Conspiracy theory happens because of fear. Everyone except for people who believe conspiracy theorists knows this, and even a lot of believers know it too. There is an element of fear of an actual other that occurs in conspiracy theory, or a mendacious desire to defame people who are obstacles to one’s personal power, but a large portion of what makes a conspiracy theory believable is people’s intellectual laziness.
It’s easy to say that people who believe conspiracy theories are some slack-jawed group of mentally deficient yokels who are incapable of understanding reality. There are stupid people in the world, but explaining everything by means of a catch-all phrase like “stupidity” is lazy. The truth is that people would rather blame other people for their shortcomings and perceived lack of power than address these problems. These same people also do not generally understand and become able to explain to themselves complex realities not because they’re incapable of understanding science, politics, psychology, or any other aspect of reality, but because they’re too lazy to.
Conspiracy theorists believe in a dualistic, black and white, us-versus-them reality not because they can’t understand the complexities of life, but because dualism is a fundamentally lazy philosophy. It doesn’t correspond to reality, exactly, because a duality is a convenient excuse for not addressing one’s shortcomings. “Look! All of our problems can be blamed on a single monolithic entity or conspiracy, that way we don’t have to look at ourselves honestly and do something about our failings. Let’s do it!”
There are actual conspiracies in the world, I’ll agree, I’m not too lazy or simple-minded to believe that no one has actually conspired to do something nefarious in the world. I will say, though, that many of these nefarious actors simply take advantage of other people’s intellectual laziness. Another way of looking at this is that many of the actual conspirators are the conspiracy theorists themselves.
It would do humanity a great deal of good if they were to look for a group of conspiracy theorists, and then find the person who started telling everyone about a particular conspiracy. Then, follow this person around, track their movements, find out who else he is associating with, and then you will in all likelihood discover a real conspiracy. That is how you fight conspiracy theories. Don’t take out a conspiracy theorist’s enemies, that’s not the real enemy. The “real enemy” are conspiracy theorists themselves, who are quite often, due to the nature of psychological projection, accusing the “conspiracy” of doing exactly what they themselves are doing. The irony.
Black and white thinking is the default that human beings default to because it is the most primal type of fear-based thinking. It’s unpleasant to think in black and white, because it’s a nice way to terrorize yourself. But this is another way that by not putting in the effort to do something simple, human beings end up complicating their lives.
