This is why anarchism is so important to me. People will only begin to trust the state once they are substantially involved in its affairs and no longer in a position to be exploited or controlled...
If a group of people strongly distrusts a government or group of leaders, anything they do will raise suspicion
Conspiracy theories can't be stopped
a false conspiracy belief can be corrected by giving the people who believe in it something they’ve lacked — power and control over their own lives.
Empower people, give them a sense of control, operate with transparency, and conspiracy theories seem to become less appealing. Trouble is, in the real world, who has the ability to offer that kind of empowerment? That’s right. THEM.
This is why anarchism is so important to me. People will only begin to trust the state once they are substantially involved in its affairs and no longer in a position to be exploited or controlled by it. The only means to this is to give the power to the people.
Maybe this is just my weird brain but I so much typical milquetoast neo-liberalism here. Sure, the discussion of power's pertinence is not indicative of this. But, from the above quotes, I wonder what but ideology could be preventing the author from concluding that conspiracy theories are endemic to our society where power is used to benefit a powerful few and the rest are intentionally bewildered.
Crucially missing from this piece is a discussion of the corporate-media-state complex, the cozy culture between political and business elites spanning centuries, or anything suggesting that popular conspiracies are caused by massive abuse of oligarchic power. What is preventing the author from saying, "if there were a truly populist movement in society trust eroded by elites over time could be restored" despite getting so close? It is so obvious to me and the author get so close but something stops them short. Could it be pure ideology?
I think humans are going to be humans. People are always looking to shift blame. Even in a populist society, there will be people who are unwilling, unable, or simply unfortunate enough to still...
Could it be pure ideology?
I think humans are going to be humans. People are always looking to shift blame. Even in a populist society, there will be people who are unwilling, unable, or simply unfortunate enough to still have lives that are unfulfilling. They will be looking for someone to point the finger at, and I think conspiracy theories are an easy way to shift blame.
Will the overall incidence of conspiracy theories be reduced? I think this would happen with any movement that benefits lots of people. The less you have to complain about the less you have conspiracy theories. This was highlighted in the article by the fact that those who are well off tend to believe in conspiracy theories less and that conspiracy theory incidence is higher among those who are disenfranchised by economic or minority status.
I have a lot of issues with this. Sure, some of this factors into the pathology. But this line of reasoning also entirely overlooks the ways in which people would be correct in asserting that: 1....
I think conspiracy theories are an easy way to shift blame.
I have a lot of issues with this. Sure, some of this factors into the pathology. But this line of reasoning also entirely overlooks the ways in which people would be correct in asserting that: 1. there are powerful people in the world and that 2: they use that power in coordinated ways to remain in power at the expense of others.
Granted, material conditions will have bearing on the degree to which people question the official narrative based on how marginalized they are by it. But that has no bearing on how legitimate or illegitimate the raising of questions is. You can still be rich and powerful and allege a conspiracy between the Obama White House and the lobbyists for Big Pharma and Big Finance at the expense of the masses in the form of Obamacare and the Bush-Obama bailouts. You can still enjoy a comfortable life and question the lack of coverage America's interference in Latin American sovereignty.
To simply say that people who believe in conspiracies are just unhappy with their lives would imply that our society is run by benevolent masters for the benefit of all. This is simply not the case. The world is run for profit by a tiny, opulent minority. This isn't a theory.
Apologies, I didn't mean to imply it's the only reason people ascribe to certain conspiracy theories, just one of the reasons and I think one of the primary reasons we see an association between...
Apologies, I didn't mean to imply it's the only reason people ascribe to certain conspiracy theories, just one of the reasons and I think one of the primary reasons we see an association between relative comfort of life and incidence of believing in conspiracy theories.
Although I wonder if other beliefs become greater among those with greater comfort in life that require some amount of "faith" in spite (or instead of) evidence.
Oh yeah, this is absolutely an essential point here. But I think it reflects more on the comfortable classes than the people questioning the narrative given to them by the state-media complex....
I think one of the primary reasons we see an association between relative comfort of life and incidence of believing in conspiracy theories.
Oh yeah, this is absolutely an essential point here. But I think it reflects more on the comfortable classes than the people questioning the narrative given to them by the state-media complex.
"faith" in spite (or instead of) evidence
Most def. There is definitely a proportional relationship between material circumstances and misplaced faith in capitalism. I think one would need to take the notions that "the system works or is just" on faith in spite of evidence. As an anarcho-communist I often debate the merits of capitalism with liberals and people even more conservative than that. People seem apt to observe material abundance in their surroundings and in their own lives as a basis to extol the merits of the system. They take this in spite of evidence like the stagnation in wages since the 70s, the utter deception of poverty stats and reporting by the IMF and UN, the scholarship of Piketty, Engels, and Marx, or the enormous sacrifice zones of capitalist, neo-liberal austerity on indigenous lands, the global south, and poor urban communities.
The arguments against capitalism are tallied by those who work but still struggle, or by people who can't find a job even though the physical world around us clearly needs work. But those arguments are distant and so don't speak as persuasively as new iPhones and Teslas and other fetishistic totems of capitalist prosperity.
I thought anarchism was a belief in the lack of a state as the desired political status. It isn't obvious to most people. If you have the data to support it, I sure am curious to hear it.
This is why anarchism is so important to me. People will only begin to trust the state
I thought anarchism was a belief in the lack of a state as the desired political status.
Crucially missing from this piece is a discussion of the corporate-media-state complex, the cozy culture between political and business elites spanning centuries, or anything suggesting that popular conspiracies are caused by massive abuse of oligarchic power. What is preventing the author from saying, "if there were a truly populist movement in society trust eroded by elites over time could be restored" despite getting so close? It is so obvious to me and the author get so close but something stops them short.
It isn't obvious to most people.
If you have the data to support it, I sure am curious to hear it.
If you wanna get really particular, anarchism is about the abolition of coercive hierarchies. The most common form of this is the "abolition of the state" which is as much a matter of erasing...
lack of a state
If you wanna get really particular, anarchism is about the abolition of coercive hierarchies. The most common form of this is the "abolition of the state" which is as much a matter of erasing borders as it is about their abolishing states. However, some anarchist schools allow for some form of common administration for the common good. So, there is still "government" in a sense - just not a familiar one. It's a confusing landscape of terms to be sure and I was being a little lazy.
It isn't obvious to most people. If you have the data to support it, I sure am curious to hear it.
I partially disagree. This is something many people have a decent intuition for, otherwise conspiracies wouldn't have become such a big issue. Consider the term conspiracy theory. Lots of these so-called theories aren't theories. There isn't much theoretical about the general notion that the powers that be are intentionally dishonest in their communications with the common people.
Consider the conspiracy between the media, the state, and the military in Western Europe and North America in the lead up to the Iraq War. This is a good example of elites abusing their station, abusing the people they rule over, eroding the public trust, and making fertile ground for conspiracy theories. The "news coverage" essentially amounted to propaganda broadcast's of the government's deliberately constructed narrative that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and this lead to war.
The amount of manipulation and lying that went into this event are just staggering. First off: Saddam didn't have the capacity to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. Second off: If he did, it wouldn't have been necessary for the US to supply him with chemical weapons for the Iran-Iraq war. Third off: Saddam functioned with the support of America for decades. Fourth: Iraq literally had nothing to do with 9/11.
So, we went from a real world with a dictator who used to enjoyed years of American material support for wars of aggression to a fake world where "Saddam is part of a Muslim axis of evil hellbent on destroying American societal values." How? How else than by a degree of conspiracy (even if tacit and ideological) could have done this? What else could have perpetrated this massive deception? And before you answer, consider how the same thing happened to Muammar Qaddafi in Libya AND to Manuel Noriega in Nicuragua.
I could literally go on for hours about how the differences in American foreign policy and the reporting on American foreign policy have wrought conspiracy-mindedness.
This is very interesting – for more so than whatever vague notion of anarchism I had in my head. I'm going to look into anarchism with more interest thanks to your description. You're conflating...
If you wanna get really particular, anarchism is about the abolition of coercive hierarchies. The most common form of this is the "abolition of the state" which is as much a matter of erasing borders as it is about their abolishing states. However, some anarchist schools allow for some form of common administration for the common good. So, there is still "government" in a sense - just not a familiar one.
This is very interesting – for more so than whatever vague notion of anarchism I had in my head. I'm going to look into anarchism with more interest thanks to your description.
Consider the term conspiracy theory. Lots of these so-called theories aren't theories. There isn't much theoretical about the general notion that the powers that be are intentionally dishonest in their communications with the common people.
You're conflating conpiracy theory with a far more reasonable approach. Being aware of the real lengths people will lie to you isn't the same kooky idea of a conspiracy theory as is being approached, regardless of the terminology. (Speaking of a confusing landscape of terms.)
There's a media campaign going on in Russia that aims to villify "the West" (in a deliberately-vague term which includes the NATO countries and their supporters) and pound Russia's chest about how powerful it is (while keeping quiet about the staggering economic and social issues that permeate the day-to-day life in the country). That's not an outlandish observation: it's right there on Channel One.
Is that a conspiracy theory? In a broad sense, yes – because it isn't outlandish. Neither is the disinformation around the Iraq War, or many, many other campaigns aimed to fool people into submission or support by the government or similar entities. But it's nowhere near as entrancing, as involving, or as self-delusional as thinking that vaccines cause autism, or that the Earth is flat and everyone else is lying about it, or that aliens abduct people and the US government knows about it...
You won't hear any of this shit in Russia. We have different sorts of quacks here. They're still quacks, but they're nothing like the US quacks. (I don't know much about other countries to say anything, but I'm willing to bet quacks are regional.) It isn't about the ideas people have: it's how they hold onto them, and how they defend them (or abstain from defending them by pretending it's the others who try to take the truth away from them), and what they do to share them. It's in the irrational offense against the rest of the world to prove that they are right, not the rest of the seven billion.
So it's not that most people have a pretty good intuition about them: it's that they aren't disenfranchised enough to look into the nuttier conspiracies, like lizard overlords or the Illuminati.
One of the recent things I've heard – about a year ago – was that the fidget spinner was a mind weapon sent in by "the evil West" to hypnotize and recruit young people. It was posted in a social...
One of the recent things I've heard – about a year ago – was that the fidget spinner was a mind weapon sent in by "the evil West" to hypnotize and recruit young people.
It was posted in a social network group centered around the vague idea of a "proper Slavic nation", full of ideas that walk the line between the early Slavic Christianity and the Slavic paganism. Looks kinda like this, talks suprisingly political.
Now that I think about it, there was a lot of things like the US quack beliefs, now and when I was growing up (I was into all kinds of "mystical and unknown" stuff growing up, and there's a TV channel that's made it their schtick to host quacks). There's the aliens, the bigfoot... even flat-earth! Which was, actually, the same group that talked about the danger of fidget spinners.
Google Murray Bookchin!!!!! GOOOOGLE MURRAY BOOKCHIN!!!! I know that's a lot of hype but seriously it will blow your mind. I would agree with most of what you draw from this premise if it weren't...
I'm going to look into anarchism with more interest thanks to your description.
Google Murray Bookchin!!!!! GOOOOGLE MURRAY BOOKCHIN!!!! I know that's a lot of hype but seriously it will blow your mind.
You're conflating conpiracy theory with a far more reasonable approach.
I would agree with most of what you draw from this premise if it weren't for the story behind the term "conspiracy theorists." I don't know how much you know about the American Warren Commission of the 60s or its "Magic Bullet Theory." So I will assume, not familiar. But if you are you can just skip to the next paragraph. The tl;dr here is that a Congressional Commission was called to investigate the shootings of JFK and Gov. John Connelly of Texas. They "found" that a magic bullet flew along a fantastically, circuitous path through Kennedy and Connelly and basically it stunk to high hell from the get.
The reason I mention it is that this is event that coincides with the entry of the term "conspiracy theory" into common usage. Now I don't mean to... theorize about a conspiracy... but I think it is telling that "conspiracy theory" would be the term people used for ideas that contradicted the official version. Which I should add looked like this. What possible reason could people have for thinking that this account was a deliberate lie?
See, this is the same thing: thinking that a "magic bullet" is equivalent to being wary something that doesn't smell right in authenticity. If you consider such a magic bullet a possibility –...
See, this is the same thing: thinking that a "magic bullet" is equivalent to being wary something that doesn't smell right in authenticity.
If you consider such a magic bullet a possibility – maybe it ricochetted at an odd angle, and its path was somewhat obscured by the damage it dealt around JFK's internals, because maybe it was light and the combination of the factors yadda yadda yadda – you're researching and being skeptical. If you're insisting that it must have been such a bullet, even though Occam's razor falls the other way, and everyone else must be lying about it to hide something...
Right now, talking about the giant government-media-military conspiracy would sound just kooky enough to get someone fired. Maybe there's a whole lot of machinations and subterfuge behind it. Maybe it's just a whole lot of people not being shrewd enough to ensure a thriving well-being of their country. Maybe money do speak, and there's a whole lot of moneymakers willing to throw green at the people who are supposed to represent us and, instead, make them make the decisions the moneymakers want to see happen.
Doesn't quite sound malevolent to me. It has bad consequences – but it looks like it comes from a whole lot of selfishness and a whole nothing of empathy for the people-as-people.
Did you Google Murray yet? Here's a good one Certainly, this aspect exists in conspiracy doctrine, no doubt. But maybe it goes for too radical an extreme. I don't know since I seem to have a weird...
If you're insisting that it must have been such a bullet, even though Occam's razor falls the other way, and everyone else must be lying about it to hide something
Certainly, this aspect exists in conspiracy doctrine, no doubt. But maybe it goes for too radical an extreme. I don't know since I seem to have a weird notion of conspiracy theories.
To me, the essential part of the conspiracy theory rationale is the acknowledgement that people with power are real and that they use this power to surreptitiously manipulate society and that what you see in the news and hear from society's masters may not be true, that what they want might not be in your best interest. People obviously apply this mode in different ways from me though - obviously there is much hysteria in these spaces.
However, this thing you said here:
Maybe it's just a whole lot of people not being shrewd enough to ensure a thriving well-being of their country
is also a totally acceptable caveat and a critical one for people who ask questions to keep in mind. That is, that there are lots of reasons to lie and other causes for apparent deception. Certainly there are those who vastly over ascribe motive, opportunity, state of mind etc. where it doesn't make sense. Perhaps, as you have suggested the truth is much more banal and less thrilling:
Maybe money do speak, and there's a whole lot of moneymakers willing to throw green at the people who are supposed to represent us and, instead, make them make the decisions the moneymakers want to see happen
But then again, this is a theory describing a conspiracy ;) so perhaps they have their merits after all.
I did. I've put his Wikipedia article on the reading list. It's going to be some time before I get there. I agree with you. I feel like out disagreement is purely about semantics: what to you is a...
Did you Google Murray yet?
I did. I've put his Wikipedia article on the reading list. It's going to be some time before I get there.
But then again, this is a theory describing a conspiracy ;) so perhaps they have their merits after all.
I agree with you. I feel like out disagreement is purely about semantics: what to you is a broad and mostly-sensible field of research, to me is the narrow, nutty part which I'd learned to roll my eyes at and disregard.
I'm kind of sympathetic to anarchism (because I lean little-r-republican), but I think this is kind of a just-so explanation that isn't really provable. Offhand I can think of a few countries...
People will only begin to trust the state once they are substantially involved in its affairs and no longer in a position to be exploited or controlled by it
I'm kind of sympathetic to anarchism (because I lean little-r-republican), but I think this is kind of a just-so explanation that isn't really provable. Offhand I can think of a few countries where the government is far more exploitative and controlling than the US and yet huge numbers of people implicitly trust the government. I haven't looked up numbers, so this is speculation, but the popular imagination of the 1950s US holds that the majority of the population trusted the government far more than they do now, and I don't think you can make a serious argument that the US government was less exploitative or controlling then than it is now.
As much as I love Foucault, I think trying to analyze history as solely a function of social power still doesn't really work when you push it to its limits. It's a useful abstraction sometimes, IMO more useful than class or race, but it's just another imperfect tool.
Yeah but notice I follow up the word trust with the words "involved" and "no longer in a position to be exploited or controlled." So, offhand, I have to imagine the examples you are thinking of...
where the government is far more exploitative and controlling than the US
Yeah but notice I follow up the word trust with the words "involved" and "no longer in a position to be exploited or controlled." So, offhand, I have to imagine the examples you are thinking of don't apply well. But I'd be interested in what/why you were thinking about here. The model I have in mind when I say this is an actually anarchistic nation like Rojava.
I don't think you can make a serious argument that the US government was less exploitative or controlling then than it is now.
Maybe. Maybe not. If you read Pinker, yeah it's all hunky-dory. But is it really? We've traded overt (only to an extent) gendered and racial forms of oppressive control for things like precarious employment and fake news. So, I don't know know that the media apparatus of control has necessarily become less sophisticated in that time either. Sure, we abolished (overt) apartheid and have (just now begun) in on patriarchy. Yet, I don't know that it's the case that social mobility is better. After all real wages are stagnant since the 70s. I wonder what would even be the appropriate metric for establishing a comparison.
I think trying to analyze history as solely a function of social power still doesn't really work when you push it to its limits.
Offhand I'm thinking of Turkey, Russia, or China which to my knowledge are run by pretty authoritarian and abusive governments that are nevertheless pretty popular. I also regularly see people on...
But I'd be interested in what/why you were thinking about here.
Offhand I'm thinking of Turkey, Russia, or China which to my knowledge are run by pretty authoritarian and abusive governments that are nevertheless pretty popular. I also regularly see people on the far Left giving unwarranted benefit of the doubt to strongmen like Assad, how does your hypothesis jibe with that observation? Why do so many people put trust in someone whose politics they aren't involved in, and who is actively exploiting and controlling their own people?
The model I have in mind when I say this is an actually anarchistic nation like Rojava.
I'm generally supportive of them, but also skeptical at how long it'll last. They've also been accused of ethnic cleansing by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. I've never really seen this addressed except people saying it's Turkish lies. Which, I wouldn't put it past Erdogan's government, but I haven't seen any connections there.
After all real wages are stagnant since the 70s
Depends what you measure. Real individual wages have been going up at most income levels since then, even for the people at the bottom. Real household wages have not, but that's not necessarily bad. More elderly people living independently would bring down household wages but does not automatically mean any individual is worse off. There's also a serious question to me of whether we should be looking at wages or total compensation. A lot of the compensation gain has "disappeared" into rising healthcare costs, but healthcare is also much better now than it was in the 1970s so there have been qualitative changes in that aspect of life.
It's actually pretty hard to tell because you'd need to see the distributional information of wages for both households and individuals, but at best with easily available stats you get mean/median and maybe standard deviation. There's also a massive subjective component that isn't very easy to square with other's judgements.
precarious employment and fake news
But these are endemic to the human condition. People have been lying for personal gain for thousands of years, even on a large scale. People have also assumed for millennia that things wouldn't change only to find out that they are not truly in control of the world around them. All of the problems we're facing today are not new, in my opinion. They're ages old, and only the scale and velocity is new.
I've spent a fair amount of time is such spaces and have never heard of this. Granted I totally reject Leninist ideas so perhaps this is why. As for my hypothesis, I don't know much about the...
I also regularly see people on the far Left giving unwarranted benefit of the doubt to strongmen like Assad
I've spent a fair amount of time is such spaces and have never heard of this. Granted I totally reject Leninist ideas so perhaps this is why. As for my hypothesis, I don't know much about the state conspiracy theories in these places. It would be fascinating to see what parallels if any exist. Perhaps there is something innate to American political culture to be learned from the differences.
But these are endemic to the human condition.
They're ages old, and only the scale and velocity is new.
That's an new insight for me - I dig it. (But if issues of exploitation have accelerated and grown, then my trendline since the 50s has some merit no?) As are the points about household vs. individual income. I'm like 85% regurgitation something Chomsky says so I don't really have a fine grasp of the concept. But you seem to. Is it something you specialize in?
To add to the "hard to tell"-ness of the issue, something else to consider is inequality and the widening disparity of outcomes over time. It's another way I perceive the worsening position of the worker over time but maybe there's something I'm missing here too?
Conspiracy theories wouldn't have such a foothold in the American consciousness if only fewer of them eventually turned out to be true. I used to chase some of the more pedestrian theories, but...
Conspiracy theories wouldn't have such a foothold in the American consciousness if only fewer of them eventuallyturnedouttobetrue.
I used to chase some of the more pedestrian theories, but these days I keep my distance because of the general toxic cult that comes attached to them, and the rampant anti-intellectualism and paranoia that follow. Plus it's just a huge waste of time, with basically zero applicability to my daily life.
But I get it. The government has a long and documented history of doing some seriously evil and secretive shit. Heck, I'm not a fan of most of they stuff they do in broad daylight. Anybody with a functioning moral compass should want to see the truth exposed and the perpetrators brought to justice. Unfortunately, in the real world it doesn't usually play out that way, and the conspiracy theory crowd does little to help (and often does more harm than good).
Still a good idea to maintain a default posture of mistrust in authority. There are too many bad actors out there looking to capitalize on the good faith of the masses. The least we can do is not throw them that bone.
Isn't that a pretty clear case of confirmation bias though? For every conspiracy that turns out to have some basis in truth, like MKUltra, there are hundreds or thousands of widely "accepted"...
Isn't that a pretty clear case of confirmation bias though? For every conspiracy that turns out to have some basis in truth, like MKUltra, there are hundreds or thousands of widely "accepted" contrail chemicals, anti-vax and "Wifi causes cancer" ones that aren't. To be wary of authority is fine, perhaps even wise in some cases, but it's a very fine line between wary and paranoid to the detrimental of society, IMO.
This is why anarchism is so important to me. People will only begin to trust the state once they are substantially involved in its affairs and no longer in a position to be exploited or controlled by it. The only means to this is to give the power to the people.
Maybe this is just my weird brain but I so much typical milquetoast neo-liberalism here. Sure, the discussion of power's pertinence is not indicative of this. But, from the above quotes, I wonder what but ideology could be preventing the author from concluding that conspiracy theories are endemic to our society where power is used to benefit a powerful few and the rest are intentionally bewildered.
Crucially missing from this piece is a discussion of the corporate-media-state complex, the cozy culture between political and business elites spanning centuries, or anything suggesting that popular conspiracies are caused by massive abuse of oligarchic power. What is preventing the author from saying, "if there were a truly populist movement in society trust eroded by elites over time could be restored" despite getting so close? It is so obvious to me and the author get so close but something stops them short. Could it be pure ideology?
I think humans are going to be humans. People are always looking to shift blame. Even in a populist society, there will be people who are unwilling, unable, or simply unfortunate enough to still have lives that are unfulfilling. They will be looking for someone to point the finger at, and I think conspiracy theories are an easy way to shift blame.
Will the overall incidence of conspiracy theories be reduced? I think this would happen with any movement that benefits lots of people. The less you have to complain about the less you have conspiracy theories. This was highlighted in the article by the fact that those who are well off tend to believe in conspiracy theories less and that conspiracy theory incidence is higher among those who are disenfranchised by economic or minority status.
I have a lot of issues with this. Sure, some of this factors into the pathology. But this line of reasoning also entirely overlooks the ways in which people would be correct in asserting that: 1. there are powerful people in the world and that 2: they use that power in coordinated ways to remain in power at the expense of others.
Granted, material conditions will have bearing on the degree to which people question the official narrative based on how marginalized they are by it. But that has no bearing on how legitimate or illegitimate the raising of questions is. You can still be rich and powerful and allege a conspiracy between the Obama White House and the lobbyists for Big Pharma and Big Finance at the expense of the masses in the form of Obamacare and the Bush-Obama bailouts. You can still enjoy a comfortable life and question the lack of coverage America's interference in Latin American sovereignty.
To simply say that people who believe in conspiracies are just unhappy with their lives would imply that our society is run by benevolent masters for the benefit of all. This is simply not the case. The world is run for profit by a tiny, opulent minority. This isn't a theory.
Apologies, I didn't mean to imply it's the only reason people ascribe to certain conspiracy theories, just one of the reasons and I think one of the primary reasons we see an association between relative comfort of life and incidence of believing in conspiracy theories.
Although I wonder if other beliefs become greater among those with greater comfort in life that require some amount of "faith" in spite (or instead of) evidence.
Oh yeah, this is absolutely an essential point here. But I think it reflects more on the comfortable classes than the people questioning the narrative given to them by the state-media complex.
Most def. There is definitely a proportional relationship between material circumstances and misplaced faith in capitalism. I think one would need to take the notions that "the system works or is just" on faith in spite of evidence. As an anarcho-communist I often debate the merits of capitalism with liberals and people even more conservative than that. People seem apt to observe material abundance in their surroundings and in their own lives as a basis to extol the merits of the system. They take this in spite of evidence like the stagnation in wages since the 70s, the utter deception of poverty stats and reporting by the IMF and UN, the scholarship of Piketty, Engels, and Marx, or the enormous sacrifice zones of capitalist, neo-liberal austerity on indigenous lands, the global south, and poor urban communities.
The arguments against capitalism are tallied by those who work but still struggle, or by people who can't find a job even though the physical world around us clearly needs work. But those arguments are distant and so don't speak as persuasively as new iPhones and Teslas and other fetishistic totems of capitalist prosperity.
I thought anarchism was a belief in the lack of a state as the desired political status.
It isn't obvious to most people.
If you have the data to support it, I sure am curious to hear it.
If you wanna get really particular, anarchism is about the abolition of coercive hierarchies. The most common form of this is the "abolition of the state" which is as much a matter of erasing borders as it is about their abolishing states. However, some anarchist schools allow for some form of common administration for the common good. So, there is still "government" in a sense - just not a familiar one. It's a confusing landscape of terms to be sure and I was being a little lazy.
I partially disagree. This is something many people have a decent intuition for, otherwise conspiracies wouldn't have become such a big issue. Consider the term conspiracy theory. Lots of these so-called theories aren't theories. There isn't much theoretical about the general notion that the powers that be are intentionally dishonest in their communications with the common people.
Consider the conspiracy between the media, the state, and the military in Western Europe and North America in the lead up to the Iraq War. This is a good example of elites abusing their station, abusing the people they rule over, eroding the public trust, and making fertile ground for conspiracy theories. The "news coverage" essentially amounted to propaganda broadcast's of the government's deliberately constructed narrative that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and this lead to war.
The amount of manipulation and lying that went into this event are just staggering. First off: Saddam didn't have the capacity to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. Second off: If he did, it wouldn't have been necessary for the US to supply him with chemical weapons for the Iran-Iraq war. Third off: Saddam functioned with the support of America for decades. Fourth: Iraq literally had nothing to do with 9/11.
So, we went from a real world with a dictator who used to enjoyed years of American material support for wars of aggression to a fake world where "Saddam is part of a Muslim axis of evil hellbent on destroying American societal values." How? How else than by a degree of conspiracy (even if tacit and ideological) could have done this? What else could have perpetrated this massive deception? And before you answer, consider how the same thing happened to Muammar Qaddafi in Libya AND to Manuel Noriega in Nicuragua.
I could literally go on for hours about how the differences in American foreign policy and the reporting on American foreign policy have wrought conspiracy-mindedness.
This is very interesting – for more so than whatever vague notion of anarchism I had in my head. I'm going to look into anarchism with more interest thanks to your description.
You're conflating conpiracy theory with a far more reasonable approach. Being aware of the real lengths people will lie to you isn't the same kooky idea of a conspiracy theory as is being approached, regardless of the terminology. (Speaking of a confusing landscape of terms.)
There's a media campaign going on in Russia that aims to villify "the West" (in a deliberately-vague term which includes the NATO countries and their supporters) and pound Russia's chest about how powerful it is (while keeping quiet about the staggering economic and social issues that permeate the day-to-day life in the country). That's not an outlandish observation: it's right there on Channel One.
Is that a conspiracy theory? In a broad sense, yes – because it isn't outlandish. Neither is the disinformation around the Iraq War, or many, many other campaigns aimed to fool people into submission or support by the government or similar entities. But it's nowhere near as entrancing, as involving, or as self-delusional as thinking that vaccines cause autism, or that the Earth is flat and everyone else is lying about it, or that aliens abduct people and the US government knows about it...
You won't hear any of this shit in Russia. We have different sorts of quacks here. They're still quacks, but they're nothing like the US quacks. (I don't know much about other countries to say anything, but I'm willing to bet quacks are regional.) It isn't about the ideas people have: it's how they hold onto them, and how they defend them (or abstain from defending them by pretending it's the others who try to take the truth away from them), and what they do to share them. It's in the irrational offense against the rest of the world to prove that they are right, not the rest of the seven billion.
So it's not that most people have a pretty good intuition about them: it's that they aren't disenfranchised enough to look into the nuttier conspiracies, like lizard overlords or the Illuminati.
One of the recent things I've heard – about a year ago – was that the fidget spinner was a mind weapon sent in by "the evil West" to hypnotize and recruit young people.
It was posted in a social network group centered around the vague idea of a "proper Slavic nation", full of ideas that walk the line between the early Slavic Christianity and the Slavic paganism. Looks kinda like this, talks suprisingly political.
Now that I think about it, there was a lot of things like the US quack beliefs, now and when I was growing up (I was into all kinds of "mystical and unknown" stuff growing up, and there's a TV channel that's made it their schtick to host quacks). There's the aliens, the bigfoot... even flat-earth! Which was, actually, the same group that talked about the danger of fidget spinners.
Google Murray Bookchin!!!!! GOOOOGLE MURRAY BOOKCHIN!!!! I know that's a lot of hype but seriously it will blow your mind.
I would agree with most of what you draw from this premise if it weren't for the story behind the term "conspiracy theorists." I don't know how much you know about the American Warren Commission of the 60s or its "Magic Bullet Theory." So I will assume, not familiar. But if you are you can just skip to the next paragraph. The tl;dr here is that a Congressional Commission was called to investigate the shootings of JFK and Gov. John Connelly of Texas. They "found" that a magic bullet flew along a fantastically, circuitous path through Kennedy and Connelly and basically it stunk to high hell from the get.
The reason I mention it is that this is event that coincides with the entry of the term "conspiracy theory" into common usage. Now I don't mean to... theorize about a conspiracy... but I think it is telling that "conspiracy theory" would be the term people used for ideas that contradicted the official version. Which I should add looked like this. What possible reason could people have for thinking that this account was a deliberate lie?
See, this is the same thing: thinking that a "magic bullet" is equivalent to being wary something that doesn't smell right in authenticity.
If you consider such a magic bullet a possibility – maybe it ricochetted at an odd angle, and its path was somewhat obscured by the damage it dealt around JFK's internals, because maybe it was light and the combination of the factors yadda yadda yadda – you're researching and being skeptical. If you're insisting that it must have been such a bullet, even though Occam's razor falls the other way, and everyone else must be lying about it to hide something...
Right now, talking about the giant government-media-military conspiracy would sound just kooky enough to get someone fired. Maybe there's a whole lot of machinations and subterfuge behind it. Maybe it's just a whole lot of people not being shrewd enough to ensure a thriving well-being of their country. Maybe money do speak, and there's a whole lot of moneymakers willing to throw green at the people who are supposed to represent us and, instead, make them make the decisions the moneymakers want to see happen.
Doesn't quite sound malevolent to me. It has bad consequences – but it looks like it comes from a whole lot of selfishness and a whole nothing of empathy for the people-as-people.
Did you Google Murray yet? Here's a good one
Certainly, this aspect exists in conspiracy doctrine, no doubt. But maybe it goes for too radical an extreme. I don't know since I seem to have a weird notion of conspiracy theories.
To me, the essential part of the conspiracy theory rationale is the acknowledgement that people with power are real and that they use this power to surreptitiously manipulate society and that what you see in the news and hear from society's masters may not be true, that what they want might not be in your best interest. People obviously apply this mode in different ways from me though - obviously there is much hysteria in these spaces.
However, this thing you said here:
is also a totally acceptable caveat and a critical one for people who ask questions to keep in mind. That is, that there are lots of reasons to lie and other causes for apparent deception. Certainly there are those who vastly over ascribe motive, opportunity, state of mind etc. where it doesn't make sense. Perhaps, as you have suggested the truth is much more banal and less thrilling:
But then again, this is a theory describing a conspiracy ;) so perhaps they have their merits after all.
I did. I've put his Wikipedia article on the reading list. It's going to be some time before I get there.
I agree with you. I feel like out disagreement is purely about semantics: what to you is a broad and mostly-sensible field of research, to me is the narrow, nutty part which I'd learned to roll my eyes at and disregard.
Yeah I have the same impression. For a discussion that was ultimately about a difference in semantics, i very much enjoyed myself.
I'm kind of sympathetic to anarchism (because I lean little-r-republican), but I think this is kind of a just-so explanation that isn't really provable. Offhand I can think of a few countries where the government is far more exploitative and controlling than the US and yet huge numbers of people implicitly trust the government. I haven't looked up numbers, so this is speculation, but the popular imagination of the 1950s US holds that the majority of the population trusted the government far more than they do now, and I don't think you can make a serious argument that the US government was less exploitative or controlling then than it is now.
As much as I love Foucault, I think trying to analyze history as solely a function of social power still doesn't really work when you push it to its limits. It's a useful abstraction sometimes, IMO more useful than class or race, but it's just another imperfect tool.
Yeah but notice I follow up the word trust with the words "involved" and "no longer in a position to be exploited or controlled." So, offhand, I have to imagine the examples you are thinking of don't apply well. But I'd be interested in what/why you were thinking about here. The model I have in mind when I say this is an actually anarchistic nation like Rojava.
Maybe. Maybe not. If you read Pinker, yeah it's all hunky-dory. But is it really? We've traded overt (only to an extent) gendered and racial forms of oppressive control for things like precarious employment and fake news. So, I don't know know that the media apparatus of control has necessarily become less sophisticated in that time either. Sure, we abolished (overt) apartheid and have (just now begun) in on patriarchy. Yet, I don't know that it's the case that social mobility is better. After all real wages are stagnant since the 70s. I wonder what would even be the appropriate metric for establishing a comparison.
Why do you think that? Are you that powerful? ;)
Offhand I'm thinking of Turkey, Russia, or China which to my knowledge are run by pretty authoritarian and abusive governments that are nevertheless pretty popular. I also regularly see people on the far Left giving unwarranted benefit of the doubt to strongmen like Assad, how does your hypothesis jibe with that observation? Why do so many people put trust in someone whose politics they aren't involved in, and who is actively exploiting and controlling their own people?
I'm generally supportive of them, but also skeptical at how long it'll last. They've also been accused of ethnic cleansing by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. I've never really seen this addressed except people saying it's Turkish lies. Which, I wouldn't put it past Erdogan's government, but I haven't seen any connections there.
Depends what you measure. Real individual wages have been going up at most income levels since then, even for the people at the bottom. Real household wages have not, but that's not necessarily bad. More elderly people living independently would bring down household wages but does not automatically mean any individual is worse off. There's also a serious question to me of whether we should be looking at wages or total compensation. A lot of the compensation gain has "disappeared" into rising healthcare costs, but healthcare is also much better now than it was in the 1970s so there have been qualitative changes in that aspect of life.
It's actually pretty hard to tell because you'd need to see the distributional information of wages for both households and individuals, but at best with easily available stats you get mean/median and maybe standard deviation. There's also a massive subjective component that isn't very easy to square with other's judgements.
But these are endemic to the human condition. People have been lying for personal gain for thousands of years, even on a large scale. People have also assumed for millennia that things wouldn't change only to find out that they are not truly in control of the world around them. All of the problems we're facing today are not new, in my opinion. They're ages old, and only the scale and velocity is new.
I've spent a fair amount of time is such spaces and have never heard of this. Granted I totally reject Leninist ideas so perhaps this is why. As for my hypothesis, I don't know much about the state conspiracy theories in these places. It would be fascinating to see what parallels if any exist. Perhaps there is something innate to American political culture to be learned from the differences.
That's an new insight for me - I dig it. (But if issues of exploitation have accelerated and grown, then my trendline since the 50s has some merit no?) As are the points about household vs. individual income. I'm like 85% regurgitation something Chomsky says so I don't really have a fine grasp of the concept. But you seem to. Is it something you specialize in?
To add to the "hard to tell"-ness of the issue, something else to consider is inequality and the widening disparity of outcomes over time. It's another way I perceive the worsening position of the worker over time but maybe there's something I'm missing here too?
Conspiracy theories wouldn't have such a foothold in the American consciousness if only fewer of them eventually turned out to be true.
I used to chase some of the more pedestrian theories, but these days I keep my distance because of the general toxic cult that comes attached to them, and the rampant anti-intellectualism and paranoia that follow. Plus it's just a huge waste of time, with basically zero applicability to my daily life.
But I get it. The government has a long and documented history of doing some seriously evil and secretive shit. Heck, I'm not a fan of most of they stuff they do in broad daylight. Anybody with a functioning moral compass should want to see the truth exposed and the perpetrators brought to justice. Unfortunately, in the real world it doesn't usually play out that way, and the conspiracy theory crowd does little to help (and often does more harm than good).
Still a good idea to maintain a default posture of mistrust in authority. There are too many bad actors out there looking to capitalize on the good faith of the masses. The least we can do is not throw them that bone.
Isn't that a pretty clear case of confirmation bias though? For every conspiracy that turns out to have some basis in truth, like MKUltra, there are hundreds or thousands of widely "accepted" contrail chemicals, anti-vax and "Wifi causes cancer" ones that aren't. To be wary of authority is fine, perhaps even wise in some cases, but it's a very fine line between wary and paranoid to the detrimental of society, IMO.