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The American collective psyche has a history of mistrust long preceding the events you identify. In the colonial and early republic there was huge mistrust of

The American collective psyche has a history of mistrust long preceding the events you identify. In the colonial and early republic there was huge mistrust of Catholics, Jews, Masons, Native Americans and African Americans - many thought they were plotting against them. Why? Because at least some of them - say Native Americans - may well have been in order to stop their land being taken away and their families being slaughtered. In the nineteenth century, "International Bankers" (shorthand for rich Jews), and other rich businessmen - Carnegie, Morgan, Mellon, Rockefeller - all joined the ranks. There is substance in the idea that they literally conspired to create cartels in some circumstances, so this is not unfounded. And then we get to the 20th century. If I told you that 10 servicemen who were serving in Roswell in 1947 have come forward and said "yeah, there was a cover up, I didn't want to say anything earlier because I was worried about prosecution and losing my pension", and all their individual testimonies mostly collaborate you might think there was some evidence of a cover up. What if I then told you the actual number was higher? How many ex-USAAF service personnel would need to say "that was not a weather balloon, there was a cover up" would it take for you to re-think whether there was indeed a conspiracy? 50? 100? The actual number is... over 600. 600 people with no reason to lie are basically going around thinking "wow, my government is really keen on lying". Perhaps telling their families that there are dark, secret forces in this World. Then a couple of decades later, we have the assassination of JFK. For you to accept the official government explanation of what happened on that day in Dallas, you have to believe in magic bullets and a small entry wound to the front of the head and a large exit wound to the rear of the head is caused by a bullet fired from the rear. All this sits swirling around people's heads and then _actual_ conspiracies are proved completely true: CIA assassination plots, Watergate, and Iran-Contra. If somebody tells you that the CIA would "never" do something shady, there is ample evidence that they can, do and will. The reason Americans believe in conspiracies is because at various points in time there has been ample evidence of them and some of them are actually true. Some of them are just racism, or anti-semitism, or shock, but some of them _are actual conspiracies_. As to your last sentence, and the wonder what it would take to restore trust. Well, quite simply, the true conspiracies need to stop happening, and that means governments need to stop needing reason to form them. In short, nothing less than total revolution, then.

cjbgkagh 5y ago
AFAIK European Americans were escaping powerful occupational guilds in Europe which definitely did conspire in secret and not so secret. There was a fear that such guilds would follow them and establish themselves in the US.
jl6 5y ago
> Watergate, and Iran-Contra For me, an essential litmus test for whether a “conspiracy theory turned out to be true” is the timing between these three events: 1. Person claims something happened. 2. Government denies it. 3. Thing revealed to have actually happened. The test is really whether #1 turned out to be valid reasoning, with the benefit of hindsight, i.e. were the claimants vindicated? And if the affair plays out over a matter of weeks, was there really a conspiracy movement? The two examples you listed… I’m not expert in these, but they feel like controversies rather than conspiracies. Or was there an underground movement of suppressed believers telling us the truth and we just weren’t listening?
- PaulRobinson 5y ago
  There was a conspiracy in all cases. A conspiracy does not need a conspiracy theorist to be a conspiracy. However, when a conspiracy becomes public knowledge, my point is that it will contribute to that collective cultural thought that conspiracies happen, they're real, and so other conspiracies being claimed with less evidence could also be real. My point is that real conspiracies - on being unearthed - fuels support for theories that have less evidence, because as the article we're discussing points out, the reason for conspiracy theories existing that have little evidence of existence has little to do with established facts, and more a sense of what "could" be true.

cjbgkagh 5y ago

AFAIK European Americans were escaping powerful occupational guilds in Europe which definitely did conspire in secret and not so secret. There was a fear that such guilds would follow them and establish themselves in the US.

jl6 5y ago

> Watergate, and Iran-Contra For me, an essential litmus test for whether a “conspiracy theory turned out to be true” is the timing between these three events: 1. Person claims something happened. 2. Government denies it. 3. Thing revealed to have actually happened. The test is really whether #1 turned out to be valid reasoning, with the benefit of hindsight, i.e. were the claimants vindicated? And if the affair plays out over a matter of weeks, was there really a conspiracy movement? The two examples you listed… I’m not expert in these, but they feel like controversies rather than conspiracies. Or was there an underground movement of suppressed believers telling us the truth and we just weren’t listening?

PaulRobinson 5y ago
There was a conspiracy in all cases. A conspiracy does not need a conspiracy theorist to be a conspiracy. However, when a conspiracy becomes public knowledge, my point is that it will contribute to that collective cultural thought that conspiracies happen, they're real, and so other conspiracies being claimed with less evidence could also be real. My point is that real conspiracies - on being unearthed - fuels support for theories that have less evidence, because as the article we're discussing points out, the reason for conspiracy theories existing that have little evidence of existence has little to do with established facts, and more a sense of what "could" be true.