I much agree with the article on how to deal with individuals arguing from a mistrustful position, but your insight that this doesn't deal with a problem on a societal level makes sense.
What has caused so much mistrust on a broad nebulous scale? Civil war and slavery are not unique of course, and every nation carries its traumas of war and disaster. But the American collective psyche is unique in relation to a series of events starting in the late 60s that seem somehow connected - Kennedy, Watergate, Vietnam, Chile, Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq, 911, Snowden...
What links these is a strong perception of betrayal by government that has failed in its duty through corruption and preference for private power interests.
It is to the credit of American people that they have courage for sceptical introspection and aim to hold government to account.
But something else has happened. Now, because the US plays such a big role in replication of culture, a paranoia, which is practically dyed into Hollywood output (X-Files, Enemy of the State, JFK etc) reaches around the world.
Somehow this needs treating separately from there being, in reality, in actual fact, both an increase in corruption due to global financialisation and technology, as well as a much greater awareness of extant, quiescent skulduggery due to the internet.
And there is one more layer to add now. That some agencies in the world, deliberately fanning the flames of mistrust and division for political gain, have their power amplified by digital technology.
One has to wonder, what event would restore trust in competent and benign government? Is there such a thing as therapy for a whole culture?
What if I told you that all governments are similarly corrupt, and that the USG (arguably, Western governments in general) is one of the least corrupt by reasonably objective measures. Let's not fall for this trite divisive propaganda dating back to old KGB psyops, that has now taken a zombie life of its own (like in the best Hollywood stinker movies).
There's no divisiveness to fall for. The public's loss of trust is legitimate and if anything, calling it KGB psyops propaganda is rich.. I suppose you think America doesn't engage in the exact same tactics?
While the road itself might be quite bumpy, the general situation now is much better than it was in the 1980’s, 50’s, 30’s etc. And I don’t see any reasons to believe this trend will change significantly in the future.
Other countries, like Russia, India, Brazil, or Nigeria, might like to be more corrupt than those, but just can't swing it. There is not enough money in play in their spheres.
The best I have is here https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021 but that does not seem to go far enough back
“ I have the honor to report that the Bogotá representative of the United Fruit Company told me yesterday that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded 1000.”
‘ The US is today rivalled only by China in its degree and depth of corruption.’
Really? I mean you really believe that US is more corrupt than Russia where Yeltsin and Putin parceled off most of the resource extraction industry to their oligarch buddies (Putin also added his ex KGB colleagues) in exchange for political support?
As I said, Russia would like to be as corrupt as the US, but is not powerful enough to be. They had to invade two neighboring countries, and more than once, to get paid any attention.
"Loss of trust" is reductionism. Funny how most people who call about "loss of trust" somehow trust the comedic channel called Fox News. Reasonable people can trust but verify and question channels
Of course this is not one sided politically, we have people like Chomsky that make a sport of saying how the US is "the worse country in the world" while living in probably one of the few countries where such discourse would be tolerated.
While the US has several problems most people don't know how good they have in living in a democracy. A flawed one for sure, but a democracy
Cynics perhaps understand this and think instead outside of the dichotomy. Maybe we can do much better, and the forces in the way of that are powerful --hence the cynicism.
You won't find that in what I wrote. Especially since there are many different ways of government.
But I won't support sham elections, biased systems (add a special note for gerrymandering and the electoral college here)
Then I'd believe you and say, as I kinda tried to in my comment, that it's to the credit of US citizens that they still hold that government to the highest of standards.
Eisenhower warned of this new complex of US power in his farewell speech. Kennedy was going to do something about it and severely curtail the CIA. Then, IMO, they killed him for it. True US democracy died with Kennedy. Ever since then the American people have been pushed out of the picture more and more by the military-industrial-academic complex. Today we often refer to these people as the "elites". They are the ones that know better, they know who we should get to vote for, who we should send our sons to go fight for vague "national interests". We are the boiled frogs and our democracy is a dystopian nightmare and they are getting away with it because of petty politics.
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.
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?
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.
One of the most extreme examples was the death of Officer Brian Sicknick [1] during the January 6th riots. The media ran a nonstop narrative (for months) that he had been brutally killed after being attacked by a rioter with a fire extinguisher: a visceral and discomforting image that helped to frame the riots. Politicians, up to and including the president, exploited this by having an honorary ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda historically used to honor the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, and RBG.
The problem is that not only was he not killed by a fire extinguisher, he wasn't killed at all. He died of a completely unrelated and preexisting medical condition (blood clot in the brain leading to stroke) well after the riots had ended. He texted his brother long after the riots stating he was feeling fine and had no problems except getting pepper sprayed twice. The media tried to pivot to claiming that he died of an allergic reaction to the pepper spray, but there was no basis in reality for that whatsoever and it was also completely dismissed by the medical examiner whose report was publicly released only months after its completion.
Events like this emphasize that the argument of scale against conspiracy theories simply doesn't hold. His family knew what happened, the examiner's office knew what happened, many politicians exploiting his death knew what happened, and I expect there's no doubt much of the media also knew. Yet they all ran with the same story because it helped advance the desired narrative. Efforts at countering it were effectively squished by a mixture of censorship and labels (such as conspiracy theory). And of course this event also emphasizes that the political establishment are more than happy to carry out amoral conspiracies even over such absurdly petty things, and that our media is now more of a tool for political manipulation of society than a balance against it.
So after events like this, what reason do I ever have to now believe the media or politicians on pretty much anything? Even science is now starting to go down the exact same myopic path with things like the famous open letter published by the Lancet [2] declaring any consideration that COVID may have come from a lab leak as being an unjustifiable conspiracy theory. Most of the scientists who signed that letter had direct ties to the Wuhan Lab. They declared no competing interests in the letter, and the Lancet editor who chose to publish it clearly didn't see it as a conflict of interest either.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Sicknick
[2] - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
but most of the rioters were there that day because they believed in some conspiracy theory
Or at least that was their esxcuse to wreak havoc and show their disrespect for any kind of common rule that should not be broken.
If you go there saying you're protecting your president from Hillary Clinton's gang who rallied in a pizza restaurant owned by HC herself but it was actually a cover up for a pedo-ring of satanists who also drank blood, well, even if you don't believe it when you say it, don't be surprised if they'll frame you as cop killers.
Psyops go both ways: sometimes you punch, sometimes you get punched in the face.
So no, that's not reason for distrust of the government, that's reason for not taking reports too seriously and read between the lines looking for the actual information, buried in the noise.
The reason for government distrust in USA is fabricated by those powerful people that do not want to make it obvious that they are abusing the rules and use the common people as human shields to protect their shady interests
Many of those powerful people work in the government, so yes the government is the reason of people distrusting the government.
don't know about the US, but AFAIU many of the people who want free hands try to put some of their people in the government
being directly the ones who work for the government means having your public and private life constantly under scrutiny and that's a no go for such people
One should ask (IMO) why people vote for them or believe that people like Sanders are commies who want to destroy US lifestyle ...
Plus, since WW1 misinformation and conspiracy theories has been routinely used as a weapon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare
Disseminating (true or false) information is still one of the main tasks of secret services around the world.
> One has to wonder, what event would restore trust in competent and benign government? Is there such a thing as therapy for a whole culture?
The medicine is called healthy democracy. It requires free press, informed citizenship, schools to teach critical thinking...
(Unsurprisingly many conspiracy theories are undemocratic or spread in undemocratic environments)
In my own experience, an important source (among others) for my own loss of trust is the impossibility of being (and/or feeling like I'm) part of that which I distrust.
for example, a false democracy (like in my own country) may fuel this.
another (better) example is the impossibility of being able to contribute (feel as a part of) to some scholarly field (these circles are riddled with authority appeals if only as a way to cope with the vast amounts of time required to wade through content).
the labeler doesn't understand the difference between conspiracy and conspiracy theory.
Another issue is that the establishment tries to put vaccines in a separate box from the rest of modern human inventions and its a total disaster. Sure, vaccines are well tested, but look at what happened with the advent of PCB's, Agent Orange, Asbestos, Benzine, etc. The last 100 years has trained everyone to expect modern chemistry to be a disaster. You can't separate that knowledge from vaccines and say "this time it's different". Of course, none of those other chemicals were tested in the context of being injected into the human body, but that's just details at this point for most people. Combined with reducing a testing regiment that should run over a decade to 1 year and you no longer get to stand on your high-ground and say "your vaccine fears are misplaced". No, the onus is on the system to be 100% transparent and honest. But we didn't get any of that, in fact the stench of rot continues to linger: https://denvergazette.com/news/judge-scraps-75-year-fda-time...
I got both shots but I totally agree. That the FDA even tried to help Pfizer not release all the data before 2097 is beyond belief.
All hope is not lost though: the very reason they'll have eight months (not 75 years) before releasing it all is precisely because otherwise it undermines the public's confidence in the government.
We are not rational beings; we are still mostly creatures of instinct, with the ability to be rational. The latter brings with it the ability to rationalize.
We all, to some extent, prefer to hold beliefs that imply outcomes we prefer (or, equivalently, dispel undesirable outcomes), and that can lead us to take positions on that basis, rather than on what the evidence supports.
That, in itself, would not be a conspiracy theory, as there are many cases where the evidence is inconclusive. The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is, firstly, the doubling-down on a belief despite evidence to the contrary or a lack of supporting evidence that should be there, and secondly, a particular form of rationalization for doing so, which says the evidence must be fabricated or suppressed, as necessary. All considerations are subordinated to the goal of preserving the initial belief.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with 20th-century history has enough evidence to see how promulgating conspiracy theories can help nefarious actors, and also how they work.
All of the options are carefully worded to minimize the actual conspiracies (ex: they say the FBI “kept tabs on” MLK which doesn’t begin to describe what they did) and disqualify others (ex: one “incorrect” option is “Republicans cheated their way to win the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections” when it’s not inaccurate to say they cheated in 2000).
It’s a pretty blatant propaganda piece, intentional or not.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2021/con...
Calling someone who is doing actual research that doesn’t go with the grain of consensus a conspiracy theorist is surely wrong, but I see a lot more of the former (Surprising thing X must be true because it somehow advantages my tribe or makes me special) on the internet than the latter (Surprising thing X must be true because I did research and the data is not matching up as you’d expect).
...gets marginalised. This has always been true in research. But now that we can all do research, of an OSINT sort, this is happening more.
Usually when amateur researchers try to engage with and/or question the consensus/professional researchers, they are met with silence. Even when they point out good evidence; that you might call "inconvenient truths".
I've worked in academia so I have sympathy; you get plenty of approaches from true crackpots [0]. Researchers/academics/professional need to learn to better engage with the amateurs, and those peers they marginalise, who genuinely try to contribute to the debate.
or write a book (or books) or manufacture a miracoulous ointment "that bigfarma doesn't want you yo know about" and get rich appealing to those people that are or feel marginalized because they actually are border-line psycos or are members of a weaker segment of the population.
that has always been true in pseudoscience ("snake oil" comes from a real product of the 1800s) but now this is happening more.
I think this is part of the trap that believers fall into: the idea that if you can’t disprove it, then it might be true, and if it might be true, then a fun game of connect-the-dots begins.
Of course, an infinite number of things might be true, so the actual conspiracy theories that people choose to believe in start to be driven by their personality and social network. That’s why we hear about lizard-people but not, say, the equally plausible echidna-people.
Any theory that requires millions of people to systematically lie and hide evidence, with little to gain, across the whole world, and for many decades, is extremely unlikely.
Someone who believes in it with just a bit of money could surely fly up and sample the air inside of one of the trails, for example.
Its pure information control by using etiquettes to discredit everything else.
What were the jews targetted by the Protocol of the Elder of Zion a threat to? Monarchy.
What did the real illuminati want? Democracy.
What does George Soros fund that makes him a target? Democracy.
What was the evil EU up to that caused Brexit. Democracy.
Why don't QAnon vote for democrats?
Why did birthers need a made up excuse to target a Black American president swept in on a massive uptick of voting?
Why is shutting down an economy to save human lives in a pandemic so scary to certain groups? Because poor people's lives shouldn't have the same worth as the rich.
Why is dealing with climate change so hard when everyone agrees it's the cheap and obvious thing to do?
Generally speaking, why do certain types of politician have to lie so much?
Possibly because they're doing stuff that isn't actually popular?
A conspiracy theory is either something true the powerful don't want you to know, or something false the powerful do want you to believe and weird echoes of those two things.
edit: a 'related article' at the bottom endorses this view:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00257-y
> Conspiracy theories are fundamentally a form of political propaganda,” says Quassim Cassam
Social media have made it incredibly easy to get a spectacular return for a very small propaganda budget.
In the same way there's financial and political asymmetry between the extremely privileged and everyone else, there's also informational asymmetry.
Most of the population lives in an incredibly polluted mental and emotional atmosphere. Conspiracy theories are being used - like smoking - to create toxic and self-harming addictive behaviours.
This is a very different space to informed and educated debate which decides policy on merits and rational evaluation of likely outcomes.
It's more like Pavlovian conditioning of entire voter populations. This leaves the shell of a democracy, but the interior is poisoned by lies.
Other true things like slavery being bad, the reasons for the civil war, rich people getting away with terrible crimes while poor people were killed for minor infractions, Nazis targeting trade unions, kings being dictators, royal families often being foreign parasites, human races not actually existing and so on fall into this weird realm as well.
Why is this controversial for fossil fuels or lead in gasoline?
Why is the simple act of insulating your house or driving an efficient car considered part of a global communist plot?
You have all these insane people following the protestant work ethic, who want to work all day even if there is not enough for them to do. Yet simultaneously, they won't work on solving climate change because for some strange reason the "economics" (perceived or not) don't "work out". The interest rate that must be paid to investors i.e. 0% by far exceeds the interest rate that the market can actually deliver. Kind of amusing. It's like people purposefully put on a brain cage and then act completely helpless as if they didn't choose this to happen.
The fact that we even have to argue about this, while short term interest rates should be negative feels like a bad joke.
You must first work then play but if you keep working in your play time, then work itself becomes play, it won't remain work and no amount of distortion by decree will change that.
> What's changed my mind is realizing how often things that might be labeled as conspiracy theory actually happen. Even if something didn't happen, many of the fears are actually well grounded and labeling them as such in my opinion reflects a certain amount of lack of empathy on the part of the labeler.
> I'm not saying certain beliefs aren't absurd or physically implausible etc. But if they are plausible they're often coming from somewhere reasonable. Widespread conspiracy theories tell you that a large segment of the population doesn't trust something, and the appropriate response is to figure out why that thing might be untrustworthy.
> I agree with the linked article, and understand that they are writing to a specific audience. But it has a patronizing tone that I think just reinforces the problems involved. If there's a widespread conspiracy belief, it's not enough to say to have "empathy" for someone who holds it, as that casts the problem as being with the person rather than the things that caused them to lose trust to begin with. You need to be asking why such large parts of the population distrust the subject of the conspiracy and address that.
I don't know if you have any "conspiracy theorists" in your close circles. One of my former friends has really gone done the deep end, and why you could argue that some of the arguments are funded in reasonable doubts, the whole world view is not. It is absolutely impossible to have any discussion with him, every argument is countered with "you can not trust mainstream, science media, people..." while at the same time those same sources get used easily for their own arguments. And it usually is not just one, there is 9/11, vaccinations being used by Bill Gates to steralize people, free vacuum energy, covid. At the same time he sees himself at the forefront of defending against a new emergence of nazism while supporting people who have literally been filmed doing a Hitler salute (supposedly that was "out of context").
It is true that these people are victims, but they are victims of propaganda who pull people toward more and more outrageous claims, and a social media machine which develops the most addictive media techniques and no care for the overall affect on society.
> while at the same time those same sources get used easily for their own arguments
100% this!
Telegram channels and Substack seem to be super popular for this sort of propaganda. I also did a technical analysis of many of the websites shared in these channels and found:
- they use very heavy trackers
- keylogging for webpages is common
- they all use privacy shields for `whois` info
- third party cookies
You can find some of these if you want to take a look in https://github.com/Langer81/Summer-REU-Research
I'm wondering about your friend. In hindsight I can see some of the behaviour also in how he was when he was young. He always had a bit of a chip on his shoulder (some of it justified being a Turkish emigrant in Germany), and always blamed bad things happening to him on outside influences never on his own behaviour. Very similar how he argues about conspiracies. Is/was that similar with your friend? I'm wondering if there is some pattern.
That's just not that damning.
What's changed my mind is realizing how often things that might be labeled as conspiracy theory actually happen. Even if something didn't happen, many of the fears are actually well grounded and labeling them as such in my opinion reflects a certain amount of lack of empathy on the part of the labeler.
I'm not saying certain beliefs aren't absurd or physically implausible etc. But if they are plausible they're often coming from somewhere reasonable. Widespread conspiracy theories tell you that a large segment of the population doesn't trust something, and the appropriate response is to figure out why that thing might be untrustworthy.
I agree with the linked article, and understand that they are writing to a specific audience. But it has a patronizing tone that I think just reinforces the problems involved. If there's a widespread conspiracy belief, it's not enough to say to have "empathy" for someone who holds it, as that casts the problem as being with the person rather than the things that caused them to lose trust to begin with. You need to be asking why such large parts of the population distrust the subject of the conspiracy and address that.