Conspiracy theories are a slippery slope. You might not believe something at first, but they are peppered with enough truth that you begin to accept them all because one part was right. "Question everything," as they often tell you. The problem is, facts and science usually comes from people in authority - the people you're told to question. So you begin blanket distrust all "authority". Which ends up being anyone telling your something with authority. Government, science, medicine, police, Greta...
I'll happily question - but the problem comes when your bias won't let you trust anyone or anything. In fact you deliberately take the opposite stance because "they lie" and they're probably "out to get" you. Then it really is dangerous - and you feel clever, because it's like knowing some secret knowledge the rest of the world doesn't - because the "sheeple" believe the spoon fed lies.
Of course the dumbest of us will fall for more theories, including the more incredible theories, but to pretend like any one person is immune is to ignore the step 1 of a 12 step program.
The people at Star Slate Codex supposed that this was to limit a run on masks.
Dr. Faucci just last month admits, yeah we lied about it at the beginning to prevent a run on masks.
The conspiracy folks in this case were correct. I am not including myself in the echelons or intelligence the SSC provides, but smart people were able to suss our this was a conspiracy.
Whilst I'm sure there's probably something in it, it's definitely not always the case.
Basically, throughout human existence, we have been guided by a lot of language that coded useful information about the world but on an abstract level was somewhere between false and meaningless. But abstract falseness didn't matter because it didn't directly impact our lives. I believe ancient hunter-gathers described a lot of their hunting method religiously. Animal spirits don't actual exist but I suspect one person can teach another concrete ways of hunting using these.
So, really, it's only a somewhat limited group that has good tools for sorting true abstractions from false abstractions from meaningless abstractions.
The 18th to 20th centuries saw a fortuitous coming together of interests where those with power found it in their interests to promote a greater rational understanding of the world, to promote tools that allow more people to determine the truth of these abstract ideas with little impact on their lives. And part of this was having somewhat truthful authorities, which allowed this rational understanding to be much easier since people didn't have to figure things out from the get-go.
Things don't look good going into the 21st century. The expanding area covered by science seems to be leading to less ability of even experts to verify basic science (PCR technician claiming viruses don't exist stands out in the OP). And rationality seems to be of less interest to the powerful.
I remember when Game of Thrones was in its early seasons. I had read the books so knew what was going go happen. I would sit and watch my friends discuss the show (who hadn't read the books) and I would be positively gleeful knowing that I knew more than them. It was like I possessed secret insider knowledge they all craved.
I suspect people who believe in conspiracy theories feel the same way. They know something others don't. Everyone else is waiting for the script writers; they've already seen the source.
It appeals to our ego and inherent narcissism. And frankly, when you have a people who have been told for decades that they are special and unique, narcissism can be an overrepresented quality
That doesn't explain why they would share that conspiracy with the masses. Doesn't it mean their insider knowledge won't be special anymore?
If I had insider trade knowledge, I wouldn't share it on reddit or well anywhere.
Book readers then had ready ammunition to share with the world "the TV series was WRONG, dishonest and false... the dialogue proves X but they changed it in the tv series!"
So they remain gleeful but they need to share their conspiracy(Book plotline) with the masses because otherwise the masses won't understand the same reality that they do.
Perhaps it helps to believe something so outrageous the masses won't believe it.
Then why are they always trying to spread their theories far and wide? Why wouldn't they do what you did and be "positively gleeful knowing that I knew more than them?"
How common are conspiracies throughout written human history? Why would modern history be any different?
COVID-19 disinformation is absolutely weaponized and that's literally killing people on a daily basis. Likewise, while the objections to 5g in my local community are merely an annoying inconvenience from naive technophobes, in some places it's manifested as attacks on physical infrastructure which are quasi-organized; there are forums where techniques are seeded, shared and refined with an underlying purpose of spreading those attacks to other forms of infrastructure.
The basic problem is that while bad ideas may spread on their own because they satisfy some emotional or pseudo-rational need of the recipients who then go on to reproduce the idea, the 'marketplace of ideas' metaphor doesn't really take account of wilful subversion.
We do know what happens with conspiracies, and it is our neurological processes and societal processes getting stuck in just the right way.
Take 2 forces -
1) Human brains are pattern recognition machines
2) A particular person always goes against the grain
With these two forces alone, this person will always orient their pattern interpretations against what is held by the "majority".
None of these things are bad, they are quite useful to the majority when someone tells them that tulip mania (for example) is irrational.
A book that I keep thinking about years after I read it, is Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_Explained).
While the topic is religion, its more an examination of beliefs, superstition and cultural norms through the lens of anthropology, evolutionary pscy, and other cognitivie theories.
Relevant to our discussion is it highlights how often brains encode information in odd ways, to increase recall, or just as a quirk of our mental wet ware.
A common example in cultures around the world are objects of a category, say Mountains/ancestors, that have an aberration or trait of another category (Eat people/are incorporeal)
Our brains fill in the necessary blanks - no one worries about the structure of the mountains digestive tract, or why ancestor spirits seem to be so human or don't dissipate in the wind/randomly follow movement rules for corporeal people.
The same applies for conspiracies. Somehow when people discuss conspiracies, the agencies involved have super human coordination, error checking, wealth and power.
Imagine you told everyone in the US in 2000 that the NSA would spy on everyone in their own country...(not sure how you'd benefit from that though)
Also, a law is not always needed. Frequently culture and society have ways to discourage problems created by outliers without turning to new laws. The problem occurs when issues (like conspiracy thinking and lack of trust in long-lived institutions / "the establishment") start to move from outlier status to mainstream.
China's economy seems to be doing fine, and the population is docile. What else do you think elites care about?
My point is that the "cure" seems to work fine in practice so long as it isn't too onerous. Any restrictions on speech in the US are likely to be limited to volatile social issues (hate speech) and enforced primarily by elites using the private sector.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2020/05/08/many-...
That’s a real life effect. Also from this article: “ Researchers at Johns Hopkins estimate that at least 70% of the population will have to be immune to provide herd protection against the novel coronavirus.“
1. The crazy ideas jacquesm decries have a limited influence on one's life. Those are (predominantly) singular topics rather than all-encompassing ideologies. They are more of conversation starters than life guides. Aside of some rare dangerous ones (COVID-19 theories perhaps?), their impact places somewhere between stamp collecting and junk food consumption. All the flat earthers, the 5G's, the moon landing hoaxes etc., - let people have weird hobbies. We can handle them as a society.
2. Given how prevalent conspiracy theories are - across times, cultures, geographical locations, social niches - I posit our propensity towards them is not a random fluke of human psyche. No, I posit the conspiracy theories play a role in some other societal processes. I posit that trying to eradicate or suppress the underlying mechanism, without understanding the mechanism in the wider context of all societal processes would cause unforeseen negative consequences.