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Conspiracy theories, taken generally, seem to very clearly be an expression of the collective unconscious. Not in the full-on woo-woo way, just "collective unco

Conspiracy theories, taken generally, seem to very clearly be an expression of the collective unconscious. Not in the full-on woo-woo way, just "collective unconscious" in the sense of a large population considering a problem or situation instinctively, rather than explicitly and rationally. As such, you usually don't want to take them at face value, but it's also a mistake to discard them completely. They often point to something very real that is going on under the surface. The hard part, like any expression of the subconscious, is trying to separate signal from noise, but there IS a signal there. If there wasn't, the "conspiracy theory" would never catch on. All that said: "The plan from which the Great Reset originated was called the Global Redesign Initiative. Drafted by the WEF after the 2008 economic crisis, the initiative contains a 600-page report on transforming global governance. In the WEF’s vision, 'the government voice would be one among many, without always being the final arbiter.'" I'd say the "Conspiracy Theorists" are pretty on the money here. It's literally an attempt to take power away from existing governments and deliver it to a cabal of multinational corporations, which is, in effect, the "One World Government" the Theorists love to crow about. And never forget, they've been trying to do this, in some form or another, since at least the 30s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

alisonkisk 5y ago
Surez, anything looks like anything if you use vague enough terms. But a public document proposing a collaboration between many sectors, is the opposite of a secret plan for a single unified government.
tzs 5y ago
> The hard part, like any expression of the subconscious, is trying to separate signal from noise, but there IS a signal there. If there wasn't, the "conspiracy theory" would never catch on. So what is the signal in such conspiracy theories as the Earth is flat and all the governments cooperate to suppress knowledge of this and to block people from going and seeing the ice walls that surround Earth; there are vast networks of tunnels under the US where millions of kidnapped children are tortured and raped before they are harvested alive for their adrenochrome which the communists and satanists the secretly rule the world ingest to stay healthy and live longer; or that most of the worlds leaders have been replaced by aliens (the ET kind); or that Biden, Harris, Pelosi, all of the Supreme Court justices, and many others have already been arrested for treason, tried in military tribunals, and executed, with animitronics/CGI/actors/whatever being put in their place to not tip off the other traitors until the military has dealt with them all, and then will reinstate Trump.
- pompom3 5y ago
  > So what is the signal in such conspiracy theories... There is virtually no signal in those conspiracy theories because they are created by schizophrenics and other mentally ill people and then spread by the media who uses them to get clicks and make them look like a danger.
- whythre 5y ago
  Your post is set up like a straw man, but let’s just take the ‘children are being sexually kidnapped/tortured’ pizza gate thing as an example. It’s absurd, but guys like Jeffrey Epstein exist. And I think we can all agree something very fishy was going on within the circles he operated in and how he died. Underage people are being exploited by some very high profile movers and shakers… but rather than anything substantive, we get this unconscious unfounded unease. Filtered through the cultural milieu, it manifests as unsophisticated paranoid fears tangentially related to sex abuse and the Clintons.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  The flat earth stuff is astroturfed disinfo seeded to discredit conspiracy narratives as such (ditto Alex Jones who comes from a CIA connected family); the tunnels and kidnapped children are pointing to vast sex trafficking and blackmail networks which operate outside the law (of which Jeffrey Epstein and the legitimately suspicious Pizzagate emails were just one small glimpse); the alien leadership thing is a stand-in for the fact that essentially everyone in our ruling elite is at such a level of sociopathic remove that they almost fancy themselves a different species from the rest of humanity (which they purely view as a resource to be exploited); and the QAnon thing is another astroturfed disinfo campaign which helped to shield Trump from his Epstein connections and get anyone who is clued into this stuff stuck on their computer deciphering 8chan posts and waiting for the cavalry to arrive (and was also very effective in getting normies to scoff at the idea of unaccountable pedophilia by the ruling elite).
- atatatat 5y ago
  > So what is the signal in such conspiracy theories as the Earth is flat Psyops, honestly. Easy to push that theory enough it can be pointed to as the "mAnY cOnSpIraCy theorists believe this" citation. P.S. The "signal" is that everyday person society often feels like it's being kept from the whole truth, to its detriment — to the point that either the CIA or FSB has convinced swathes of people the fucking Earth is flat with (often disappointing quality!) meme magic. P.P.S. People//kids are really sex trafficked. Some of them end up being victimized by the elite (sole of whom are pretty weird!). You should know your post really conflates wildly different things!
IAmEveryone 5y ago
“Delivering it to a cabal of multinational corporations” is the bad-faith interpretation that only works if you ignore almost everything written on the topic. And “cabal” happens to be an anti-semitic dogwhistle, although I’m sure its use here is just a coincidincle. Here’s an example from Wikipedia: “ The final outcome of the Summit, the Tunis Agenda (2005), enshrined a particular type of multistakeholder model for Internet governance, in which, at the urging of the United States, the key function of administration and management of naming and addressing was delegated to the private sector (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN)” And while ICANN gets criticism as any other organization, few argue the internet would be better served by direct control by any government. The article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistakeholder_governance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistakeholder_governance, also explains the reasoning behind the idea. Basically, the world has become complicated, and governments are often not familiar with some situation, so they want to involve more of the people close to the issue on decision-making.
- hmsshagatsea 5y ago
  “Everything I don’t like is an alt-right dogwhistle”
  - IAmEveryone 5y ago
    No. I don't like cats. They're more like old-school fascists than alt-right.
  - blueflow 5y ago
    This attitude is insane, and i can't believe how many people on HN exhibit this. The US is going mad and we are watching it like a car crash in slow-motion.
- atatatat 5y ago
  > And “cabal” happens to be an anti-semitic dogwhistle, although I’m sure its use here is just a coincidincle. Really difficult to take anything else you're saying seriously alongside this.

alisonkisk 5y ago

Surez, anything looks like anything if you use vague enough terms. But a public document proposing a collaboration between many sectors, is the opposite of a secret plan for a single unified government.

tzs 5y ago

> The hard part, like any expression of the subconscious, is trying to separate signal from noise, but there IS a signal there. If there wasn't, the "conspiracy theory" would never catch on. So what is the signal in such conspiracy theories as the Earth is flat and all the governments cooperate to suppress knowledge of this and to block people from going and seeing the ice walls that surround Earth; there are vast networks of tunnels under the US where millions of kidnapped children are tortured and raped before they are harvested alive for their adrenochrome which the communists and satanists the secretly rule the world ingest to stay healthy and live longer; or that most of the worlds leaders have been replaced by aliens (the ET kind); or that Biden, Harris, Pelosi, all of the Supreme Court justices, and many others have already been arrested for treason, tried in military tribunals, and executed, with animitronics/CGI/actors/whatever being put in their place to not tip off the other traitors until the military has dealt with them all, and then will reinstate Trump.

pompom3 5y ago
> So what is the signal in such conspiracy theories... There is virtually no signal in those conspiracy theories because they are created by schizophrenics and other mentally ill people and then spread by the media who uses them to get clicks and make them look like a danger.
whythre 5y ago
Your post is set up like a straw man, but let’s just take the ‘children are being sexually kidnapped/tortured’ pizza gate thing as an example. It’s absurd, but guys like Jeffrey Epstein exist. And I think we can all agree something very fishy was going on within the circles he operated in and how he died. Underage people are being exploited by some very high profile movers and shakers… but rather than anything substantive, we get this unconscious unfounded unease. Filtered through the cultural milieu, it manifests as unsophisticated paranoid fears tangentially related to sex abuse and the Clintons.
AndrewBissell 5y ago
The flat earth stuff is astroturfed disinfo seeded to discredit conspiracy narratives as such (ditto Alex Jones who comes from a CIA connected family); the tunnels and kidnapped children are pointing to vast sex trafficking and blackmail networks which operate outside the law (of which Jeffrey Epstein and the legitimately suspicious Pizzagate emails were just one small glimpse); the alien leadership thing is a stand-in for the fact that essentially everyone in our ruling elite is at such a level of sociopathic remove that they almost fancy themselves a different species from the rest of humanity (which they purely view as a resource to be exploited); and the QAnon thing is another astroturfed disinfo campaign which helped to shield Trump from his Epstein connections and get anyone who is clued into this stuff stuck on their computer deciphering 8chan posts and waiting for the cavalry to arrive (and was also very effective in getting normies to scoff at the idea of unaccountable pedophilia by the ruling elite).
atatatat 5y ago
> So what is the signal in such conspiracy theories as the Earth is flat Psyops, honestly. Easy to push that theory enough it can be pointed to as the "mAnY cOnSpIraCy theorists believe this" citation. P.S. The "signal" is that everyday person society often feels like it's being kept from the whole truth, to its detriment — to the point that either the CIA or FSB has convinced swathes of people the fucking Earth is flat with (often disappointing quality!) meme magic. P.P.S. People//kids are really sex trafficked. Some of them end up being victimized by the elite (sole of whom are pretty weird!). You should know your post really conflates wildly different things!

IAmEveryone 5y ago

“Delivering it to a cabal of multinational corporations” is the bad-faith interpretation that only works if you ignore almost everything written on the topic. And “cabal” happens to be an anti-semitic dogwhistle, although I’m sure its use here is just a coincidincle. Here’s an example from Wikipedia: “ The final outcome of the Summit, the Tunis Agenda (2005), enshrined a particular type of multistakeholder model for Internet governance, in which, at the urging of the United States, the key function of administration and management of naming and addressing was delegated to the private sector (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN)” And while ICANN gets criticism as any other organization, few argue the internet would be better served by direct control by any government. The article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistakeholder_governance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistakeholder_governance, also explains the reasoning behind the idea. Basically, the world has become complicated, and governments are often not familiar with some situation, so they want to involve more of the people close to the issue on decision-making.

hmsshagatsea 5y ago
“Everything I don’t like is an alt-right dogwhistle”
- IAmEveryone 5y ago
  No. I don't like cats. They're more like old-school fascists than alt-right.
- blueflow 5y ago
  This attitude is insane, and i can't believe how many people on HN exhibit this. The US is going mad and we are watching it like a car crash in slow-motion.
atatatat 5y ago
> And “cabal” happens to be an anti-semitic dogwhistle, although I’m sure its use here is just a coincidincle. Really difficult to take anything else you're saying seriously alongside this.