to be a single coherent narrative of "conventional truth" called "mainstream media". Sure it had a lot of propaganda in it, and was fairly heavily controlled politically, but it took a long time for that propaganda to be discovered and acknowledged. By the time it was enough time had passed to say "oh sure, back then there were lies but only other countries put lies in their papers now". Then the internet fragmented that, providing real time alternative narratives, around the same time that 9/11 and the wars afterwards happened. So people got very interested in the news and it was very obvious that the mainstream news was lying right now. Now your entire worldview start falling apart, how do you know what's true and who's trying to kill you? You need to find someone else who can tell you what's happening. You aren't quite sure how this whole "critical reading" thing is supposed to work, never learned that stuff in school, but you did find some trustworthy folks who are a lot like you online who seem very confident about what's happening. Even more like you than the old people at the newspapers, and more certain about things, which means they are more likely to be right! This is great, now you will be safe and you actually understand what's happening, unlike those people who keep making things so bad.
- seppin 6y ago
  Media and government does lie to you, but not about fluoride in the water. They tell you your life is sustainable (when it's not) and they cannot do anything more to help (while helping the 1% without hesitation). QAnon (like all conspiracies) start with a grain of truth, but it seems to also want to frame Donald Trump as a savior of a sick and broken system instead of its greatest and more literal manifestation.
  - burke_holland 6y ago
    Just to be clear, the government literally does lie to you about what’s in the water. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/flints-water-crisis-reveals-government-failures-at-every-level/2016/01/23/03705f0c-c11e-11e5-bcda-62a36b394160_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/flint...
    - 6y ago
searchableguy 6y ago
Conspiracies are fun. Might be why? Anecdote: I am in a privacy group where everyone likes to talk about the three letter agencies and big companies in a grand manner. Some of it is possible, other seems plausible and some part is a joke. I don't think everyone knows which part is which though.
swayson 6y ago
I imagine the answer to that question is complex. One aspect, I think plays a role is having people's attention divided, as they argue and polarise, allows the powerful actors in the globe, to take actions that fly underneath the radar.
res0nat0r 6y ago
It is more comforting to believe in big cabals and shadow figures than to know that crazy pandemics that can cripple the entire world in months and just a handful of evil people can fly planes into buildings and kill thousands, are just things that can happen and you can't control or stop any of it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tzs 6y ago
In many cases they aren't seeking it out. It just shows up in their social media feed. They get a mix of real news, fake news, satire, comedy, all tossed together and it is mix up which is which. Plus they get a lot of it indirectly, because it was liked by a friend, and that indirect version is even less likely to be clearly labeled. Worse, for a lot of people their social media feed is their main or even only source of news.
dorkwood 6y ago
If a low-information voter is having to face criticism for supporting a particular candidate, I can imagine it would be appealing to be presented with a story saying that the candidate in question is secretly dismantling a global ring of child traffickers. It's a way to reconcile cognitive dissonance and make them feel like they made the right decision.
notacoward 6y ago
I don't think they're dissatisfied with truth of any kind. They're dissatisfied with their own position and status relative to that truth. There's little glory to be had from saying "yes, the experts know what they're doing and they got this right" even when those experts are highly regarded. But if you get in early to become your local peer group's representative for an unconventional or controversial position, and it turns out to have merit, there's a huge social-status payoff. Everyone's playing the thought-leader lottery. They keep bleeding little bits of credibility, over and over again, in the hopes of some day hitting the jackpot that will make all those losses seem tiny. Getting in first is an essential part of the game, so people range far and wide to find what they think is the perfect balance of possibility and payoff. The 40-year project to undermine expertise and specialization of all kind magnifies this effect in some, and brings it out in others for whom it had only been latent, but it's not the real driver. The real driver is that people feel slighted and ignored, operating in a supposedly egalitarian public sphere and seeing other "ordinary" people gain extraordinary status, but unable to do so themselves without taking risks.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tinalumfoil 6y ago

On the other hand why are people so scared of distrust of authority? If it's true why does it require censorship to defend?

aNoob7000 6y ago
Because every fact is disputed. There's no truth anymore. Look no further than the use of masks and hydroxychloroquine in the United States.
- Lammy 6y ago
  > anymore There never was. Don't limit yourself to the concept of a single objective truth.
  - aNoob7000 6y ago
    With regards to my comment about the mask and medicine, what's not truthful about it? There are still people that don't believe that masks help, and that hydroxychloroquine will help them.
    - Lammy 6y ago
      Not in regard to just that but to people in general. People are telling you the world as they perceive it. I don't live in the anti-mask-pro-HQwhatever world either, but I have found it much more effective to let people have their truths than to get in a never-ending fractal of battles that just make people dig their heels in and hate each other.
    - LHxG 6y ago
      The fact that the truth monopolists first declared that masks don't work and now they do? I always believed they work, even when the government first lied about that.
  - Florin_Andrei 6y ago
    > Don't limit yourself to the concept of a single objective truth. Embrace... falsehood?
    - Lammy 6y ago
      You're still doing it! All truths can be true simultaneously because they are a property of the observer.
- seppin 6y ago
  > Look no further than the use of masks and hydroxychloroquine in the United States. Masks work to help stop the spread and hydroxychloroquine has no evidence that it helps anyone who is sick. There, was that so hard?
  - aNoob7000 6y ago
    I completely agree with you but there's a huge swath of people that don't.
    - seppin 6y ago
      Then they ignore evidence to believe what they want to, not what is most logical. Internet or no, those people were always going to be misinformed. Because they choose to be.
  - btgeekboy 6y ago
    For many, yes. That’s the problem.
willis936 6y ago
It doesn’t. We don’t see that in practice, either. We see deliberate misinformation censored. It just so happens that the authorities on topics are also right a good amount of the time. Misinformation necessarily has to attack authority. You don’t need to be spreading misinformation to challenge authority.
pjc50 6y ago
Because this particular kind of conspiracism feels likely to get people killed. Not just the pizza parlour, but a lot of this stuff gets cited by mass shooters (+), and racial misinformation in particular, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in onwards, has been involved in most genocides of history. (+) What happened to mass shootings? Have they just vanished from the news cycle from outside the US, or vanished under the high covid death rate, or been ended by lockdown?
Florin_Andrei 6y ago
> If it's true why does it require censorship to defend? It's not Fort Knox to need defending. What really happens is - it turns out a significant portion of human beings are vulnerable to what, for lack of a better term, could be called bullshit. It's part just plain ignorance, part honest mistake, part willful deception. As long as only a few fall prey to it, as long as times are not too trying, as long as the bullshit doesn't make them do crazy and/or destructive things, then it's more or less okay - I mean, that's basically the default state of humanity since forever. But when those conditions are not true anymore, some feedback loops need to be activated.

willis936 6y ago

Equal rights means lessening the privilege of some. They’re having something taken away from them and need some way to convince themselves they are in the right to push back. You need to do some serious mental gymnastics to seem just in wanting to maintain an unjust advantage.

gwright 6y ago
I think you need to be clearer about what you think of as "rights". Unfortunately that word is used to mean many things but at least at the level of "natural rights", it isn't a zero-sum game.
- willis936 6y ago
  Some people benefit from subjugating a minority. It isn’t necessarily economic. If you believe you are above others then you will push back against being told that you are not. Taking away those privileges by giving equal rights to the minorities is a zero sum game.
  - gwright 6y ago
    I see what you are saying but I'm having a hard time understanding why there is a prerequisite to "take away ... privileges" in order to ensure individual rights are being protected. I guess I just wouldn't use the word "privilege" to describe something that is an impediment to protecting the individual rights of any individual. I realize that "privilege" is a very overloaded word these days so perhaps I'm just not understanding its use in this context.
    - willis936 6y ago
      African-Americans have faced disenfranchisement consistently since reconstruction. That is why they are poor. Being able to afford college is a privilege. Being able to pull yourself out of poverty is a privilege. The “American Dream” is that there is a fair meritocracy at play. We’re finally making moves towards that and those who benefit from it are pissed off. I don’t have hard laws to point towards, but laws are made based on culture. The US is in the midst of a cultural revolution. The majority is realizing that we should have a society that treats people fairly. That is pissing some people off.

1propionyl 6y ago

Because reality is complicated, messy, nuanced, moves extremely quickly, is sometimes seemingly contradictory, and feels completely out of control. The root of much of conspiratorial thinking is attempting to make sense of a chaotic world by assuming that everything is being organized and controlled by a small group. The feeling of being "in the know" about the "way things really work" gives adherents a sense of control. Put another way: modern conspiracy theory could be seen a coping mechanism for information overload. I think that it's at least in part rooted in epistemic heuristic, and I suspect that the reason people engage in conspiracy theory today is exactly the same reason ancient humans imagined the movement of the sun and the tides as being controlled by anthropomorphic deities. Of course this isn't the complete story, there are social aspects as well, but it is a very large part of it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/

cosmojg 6y ago
Could this be the same phenomenon which motivates theism, at least in part?
- 1propionyl 6y ago
  Aha, I didn't see your comment until I submitted my edit suggesting more or less the same thing. I personally believe it is. Or at the very least it's closely related.
  - pfraze 6y ago
    To take the religion analogy further, I think people use information, not just to support views they want to hold, but to organize. Q anon is a community. The accuracy of the information is much less relevant than the membership and the mission.

wgx 6y ago

Theory: huge swathes of people are hugely dissatisfied with their lives; long hours, poor pay, lack of social mobility, poor education (as others have said) and they feel there must be some thing tangible to blame for this. It’s fertile ground for conspiracy theories to grow.

Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
Exactly. This is how Brexit happened.
TaupeRanger 6y ago
I think that's part of it. I have also noticed that it tends to satisfy a deep desire in susceptible people for "secret knowledge". They thrive on the idea that the world is more dangerous and mysterious than it actually is, perhaps stemming from the malaise and depression that comes from those things you mentioned.
- wavepruner 6y ago
  I'm prone to consider "conspiracy theories" because something terrible happened to me that is adamantly denied by those in power. The terrible thing that happened to me does not feel like "secret knowledge" or a "conspiracy theory" at all. It is very real and the consequences I deal with are relevant to every minute of every day of my life. I don't feel depressed. My life is fulfilling and I find a tremendous amount of meaning in the work I do. I know many others who are prone to considering "conspiracy theories" who are the same.
  - seppin 6y ago
    > I'm prone to consider "conspiracy theories" because something terrible happened to me that is adamantly denied by those in power. You seem to be confusing "people in power abuse said power and never face consequences" (true) with Hilary Clinton operated a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza place" (not true).
    - 6y ago

StreamBright 6y ago

Or more like what triggered their dissatisfaction. https://www.businessinsider.com/true-government-conspiracies-2013-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/true-government-conspiracies...

luckylion 6y ago
I believe that's a good point. Most times I talked to someone that I found to be "out there" (and I have somewhat of a tolerance in that regard), they seemed to go from obvious-ish lies/corrupt deals etc of politicians to "now they and their apparatus have zero trustworthiness". Essentially they jump from "Iraq's WMD were a lie" to "everything the federal government says is most likely a lie".

cosmojg 6y ago

Best guess: the conventional truth is boring. Next best guess: the conventional truth is inconvenient.

Daishiman 6y ago
Conventional truth is tedious, not just boring. Who has time to peruse dozens of papers of technical jargon on COVID? Who's got the time to read a book by Chomsky, compare and contrast with a conservative writer on the same topic, a historian, while looking at the experts' interpretation of these things? Out best understanding of things is just as fragmented as the wild conspiracy theories, with the difference that the experts debate minutiae that requires deep knowledge and patience. We cannot deeply research more than a couple of things at a time, at best. We crave easy answers and grand narratives.

jfarmer 6y ago

That's not how conspiracy theories and magical thinking work. I grew up around folks who thought fluoride was in the water to brainwash us. I had an English teacher who thought the major news media was hiding the fact that we discovered the remains of Noah's Ark. Humans have thought patterns like this by default. We invented things like science to _prevent_ us from falling into those traps. Flat earth, anti-vax, Qanon, etc. are more of the same. If there's a difference it's the scale and speed afforded by social media.

drewcon 6y ago
Scale is the truly terrifying variable here. We’ve always believed in ghost stories when we couldn’t explain the phenomenon. But now those ghost stories are displacing explanation and at massive speed and scale. So worrying.

vkou 6y ago

Because the truth is messy, and is always less satisfying then a neatly packaged lie.

drewcon 6y ago

This. This hard pull towards conspiracy theories is happening in contrast to a period of about 100 or so years of relative enlightenment supported by mainly centralized liberal institutions(not saying that doesn’t have a cost), but this pattern is as old as civilization itself. But why now? IMO it’s modern day mythology created by a tremendous lack of trust in fragmented and unreliable cultural and political institutions. Authority and expertise to explain and deal with the events around us been either drowned out by false prophets or ignored after committing enough reputation suicide as to be rendered untrustworthy. It’s hard to see the path out of this dark forest.

seppin 6y ago
> It’s hard to see the path out of this dark forest. Impossible really.
Florin_Andrei 6y ago
> but this pattern is as old as civilization itself Maybe on a small scale, village level. Now the village is global, and that's what makes the whole thing extremely dangerous. > It’s hard to see the path out of this dark forest. Agreed.

gwright 6y ago

I'm trying to wrap my head around the phrases "conventional truth" and "alternative" truth. How about we aim for just plain old un-modified "truth" and realize that it can be quite elusive?

rjkennedy98 6y ago
To quote T.S. Eliot: "Human beings cannot bear very much reality". To expect anyone to strive towards truth is just not realistic. That's what makes genius so special.
RichardCA 6y ago
Human beings have existed for several hundred thousand years. The idea of a separate objective truth outside ourselves is a relatively recent development. We generally credit the Ionian Greeks with adding this idea to human civilization and there has always been push-back against it. I remember watching this as a child and thinking it was the least important episode, but upon reflection I realized it was the most important one. https://youtu.be/AiYGFZcD1h8 https://youtu.be/AiYGFZcD1h8

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

Be careful with “conventional truth”. From Epstein alone we learn that our government does conspire (conspiracy) against us. We’re only finally starting to learn the truth about that situation and Q people have been talking nonstop about it for two years.

freshhawk 6y ago

Because there used to be a single coherent narrative of "conventional truth" called "mainstream media". Sure it had a lot of propaganda in it, and was fairly heavily controlled politically, but it took a long time for that propaganda to be discovered and acknowledged. By the time it was enough time had passed to say "oh sure, back then there were lies but only other countries put lies in their papers now". Then the internet fragmented that, providing real time alternative narratives, around the same time that 9/11 and the wars afterwards happened. So people got very interested in the news and it was very obvious that the mainstream news was lying right now. Now your entire worldview start falling apart, how do you know what's true and who's trying to kill you? You need to find someone else who can tell you what's happening. You aren't quite sure how this whole "critical reading" thing is supposed to work, never learned that stuff in school, but you did find some trustworthy folks who are a lot like you online who seem very confident about what's happening. Even more like you than the old people at the newspapers, and more certain about things, which means they are more likely to be right! This is great, now you will be safe and you actually understand what's happening, unlike those people who keep making things so bad.

seppin 6y ago
Media and government does lie to you, but not about fluoride in the water. They tell you your life is sustainable (when it's not) and they cannot do anything more to help (while helping the 1% without hesitation). QAnon (like all conspiracies) start with a grain of truth, but it seems to also want to frame Donald Trump as a savior of a sick and broken system instead of its greatest and more literal manifestation.
- burke_holland 6y ago
  Just to be clear, the government literally does lie to you about what’s in the water. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/flints-water-crisis-reveals-government-failures-at-every-level/2016/01/23/03705f0c-c11e-11e5-bcda-62a36b394160_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/flint...
  - 6y ago

searchableguy 6y ago

Conspiracies are fun. Might be why? Anecdote: I am in a privacy group where everyone likes to talk about the three letter agencies and big companies in a grand manner. Some of it is possible, other seems plausible and some part is a joke. I don't think everyone knows which part is which though.

swayson 6y ago

I imagine the answer to that question is complex. One aspect, I think plays a role is having people's attention divided, as they argue and polarise, allows the powerful actors in the globe, to take actions that fly underneath the radar.

res0nat0r 6y ago

It is more comforting to believe in big cabals and shadow figures than to know that crazy pandemics that can cripple the entire world in months and just a handful of evil people can fly planes into buildings and kill thousands, are just things that can happen and you can't control or stop any of it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tzs 6y ago

In many cases they aren't seeking it out. It just shows up in their social media feed. They get a mix of real news, fake news, satire, comedy, all tossed together and it is mix up which is which. Plus they get a lot of it indirectly, because it was liked by a friend, and that indirect version is even less likely to be clearly labeled. Worse, for a lot of people their social media feed is their main or even only source of news.

dorkwood 6y ago

If a low-information voter is having to face criticism for supporting a particular candidate, I can imagine it would be appealing to be presented with a story saying that the candidate in question is secretly dismantling a global ring of child traffickers. It's a way to reconcile cognitive dissonance and make them feel like they made the right decision.

notacoward 6y ago

I don't think they're dissatisfied with truth of any kind. They're dissatisfied with their own position and status relative to that truth. There's little glory to be had from saying "yes, the experts know what they're doing and they got this right" even when those experts are highly regarded. But if you get in early to become your local peer group's representative for an unconventional or controversial position, and it turns out to have merit, there's a huge social-status payoff. Everyone's playing the thought-leader lottery. They keep bleeding little bits of credibility, over and over again, in the hopes of some day hitting the jackpot that will make all those losses seem tiny. Getting in first is an essential part of the game, so people range far and wide to find what they think is the perfect balance of possibility and payoff. The 40-year project to undermine expertise and specialization of all kind magnifies this effect in some, and brings it out in others for whom it had only been latent, but it's not the real driver. The real driver is that people feel slighted and ignored, operating in a supposedly egalitarian public sphere and seeing other "ordinary" people gain extraordinary status, but unable to do so themselves without taking risks.