Conspiracy theory consists of the interpretation of an event contrary to the current explanation. Its defenders attribute to people with power the intention to harm society through secret strategies.These fabulations are either rejected (regardless of their content), or defended. Psychologists characterize the mentality of those who agree with such explanations as conspiracy.
Most individuals who believe in hidden truths harbor prejudice against high status groups, including bankers and politicians. They are also suspicious of the medical treatments used.
Conspiracy theory offers an explanation of a past or present event that contradicts our knowledge of it. It starts from the idea that there are intentional manipulations or secret agreements of one or more people. The tsunami that caused the Fukushima disaster in Japan did not result from natural tectonic displacement, as stated, but was caused by a US radiation weapon from the HAARP research station in Alaska. Feminism was invented by the CIA to destabilize society, says another of these theories.
Will a conspiracy theory lead you to some kind of knowledge / truth?
One of the problems of conspiracy theories is that they tend to err on the side of what they criticize: a blind faith in information, but in this case it is an alternative to the institutional or official one. This faith in any information that is awarded as outside the system, this credulity based fundamentally on the fact that the great powers (political, business, etc.) have very good reasons to want to control us in any way and hide their true strategies and mechanisms of mass manipulation, nothing that as a general concept sounds far-fetched: we all know very well that transparency is not our main characteristic, and less when we have something in our hands.
Conspiracy theories have been gaining strength as part of our pop culture since the first half of the 20th century
Does that mean that conspiracy theories should disappear? NO. Why:
1.- Some conspiracy theories have proven to be true or, at least, not misguided. For example, the MK-ultra project (a secret CIA investigation program that tried to discover methods to control the mind).
2.- Some conspiracy theories highlight blind spots in common or official interpretations of events.
3.- Some conspiracy theories invite debate where, in order to counteract them, stronger arguments must be delivered or underlined than those reported in the first instance. Like the famous theory that man did not get to the moon.
4.- Some conspiracy theories are more fun than some novels. They are a narrative genre in themselves.
5.-We could say that it is a lot of unclassified information-garbage that we can recycle to question institutionally established paradigms.
For insiders who want a few simple guidelines to help them better discriminate among so many theories that might be more appealing to dig into, I recommend looking for advice from Michael Skeptic from Skeptic magazine ; among them, he suggests internalizing the following concept: “correlation is not cause”.
“Obviously I do not believe that the perfect conspiracies exist but that does not make the real conspiracies less authentic or feasible.
No one can fool everyone all the time
Conspiracy theories, in a way, carry out an opposite analysis to the institutional one. I invite you to use the imagination, necessary and powerful, without forgetting the critical sense and an absence of faith in the information that comes to us. As Miguel Ibáñez proposed : “more than giving answers, the invitation is to ask questions.”
