Belgium (Brussels Morning newspaper) The ruling Conservative Party in the UK, campaigning for votes, floated the counterfactual twin conspiracy theories of tax on meat and 15-minute neighborhoods, supposedly intended to restrict people’s freedom of movement.
Senior as well as fringe politicians in Poland, Italy, Lithuania, and Bulgaria are pushing the “eat insects instead of meat” tripe trope which originated, where else, on Russian TV.
it was the murder of John F. Kennedy, America’s youthful president, that ushered in a golden age of conspiracy theories.
The distrust of appearances and official versions was further enhanced by the Watergate scandal in 1973-4. Conspiracies and urban legends offer meaning and purposefulness in a capricious, kaleidoscopic, maddeningly ambiguous, and cruel world. They empower their otherwise helpless and terrified believers.
New Order One world government, Zionist and Jewish cabals, Catholic, black, yellow, or red subversion, Q-Anon, and the machinations attributed to the Freemasons and the Illuminati – all flourished yet again from the 1970s onwards.
Paranoid speculations reached frenzied nadirs following the deaths of celebrities, such as “Princess Di”. Books like “The Da Vinci Code” (which deals with an improbable Catholic conspiracy to erase from history the true facts about the fate of Jesus) sell millions of copies worldwide.
But there is more to conspiracy theories than mass psychogenic illness. It is also big business. Voluntary associations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society are past their heyday. But they still gross many millions of dollars a year. TV talk shows documentaries, Tabloids, dedicated magazines, online forums, games, and YouTube channels with millions of subscribers make hay for both content creators and platforms.
Conspiracism is the propensity to believe in unproven and unverified oft-repeated conspiracy theories, urban legends, myths, and patent falsehoods, usually involving an evil intent of a cabal to abuse, manipulate, and exploit the unsuspecting masses.
Most people are gullible and believe literally anything and anyone: a well-documented and thoroughly researched phenomenon known as base rate (fallacy).
They then defend their misconceptions fiercely as they actively align themselves with others and signal their uncritical conformity in like-minded tribes and silos.
Frequent exposure in these echo chambers to toxic nonsense solidifies the belief in these outlandish and inane narratives, a phenomenon known as “consistency”. Social media leverage consistency as grist to their perpetuum mobile rumor and gossip mills.
Other cognitive distortions feed into conspiracism. Consider the proportionality bias: the erroneous conviction that great events are caused by commensurately massive reasons, plots, and dynamic processes. This flies in the face of chaos theory and its butterfly effect: a lone grandiose gunman in Texas can rock the entire world with a single shot.
We also find patterns where there are none (apophenia and pareidolia), connect dots that should remain discrete, and find continuities in the disparate and the unrelated, including other people’s actions as related to their imputed motivations (intentionality bias)
Conspiracism is a personality trait. Even after a favorite conspiracy is debunked, there is a counterfactual residue left (continued influence effect). The more you try to argue with a true believer, the more entrenched s/he becomes in his/her misinformation and paranoid skepticism (backfire effect)
Conspiracies thrive on ignorance: we don’t know what causes autism – enter the anti-vaxxers. There is a smidgen of grandiosity involved as people trust their gut instincts and consider themselves “enlightened”, “in the know”, superior to the sheeple, and adepts.
YUPTIE is a yuppie with a white trash background. You can find them mainly in the arts, including the performing arts, fashion, television, and information technology. Yupties are Young, Urban, Upwardly mobile, and Trash.
They are functionally illiterate, are high-income, schizoid loners, and possessed of the manners, habits, and values of the underclass. When they do socialize it is to binge drink, do drugs, dance all night, and end up having casual sex with strangers. They have no families and are highly itinerant and desultory. They are not as materialistic and competitive as their forerunners, the yuppies. Many of them have serious mental health problems such as mood disorders and personality disorders, mostly Borderline and Narcissistic.
Yupties despise learning, experts, the elites, and intellectuals. They are highly paranoid and into conspiracy theories. They congregate in professional conventions but otherwise communicate and collaborate exclusively online. They are both amoral and immoral or even defiantly antisocial. They dress like white trash, neglect their bodies (except to adorn them with prison gang tattoos), and gorge on all manner of medication. They wallow in video games and pointless TV series. They are pathetic wannabe bad boys and gals.
The British historian, Arnold Toynbee, said that when most members of society adopt the behaviors and customs of the ignorant, impoverished, and inert lowest class and when the elites abrogate their responsibility to show the way and to educate – these are the hallmarks of a dying civilization. Yupties are the maggots on and in the corpses of what used to be the West.
But conspiracism underlies even modern psychology itself!
Treatment modalities (psychotherapies) belong to either of two camps: the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) no-nonsense correctional officers (for example: Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies or CBT) and the WYDSIWYG conspiracy theorists (what you don’t see – depth psychology, the unconscious, complexes, the shadow – is what you get).
The first school assumes that overt behaviors and speech faithfully reflect the patient’s inner landscape.
The second group is convinced that manifest conduct and words are there to compensate for or misrepresent underlying psychodynamic processes as well as whole continents of repressed, festering material. There is always a “conspiracy”, collusion between various psychological constructs to hide the true self. In this sense, everyone has a false self to some degree (Jung, Goffman, Winnicott)
The very word “personality” presupposes the existence of a mask (“persona”) intended to conceal various fears (abandonment, rejection, ostracism, failure); camouflage thwarted needs, urges, drives, desires, and emotional expression; avoid true intimacy for the dread of being shunned, sadistically criticized, or hurtfully ridiculed; and defend – via defense mechanisms – against the incursion and encroachment of ego-dystonic, uncomfortable, disorienting, and painful reality.
We have an innate need to make sense of the world. The more uncertain reality is, the more inclined we are to impose counterfactual narratives on it. But it is when these works of fiction hijack politics that we are in real trouble.
Opinions expressed in the op-ed section are solely those of the individual author and do not represent the official stance of our newspaper. We believe in providing a platform for a wide range of voices and perspectives, even those that may challenge or differ from our own. As always, we remain committed to providing our readers with high-quality, fair, and balanced journalism. Thank you for your continued support.Sincerely, The Brussels Morning Team
