I have two brothers, one of which around 2019 fell down a couple YouTube rabbit holes and came out repeating things about flat earth, QAnon, and just about every other comorbid conspiracy theory circulating at that time. He honestly believes that there is some global cabal involving tens of thousands of people to hide the fact that the earth is flat. He especially makes the fundamental error of assuming that all of the "evidence" he has collected is ultimately attributable to a single source, and that there exist world-wide organizations that are eminently capable and efficient in keeping these things going and largely under wraps. My brother was in the military, and I have seen the inside of many large organizations, and this is just not anywhere in our experience. At best the world somehow runs along in a kind of controlled chaos, it is one enormous coordination problem and there are too many competing interests at work in any one area.

The world according to a gas molecule and the world according to a statistician.

This needs to be amplified + defensive caveat regarding subscription to any “youtube” theories. That said, a member of a large organization, such as the US military, will have many stories to tell and phrase “FUBAR” iirc came out of the US Army. In fact, even being in smaller commercial enterprises, one sometimes wonders that anything gets done at all!

But things get done. The military can plan, provision, conduct, and win wars. Systems tools and state-spaces are the tools of top level control mechanisms. So, yes, things can be chaotic when viewed from a narrow perspective, but from another top level perspective, there is order.

Meanwhile there are people on the flip side who vehemently believe everything pharmaceutical companies and ancient western medicine textbooks telling them about nutrition, health, drugs they must take...because they believe they're on the side of "science" and "consensus".

Perfect reply. Every statement and its contrary can be made plausible with right arguments.

I have no idea if you are genuinely arguing in favor of or against something here, or just playing devil's advocate.

My experience is that this is a gross oversimplification. Once you know a person on an individual level - people always have their own stew of beliefs

I think part of the issue is that, unfortunately, there are conspiracy theories that have proven out to be true. The military's thumb pushing the scales on Hollywood's war depiction through careful deliberation of allowing use of equipment has the added effect of limiting the resources of any military narrative the us military doesn't approve of. There is actually in existence a conservative court group whose entire existence is to funnel conservative justices, including things like politically-aligned clerking for supreme courts and providing republican appointers with lists of politically-aligned candidates. A federal program really did exist to try and figure out if they can brainwash people with acid, and then records of the program mysteriously went missing when the public tried to investigate it. Epstein's book exists and all its implications thereof. Microsoft's early "embrace, extend, extinguish" is a conspiracy theoy about Microsoft's business dealings that turned out to be true.

It's really hard to turn back on the "but realistically, conspiracies are uncommon" brain when exposed to the fact that actually decades-long conspiracies do actually occur and produce results.

I would however say: A lot of the real, and effective "conspiracies"/propaganda aren't so much dozens of thousands of people all acting in secret and coordination and such. It's usually a much smaller group of people kind of pushing a somewhat larger group of people into a certain direction, which then starts to move larger groups around.

As you said, you don't send people into the street to yell at other people how the soviets are evil and we need to arm up. You rather plant ideas into the heads of a few influential people in hollywood, then give them cool toys and props for the movie, and let it roll downhill from there.

This is similar to work - and we're not large with ~150 techies in the company. But it has grown impossible to directly steer all different teams. Instead, you have to see that the right trailblazing teams are going into the right directions and possibly make sure that service requests moving into the right direction are quick, and service requests moving in the wrong direction.. well either roughly stay in the SLA or get blocked.

Well, let’s not conflate conspiracies with conspiracy theory. True, people do conspire to break the law, but conspiracy theories are marked by inferred, presumed evidence.

Another thing is that everyone is a lot younger than stereotypical corporate operators who are often >50 years old.

After living for a few more decades you get a lot better at power plays.