Ambivalence wrote:
Conspiracy theories are almost universally stupid.
They usually rely on imagining a large number of people behaving in an identical way, without taking into account individual motivations, in a manner which simply does not happen in reality, people being the contrary, disorganised things we are. I think you can look at conspiracy theories as a classical example of failure to grasp that "theory of mind" thing - people aren't superorganised secret-keeping ninja robots, but oh! if they were, then couldn't The Man have fun with us...
I have to respectfully disagree. Conspiracies, by nature, do not involve a large number of people, simply because they involve the need for secrecy. What a conspiracy needs is a few people sympathetic to the cause in key areas, and everyone else behaving as they normally do. The genius of the conspiracy is to be able plan well enough to pull off history-changing events without anyone realizing that a secret plan was involved.
Said small group does not have to behave in an identical way-everyone simply has to do their assigned parts. People are contrary-yes, but I imagine the conspiracy has a screening process. If someone happened to have an 11th-hour attack of conscience, there are safeguards in place. Or, maybe the whole thing does fall apart, and that's when we hear about it. The conspiracies that work we call theories.
Things aren't that disorganized in this world-I'm sitting in a cafe, and people around me are doing their jobs pretty competently. I have coffee from Brazil. I'm getting internet service from a satellite. I'm wearing shoes from China. Somehow, all of these things went off without a hitch-because people did their jobs. That normalcy is what conspiracies rely upon, both to function effectively and to provide such a screen of normalcy that any suggestion of conspiracy seems paranoid and "stupid."
We fail to imagine conspiracies simply because we have no need for them. Someone, somewhere, is imaginative enough to engineer things in a secret fashion because they are desperate.