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I recognize within myself a psychological disposition to be drawn to topics and thought patterns that would often be classified as "conspiratorial" (I don't know if anyone here still remembers my UFO posts from a few years back), so I have a personal interest in this.
Some people believe in something akin to the Generalized Anti-Conspiracy Principle: "It's impossible for conspiracies to exist, because large groups of people can't keep secrets; the information will always become public". But, I don't see much of a reason to believe that the GACP is true. You and your bank and the government have kept your social security number secret enough that your bank account is still intact. (Your SSN might be floating around on the deep web somewhere if it was part of a large breach, but, that seems to me to be different than it being widely available public knowledge.)
Much like the term "pseudoscience", the term "conspiracy theory" is primarily a social/political category, rather than a value-neutral epistemological one. People make all sorts of false claims all the time, and the plain and simple word "false" is sufficient to describe most of them. Calling something "pseudoscience" or a "conspiracy theory" rarely adds additional semantic content beyond calling it "false", except to bring attention to it as a dangerous type of wrongthink that must be suppressed. (For most people here who hold any type of anti-woke belief, it wouldn't be too hard to find someone in The Cathedral who would indict them of conspiratorial or pseudoscientific thinking. Perhaps moldbug's notion of "The Cathedral" is a conspiracy itself? Who knows.)
As for the "personality type" you identified, I'm not in too much of a rush to find a term to label it. Perhaps some of these people are on the "schizophrenia spectrum", perhaps some are not. (Hilariously, I was watching a youtube video of a woman describing her experience with schizophrenia. She said "I often have trouble taking my anti-psychotic medication on schedule, because one of my frequent delusions is that my doctors are using the medication for mind control", and I thought to myself "...I mean, I don't want to scare you or encourage you or anything, but I can see how that's an exaggerated version of something that has a kernel of truth to it. I mean, have you seen the side effects of the shit they're feeding people these days??") People are going to come up with terms for it anyway, because it's a salient social pattern that people are going to notice. But I don't want to contribute to the medicalization and over-pathologization of what I see as normal psychological variance.
Indeed. People use this argument as an all purpose proof that large conspiracies are impossible. Given a small statistical likelihood of someone leaking every conspiracy larger than a few conspirators would be leaked.
But the major conspiracies that were revealed in the 20th century were not leaked. The criminals and conspirators in the FBI and CIA had a perfect 0% leak rate on COINTELPRO and MKUltra. They forgot to shred a few copies of some documents and leftists broke into a field office and stole other documents so they were revealed despite the lack of leakers. Operation Choke Point is a more recent example of their disciplined lack of leaking. GACP is trivially false with a basic understanding of the modern history of government malfeasance.
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What conspiracy theories do you believe, specifically?
Jews run the world! (Well, they do run the American foreign policy establishment.)
That’s always the most enduring conspiracy that comes to my mind. Yes. Jews run the world. Even to the point of them being exterminated and sent to gas chambers without the ability to do anything about it. A strange syncretism of believing that Jews are somehow both superhuman and subhuman. If it’s the fact that as a group, they’ve tended to become successful and do very well for themselves in the places they inhabit such that their occupy important positions and seats of power, that’s undoubtedly true. But that isn’t quite the same thing.
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"Believe" is a strong word.
I would like aliens to be real, but I recognize that the probability that we've actually had contact with them is ultimately very slim.
I believe in a battery of familiar "right wing conspiracy theories" about racial replacement in western nations, but, similar to what Brainwavez described in his post, I believe that these are more "emergent phenomena" rather than people literally conspiring in a dark room.
I have a "religious predisposition" and feel the gravitational pull of various religious/spiritual beliefs despite consciously assenting to atheism and materialism, which has nothing to do with conspiracy theories per se, but is probably a related phenomenon with a similar underlying neurological basis.
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