This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
(I originally posted this in the Small-Scale Questions thread, but @Primaprimaprima thought it might be a better fit here.)
Last week I finished reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed, his attempt to set the record straight on the JFK assassination and prove that Oswald acted alone. Posner reserves plenty of ire for the assorted conspiracy theories that mushroomed around the assassination over the last six decades.
I dislike the terms "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist", as they're generally used as terms of dismissal or abuse: characterising a particular hypothesis as a "conspiracy theory" is tantamount to saying that it's untrue, and characterising the person who espouses it as a "conspiracy theorist" is tantamount to calling them paranoid and unserious. But this shouldn't be the case, because conspiracies do happen! Some important historical events really were the product of conspiracies. Imagine if a public figure was killed, you thought he might have been murdered, and I rolled my eyes and said "oh, you're one of those 'murder theorists'." Murders really happen! There's nothing intrinsically ridiculous about the hypothesis that a given dead person might have been intentionally and unlawfully killed by another person; nor is there anything intrinsically ridiculous about the hypothesis that a given event might have been the result of multiple clandestine actors working together to bring it about. As many have noted before me, theories about history or current affairs are rubbished and dismissed as "conspiracy theories" – right up until the very moment they're proven true, at which point they simply become historical fact.
However. We're all familiar with the type of person described by the term "conspiracy theorist". The people in tinfoil hats, the people who never believe the official story, the people who attribute every setback (no matter how trivial) to the dark hand of da Joos/the CIA/the Illuminati. These people may not be paranoid in a clinical sense, but they reflexively jump to the conclusion that there is more to every news story than meets the eye, and the conclusion seems effectively predetermined. They arrive at the conclusion first, then go looking for evidence to support it.
I wish we had better terms for "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist", respectively. When we use the former, what we're really getting at is that a historical event is being attributed to a vast nefarious conspiracy on the basis of little to no evidence. "Conspiracy theory" should be a neutral term which expresses no judgement on whether the theory is true or not, but I think it would be genuinely helpful to have a separate term for how the term is used nowadays i.e. as a particularly far-fetched and implausible example of same. "Truther" is starting to catch on ("9/11 truther", "Lucy Letby truther"), but it would be nice to have a noun for the theory itself, as opposed to the person espousing it.
And when we characterise someone as a "conspiracy theorist", we don't usually mean that they espouse one conspiracy theory and no others. We usually mean that they advance conspiracy theories habitually and reflexively, that there are vast swathes of human history they attribute to the machinations of nefarious organisations operating in secret. People to whom the term "conspiracy theorist" don't, as a rule, endorse the mainstream historical narrative except for one little wrinkle: it's an entirely different worldview, a paranoid style. I think "tinfoil hat wearer" is a much more apt term for people with this worldview or mindset than "conspiracy theorist", except that I'm not sure if anyone actually wore a tinfoil hat in complete sincerity.
What do ye think? Any ideas? What would your preferred terms for these concepts be?
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.
What conspiracy theories do you believe, specifically?
"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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link