Why Conspiracy Theories?

[shiels]

What are they victims of, though? Besides a delusion?

I can't see that it's "classist", either. Rates of vaccine skepticism, in the USA at least, correlate positively with education level. The stereotypical "Karen" is solidly middle-class.

victims of misinformation i suppose. more broadly a collapse in trust and community. my point is going ha stupid cunts is easy, not very empathetic, doesnt really get to the root of the issue

eg from my feed

Onlyfans crew out there who are questioning the covid vaccine but would jump at the chance to inject cement into their arse and workmans glue into their lips, how does that work out?!?

theres been a lot of this. and it reminds me of centrist chat around brexit which again focused on stupid racist bigots etc without much reflection on why are these people susceptible to these ideas now, what needs are being served here

 

[Mr. Tea]

Ok tea you're right that means every large organisation is incapable of delivering results and is inherently incompetent

It's a single example.

You could look at the gargantuan fuck-ups with the centralized IT systems introduced for the UK's air traffic control and accounting in the Post Office.

You could look at NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter, which crashed and burned because one team of engineers who'd worked on it used imperial measurements while everyone else had used metric measurements.

You could also look at the defeat of the largest and most sophisticated military force in the world by some tribesmen with antiquated rifles in Vietnam.

I've worked in the UK civil service and I now work in a company with an annual revenue of $1.7 billion. The idea that large organizations are all finely-honed, ultra-efficient machines is simply untrue.

 

[Leo]

Large scale operations are notable for how competent they are. They're brilliant at logistics .

isolated cases, and even in some of those it could be said that they could have achieved their goals years earlier had they been more competent. I'm talking from first-hand experience, I've worked with lots of large corporations and most of them are lucky to attain 60-75% of their potential. in the scheme of things, that's often good, or good enough. landing on the moon is amazing, for sure. but that level of competence is rare.

 

[WashYourHands]

Aren’t these things like the counter-intel equivalent of volts, amps and ohms of false consciousness setting?

Take the one eye open one eye closed celeb riff. It’s there in plain sight (apparently), so the voltage is x, the ampage is y and the resistance is z. Any subject exposed to the disinformation database responds within specific parameters, which any broadcaster can then tweak accordingly. Increase the exposure rate, get a hook in and you’re halfway to control.

Or something.

 

[luka]

You lot are unreal . Modern capitalism is only possible because of the extreme competence and expertise of large organisations

 

[Mr. Tea]

Large scale organisations put men on the fucking moon (allegedly!) People are amazing and brilliant when they want to be.

Yes, they did. I'm not saying that everyone in the world is an idiot and nothing impressive can ever be achieved, because that's obviously untrue. But convincingly faking the moon landings and keeping anyone from whistleblowing on it, or from espionage destroying the conspiracy would have been infinitely harder. The history of nuclear espionage demonstrates this amply.

 

[luka]

What's that got to do with anything?

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

then someone else has to sex them up and convey them with the appropriate drama and intrigue if you're going to win people over from what youre complaining about

I don't think it's that simple, that someone can just come along with the right style and make boring things enticing. it's not that difficult to explain to ppl how white-collar crime or mundane political corruption affect their lives but they're never going to have the sex appeal of some vast conspiracy controlling every facet of life. as I'm sure you know conspiracy theorizing isn't only or perhaps even primarily about the theories themselves - it's about retaking control when you feel powerless, and seeking to understand why that you feel that way, who's to blame. most actual conspiracies simply don't have that. the reasons people feel powerless are usually the product of both individual decisions (i.e., to implement given policies) and impersonal historical forces but they're very rarely caused by large, nefarious conspiracies.

i.e. the initial dissemination of neoliberal thought into the academy and think tanks was actually quasi-conspiratorial, or at least a recognition by Mont Pelerin Society members and fellow travelers that they needed to actively seek inroads into the influencing and formulation of policy to combat Keynesian and Marxist economic thought, but the adoption and implementation of neoliberal policies were open and openly ideological decisions driven, or at least made possible, by a given set of economic conditions. that's how most things actually work. both not a conspiracy in the sense of a secret cabal, and quite boring.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I suppose there are some examples of sexing up quite boring conspiracies

The Big Short, definitely. tbf it's much more about incompetence and institutional self-delusion, but the collusion of the rating agencies to misrate mortgage-backed securities was a conspiracy even if no one was ever punished for it.

All the President's Men did a pretty good job with Watergate, tho you could argue Watergate was quite a sexy conspiracy to begin with

 

[Leo]

You lot are unreal . Modern capitalism is only possible because of the extreme competence and expertise of large organisations

there are certainly examples, but they are not the norm. maybe incompetence is the wrong word (although there is plenty of it), better to think of mismanagement and inefficiencies due to corporate structures. few factors slow productivity more than internal fiefdoms and management power struggles, teams that compete for budget and resources and thus sometimes maneuver in ways more focused on their internal fights versus customer service and innovation. the bigger the ship, the harder it is to turn. less of an issue for a company like amazon, which doesn't have all the legacy issues of traditional/100-year old corporation.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

as a general rule, the more you learn about a conspiracy, the less sexy and more mundane - although still potentially horrific - it becomes

there was, for example, a flood of CIA memories in the 70s demythologizing 20 years of coups, stay-behind programs and black ops - John Stockwell, Philip Agee, Frank Snepp, Ralph McGehee, Victor Marchetti, etc. not all those sources are of equal value but if you combine them with a reasonable knowledge of the first decades of the Cold War, the atmosphere of America that time and how it shaped what William Colby referred to as the "cult of intelligence" - essentially a second society totally separate to American society, acting with its own motivations and in often in its own interests - then things like MKUltra and Operation Mongoose and whatever become much less sensational. it also speaks to, again, the inability of large organizations to control information, even secret information, indefinitely. the CIA went to great lengths to prevent some of those memoirs and was unable to.

here's journalist Neil Sheehan writing openly about the actual deep state - not some fictional monolith - in the early 1970s in re the Pentagon Papers

...it were as if there were an inner U.S. government, a centralized state, far more powerful than anything else, for whom the enemy is not simply Communists but everything else, its own press, its own judiciary, its own Congress, foreign and friendly governments – all these are potentially antagonistic. It had survived and perpetuated itself often using the issue of anti-Communism as a weapon against the other branches of government and the press, and finally, it does not function necessarily for the benefit of the Republic but rather for its own ends, its own perpetuation; it has its own codes which are quite different from public codes. Secrecy has a way of protecting itself, not so much from threats by foreign governments, but from detection from its own population on charges of its own competence and wisdom.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

few factors slow productivity more than internal fiefdoms and management power struggles, teams that compete for budget and resources and thus sometimes maneuver in ways more focused on their internal fights versus customer service and innovation. the bigger the ship, the harder it is to turn. less of an issue for a company like amazon, which doesn't have all the legacy issues of traditional/100-year old corporation.

this is exactly what @beiser is forever banging on about with Tesla

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

my point is going ha stupid cunts is easy, not very empathetic, doesnt really get to the root of the issue

presumably it's already clear but I agree with this 100%

condescension is satisfying - not least as a way of dealing with your own feelings of powerlessness - but the most counterproductive approach

nothing is more guaranteed to reinforce people's QAnon-type views

people aren't stupid, they have reasons for believing the things they do. it's not that difficult to try to understand them.

again, an insurgency - the French condescended to the Vietnamese right up until the moment they were unceremoniously booted out of Vietnam

 

[Mr. Tea]

What's that got to do with anything?

It's got everything to do with it! "It is implausible that men went to the moon in 1969" is untenable because the alternative explanation - that it was convincingly faked and not a single person involved in the conspiracy has said anything to anyone outside it for 60-odd years - is infinitely less plausible. It would require a degree of sophistication and dedication that humans, en masse, are not capable of.

 

[luka]

The mad ravings of a mad man

 

[luka]

Who's talking about faking the moon landings? Someone's slipped some acid into grandads cocoa!

 

[john eden]

You lot are unreal . Modern capitalism is only possible because of the extreme competence and expertise of large organisations

Well sorta.

I think there is a problem here equating “efficiency” with competence. Tea’s example of the accounting system of the Post Office is probably true, but the PO is still largely pretty amazing at getting people their post.

in the same way the NHS is huge and generally quite good at making people better.

In both of these examples it is often your humble workers coming together to deliver the service including working around the inefficient systems that is decisive.

So only a complete buffoon would suggest that we are better off without these organisations. They can both be improved but usually these attempted improvements involve top down impositions from Serco et al rather than liberating the creative forces of the workers themselves.

 

[luka]

Part of this is not so much what is believed as the fervour with which it is believed. So for instance we don't bat an eyelid at someone saying they 'believe' in God but when they really believe like, start trying to convert you, see Angels, converse with Jesus, fucking bang on about it all the time then we say, that's a fucking nutter

 

[luka]

Once you're trying to convert people etc. One of my schizophrenic friends says that's a warning sign for him impending psychosis, that need to convert and persuade, to show other people the truth, let them in on the secret.

 

[john eden]

Part of this is not so much what is believed as the fervour with which it is believed. So for instance we don't bat an eyelid at someone saying they 'believe' in God but when they really believe like, start trying to convert you, see Angels, converse with Jesus, fucking bang on about it all the time then we say, that's a fucking nutter

I think even attempts at conversion are forgivable. The issue is when people with these views try and effect policy.