Nerd Pride Radio

I answered Kyle's question on the podcast about why people believe in conspiracy theories, and I don't know how good my answer was.

I don't think I was necessarily wrong, but it was incomplete for sure. A more sympathetic response is that conspiracy theories provide comfort. Sometimes that's just the comfort of assuaging your own cognitive dissonance. I.e. -- admitting that X is true means admitting that I've been horribly wrong about Y and Z my whole life, which would mean I've been a bad person. Much better to believe that X is just a huge conspiracy.

But also, conspiracy theories for some help bring order to a scary chaotic world. If a deranged person can shoot up an elementary school in Connecticut then that sort of thing can happen anywhere and to anyone, and there's no rhyme or reason to it. But if I buy into the whole CIA false flag theory, then there's reasons why things happen, and no actual children were harmed. Better to believe the conspiracy than to think the world is random and dangerous.

And then of course you have people who may or may not believe, but are happy to sell the conspiracy because it advantages them politically or financially or whatever.

The best explanation for belief in conspiracy theories that I've come across is Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Amazing book. It hits a lot of the same points Mike made.

I've always maintained that the global consipiraces are actually at the core, very optimistc.

If a cabal of shadow men were controlling the world, even ones that don't have our best interests in mind, even if they are willing to do awful things, it still maintains that yes, someone is thinking very carefully about the future of mankind and what that looks like.

In truth, what if the world was ran by a bunch of short sighted, mostly lucky, mostly kind of stupid people with no real grasp on the environmental damage or any other kind of damage they are doing the world and no one has a real plan outside the next 20 years.

comfort...and it gives them something to keep the mind occupied...

Billionaires have private islands where they keep underage sex slaves and if one of them gets caught they're suicided in jail while 2-3 false flag shootings occur to misdirect the public away from the truly important information. This is not a conspiracy it is reality

Oh, if I had Epstein's supposed money, with the expectation of someday being prosecuted for crimes for which both the formal and informal penalties would be the worst, and I supposedly had leverage over some of the most powerful people on earth, I would have found a ringer for my physical body and already would have had a plan in place to bring that poor man to the jail, hang him there, and then escape to some unregistered island somewhere to live out the rest of my days while everyone assumed I had committed suicide and was busy fighting over which political party or nation's bad representative was responsible.

The takeaway moral here is: be cautious about working as a body double or decoy for extremely wealthy and powerful people, because you might not know what they really need you for.