It is possible to swiftly discredit conspiracy theories like HAARP and 2012 without so much as a second glance, to label the creators of said theories nut-jobs and leave it at that. While these theories are convoluted, conclusion-based, blame-seeking and just plain incorrect, the fact that they exist and have nominally wide followings is worthy of study and investigation. Why do people follow conspiracy theories, even the flimsy ones, not grounded in any kind of scientific foundation?
A recent article in Psychology Today addressed just this question, citing multiple reasons that conspiracy theories have become exceedingly prevalent in our particular contemporaneity.
Firstly, the article points out that conspiracy theories often act as comfort. A morphine drip for an exceedingly cynical public. In a society where people constantly feel uninformed and unable to control the events around them (think: 9/11), there is comfort in having a black-and-white vision of the world, a deceptively simple way to explain the things over which one has no control.
The article also mentioned the the increasingly digitized nature of society is helpful in popularizing conspiracy theories, and creating a snowball effect in which they get larger and larger - a la HAARP and the Vaccines Cause Autism scare.
A lot of factors create a conspiracy theorist, but Psychology Today certainly proposes many adept interpretations of the current conspiracy epidemic.
I love this post (I based my next post off of it) but I wish you had included a little more of an explanation about the article because I thought it seemed just a little too brief.
ReplyDeleteI love this post (I based my next post off of it) but I wish you had included a little more of an explanation about the article because I thought it seemed just a little too brief.
ReplyDeleteYes, I definitely agree that they are a bit of a twisted comfort. Humans, just as a side effect of human nature, have an insatiable desire to know things that they can't.
ReplyDeleteI also really liked how you used "morphine drip" to describe the condition. It fits well.