Conspiracy theorism comes in degrees. (Zoom in to read)
I was recently in an email discussion about African culture with a friend who lives in Africa. The rural African mind sees a very different world of causation to our own, and yet in the final analysis it isn't so very different to the Western mind. See below for an edited extract of my correspondence with my friend
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And now, a comment on
the attraction of conspiracy theorism,
an epistemic method used by the politically far-right, far-left, Christian fundamentalists, numerous websites and, may I add,
many rural Africans.
As gregarious animals humans have to deal with that most complex of all created objects i.e. other humans. In having to cope with social relations we are constantly called to attempt to read between the lines of human behaviour in order to understand one another. But in contexts where suspicions about sinful motives are rife the mind can get up to all sorts of tricks as it tries to read into the minds of others through a fog of distrust. So, this very sophisticated ability which attempts to decode human behaviour comes with an overhead of side effects, especially when human interests conflict. Viz: it all too easily interpolates imaginary scenarios and is sometimes apt to too readily commit to those imagined scenarios.
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Stage 1 conspiracy
theorism starts with a toxic mix of emotions. emotions which may include fear, distrust, paranoia,
confusion, anger, frustration and envy. This mix is fertile ground for stage 2 where
there is a desire to justify & explain these emotions rather than accept
their causes as due to inexplicably random circumstances. Stage 3 occurs when
the fecund human imagination attempts to join the dots of observation with background
stories which rationalise, simplify, dignify and make sense of one’s otherwise
perplexing experiences; this involves creating a cast of nefarious hidden actors who are
thought to be the cause of one’s problems and who then become the focus of one’s
blame and anger. Personalising the struggle in this way somehow makes it easier to cope
with. For Africans the dots are joined
with witches and spirits. In mid-17th century England the witch
finder general (Matthew Hopkins) blamed crabby women. For American Trumpite “QAnon”
Christians it’s those evil “woke” conspiracists who may even be accused of
being involved in Satanism. And it’s really gone over the top with the
Christian flat earthists (and young earthists) who see the whole secular
educational system being involved in a lying conspiracy to defraud us of our
central place in God’s creation.
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The actual causes behind the frustrations & aggravations in the little picture of our lives can be breathtakingly banal, commonplace, random and not down to the direct planned action of nefarious antagonists, whether they be spirits, demons, Satan, or human conspirators. We may like to think of ourselves as heroic figures fighting against those who have got it in for us, but the truth may be far more mundane & vapid. But to see the real struggle we have to step back from our everyday commonplace frustrations and look at the big picture. It is only when we step back and look at the big picture can we see the real causes: Seldom are our problems a result of a direct Satanic attack or an outcome of carefully planned human conspiracies to thwart us. Yes, many of our problems ultimately do trace back to human Sin, human epistemic failings and Satanic evil, but I see the main problem being the impersonal backwash of chaos which bad actors (human & Satanic) leave behind. That is, most of our problems are due to the indirect action of bad actors and the tsunami of chaos that their behaviour triggers. The ultimate struggle is against the chaos beast: Kaoskampf!
Quantum Non-Linearity: The Compulsion of Conspiracy Theorism (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)
