Psychology of Conspiracy Theorists

This thread, and most in this section is exactly why I can't stand semantics, and "deep philosophical discussion" that inherently delves into semantics.

It's several pages of arguing about the definition and application of a word.

How the hell does our society ever move forward?
 
It's several pages of arguing about the definition and application of a word.
I have found that whenever someone I am arguing with starts redefining words to make their case, the argument is over and they have effectively conceded the debate.
 
Check out this article.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate
(exerpts)
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We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.
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The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.
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Americans who have neither an a priori incredulity nor a naive willingness to believe and are objective when dealing with theories that don't agree with the official US government version of things and know that 9/11* was an inside job and that we never went to the moon**, etc are probably generally in the first category.

Americans who have a naive willingness to believe and simply accept the official US government version of things and think that terrorists destroyed the twin towers, we really went to the moon, etc are probably generally in the second category.


That's what I would tend to think anyway. I haven't been to the US since 1995 so I'm really not sure what's going on but those people in the second category can now watch YouTube videos and there are a lot of objective videos out there so a lot of them are probably waking up.

I've given English classes to a lot of professionals here in Madrid and I'm quite surprised at how many of them are not objective about 9/11 or the Apollo moon missions. Some of them simply refuse to look at the evidence I try to show them. Others look at it and experience cognitive dissonance and go into denial which means they believe one thing and say another.

There seem to be a lot of closed-minded literate people who don't seem to know how to come to a logical conclusion. There are probably a lot of semi-literate people out there who see all the theories on YouTube and know how to come to a logical conclusion and therefore know that 9/11 was an inside job and that we never went to the moon, etc.



*
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/interesting-9-11-video.142265/page-20#post-3335857

**
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/we-never-went-to-the-moon.145207/page-3#post-3332091
 
----------------------
We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.
----------------------
The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.
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I generally agree.

What FF doesn't realize is that he is unable to objectively recgonize his own place in it.

His own non-reality-based belief system, wherein he believes what he read (on the internet or otoer), that "9/11* was an inside job and that we never went to the moon" puts him squarely in the second category.


I'll add a third category though. Some of us don't have to rely even on print, but on presence. We didn't read somebody else's filtered account of them, we experienced these events directly and in real-time.
 
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My prediction:

In just a couple of years, we will observe young adults - those who were born after 2001 - asserting that the World Trade Towers didn't collapse at all. There were never there. All footage of their existence was faked. It is easy for them to do this because it's all just history to them. They're weren't there.

And people like FF will be gob-smacked, uttering "Of course they existed. I was alive when they existed...."
And the young adults will say he is a naive fool, believing whatever he is fed.


This is not a new phenom. It is the folly of the young to deny the past. There is no such thing as a 75+-year-old Holocaust denier.
 
Mod Note

FatFreddy

This may be the Conspiracy sub-forum and this might be the "psychology of conspiracy theorists" threads. And we have seen our fair share of conspiracy theorists, from 9/11 truther's, to political conspiracy theorists to truther's, birther's and all the other 'er'ther's' one might imagine.

We tend to tolerate it to a certain extent, hence the existence of this sub-forum and threads such as this one. If it's kept out of the main forums and is not offensive or illegal, there is a certain level of eye-rolling at the utter stupidity of people in believing these sorts of things.

Which brings me to you and this latest post by you..

One thing we do not tolerate, at all, conspiracy theory or whack-job declarations (you can apply whichever one applies to you in this case) is this level of vitriolic Holocaust denial. For a few reasons, but the one I will address here in your case, is the malicious nature of your denial. To wit, denying the extermination of millions of people, Jews and non-Jews alike, by an apparatus that made sure to keep meticulous records of their horrific crimes, from jotting down how many people they murdered, to their race, religious identity, sexuality, disability, etc, to keeping souvenirs from those they slaughtered (hair, clothing, teeth fillings, teeth, nails, etc, but also recording them through pictures, film and the like. To wit, the images we have seen of the vast number of deaths, of having people line up before pits of dead bodies before being killed, of lining up before gas chambers and the ovens, were not filmed by the West, or Westerners, but by the Nazis themselves.

There comes a point where people such as yourself, should stop making excuses for their horrific crimes.

And that is exactly what you are doing. We can only assume your motives, frankly, I have no interest in why you and your ilk do this. I have heard countless of excuses for this level of vile rubbish in my time about the Holocaust and the one thing I can say with absolute certainty, is that it is deplorable and disgusting. You are literally attempting to whitewash the deaths of millions of people for personal ideology. It is despicable.

But what I can tell you is that it is not acceptable and frankly, will never be acceptable on this site.

I will be deleting your post. The reason being is that the large majority of what you posted is revolting, offensive and basically, from white supremacists, as are the links you provided. Not only that, it is also illegal in many parts of the world. The ideology behind those links is dangerous, deadly and a constant threat. Do not ever, EVER, post that kind of thing on this site again. I am sure there are many sites where this sort of thing is acceptable and most of their members probably wear white pillowcases on their heads and burn crosses to toast their marshmallows and lynch black people. This is not one of those sites.

So take your denials, your vicious and malicious ideology and go elsewhere. It isn't welcome here. Do it again, and I will permanently remove you from this site.
 
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And people like FF will be gob-smacked, uttering "Of course they existed. I was alive when they existed...."And the young adults will say he is a naive fool, believing whatever he is fed.
It would indeed be amusing to see a conspiracy theorist take FF to task for not believing the latest conspiracy.
This is not a new phenom. It is the folly of the young to deny the past. There is no such thing as a 75+-year-old Holocaust denier.
Sure there are - just as there are a great many 50 year old Apollo mission deniers. If they weren't there, they can deny it.
 
It would indeed be amusing to see a conspiracy theorist take FF to task for not believing the latest conspiracy.
Sure there are - just as there are a great many 50 year old Apollo mission deniers. If they weren't there, they can deny it.
'can'. doesn't mean 'do'.

I could be wrong, but I think that, with very few exceptions, if they were alive at the time, they don't deny it.
 
I could be wrong, but I think that, with very few exceptions, if they were alive at the time, they don't deny it.
I'm not sure that's true. The first book published claiming that the moon landings were faked was published in 1976 by someone who was certainly alive during the landings; most of the readers of that book were necessarily alive when the last moon landing occurred since it had happened only four years earlier. It's probably impossible to set a date for the "peak" of this conspiracy theory, but 1977 would be a good candidate - that was the year a popular movie was produced (Capricorn One) about the topic. (In the movie Mars is substituted for the Moon, but beyond that the story is quite similar to the various theories floating around out there.) There were half a dozen other books published between 1976 and 1986, again by people who were most likely alive during the landings.
 
We live in two Americas.

That sounds simplistic right out of the gate.

One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.

I'm a former philosophy student and if there is any simple method for "separating illusion from truth", I'd like to know what it is. It would revolutionize intellectual life, that's for sure. So I'm skeptical that our readers-of-print ever really had the "intellectual tools" to accomplish that.

Having said that, I am struck by how reading books seems to be less and less common. People spend all their time on their cell-phones, and whatever information they find there is just an instant snippet, a few sentences long. Attention spans seem to be declining as bookstores disappear.

It's just another step in an evolution (devolution?) that's been happening for centuries. In ancient and medieval times books were written by hand. That made them rare treasures. Even well educated intellectuals might only have been exposed to a small handful of books. So they read them over and over, sometimes memorizing them. They learned to see how all parts of an extended argument fit together (if they did). Then in the 15th century, printed books appeared, filling bookstores in an abundance never before known. So intellectuals would have hundreds or even thousands of books in their studies, many of which they had never even read. Attention span grew shorter and less attention was paid to each title.

Today we have access to all of the world's information right there in our pocket, but only read it a paragraph at a time. And in the process we may be losing some of our ability to follow arguments any distance and to fit disseparate ideas together.

The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture.

That sounds like warmed-over Marxism to me. The Marxists were always eager to denounce everyone else's intellectual life as nothing more than "ideology", supposedly designed and imposed from outside on the sheep-like "masses" in order to support the capitalist system. That's the intellectual ancestor of most of our conspiracy theories today.

It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés.

I suppose that the author imagines himself as a member of an intellectual elite above all that, the kind of individual who sees through the illusions. That's another basic element of conspiracy theories, they are typically self-aggrandizing.

I've given English classes to a lot of professionals here in Madrid and I'm quite surprised at how many of them are not objective about 9/11 or the Apollo moon missions. Some of them simply refuse to look at the evidence I try to show them. Others look at it and experience cognitive dissonance and go into denial which means they believe one thing and say another.

It might hurt Spanish pride a little to think that Americans walked on the Moon when nobody else could. The 9-11 conspiracy theories are usually associated with hostility towards the United States government and a desire to deflect all condemnation back on somebody like Bush. So there's another element of conspiracy theories, there's usually some emotional motivation for embracing them. Somebody or something already disliked typically ends up being selected as the bad-guy.

There seem to be a lot of closed-minded literate people who don't seem to know how to come to a logical conclusion.

True. I don't think that being literate or having lots of years of education necessarily makes somebody smarter, more logical or a better thinker. Ph.D.'s put in a lot of work to earn their doctorates, but it's usually focused around a tiny research problem. There's no guarantee that specialists are more capable than any of the rest of us, the further they stray from the narrow topic of their expertise.
 
Holocaust denial
The revisionists don't deny that it happened. They maintain that it was exaggerated and distorted. Can I at least tell the viewers where they can see the info so that they can decide for themselves?

Go to the "Political Talk" section of the "Flint Talk" forum. There's a thread on WWII there.
 
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