I get what the above poster is saying about conspiracy theorists and religion. And its absolutely valid.
However I think its tough to be that simple. From a pure I think psychological standpoint. People are drawn into the whole rabbit hole of conspiracy theories because it makes them feel like they have control through knowledge, that they are protected by that knowledge, and that it allows them to explain frightening events in the most simplified terms.
For a long time the biggest conspiracy theory wasn't the "faked" moon landing, or the Jewish Conspiracy to control the world, or even JFK assasination. But 9/11.
Loose Change or whatever it was, which is a fantastic piece of evolving conspiracy film work captured peoples imagination because it allowed them to explain away the 9/11 attacks, not for what they were but for what they could be, and if you have the "knowledge of what happened" you're aware and the next time you'll probably be better protected from it. But it leads to amazing leaps of logic when you talk to or debate people.
Its not that you can prove yourself right when you're talking to a conspiracy theorist, it has to be that you have to prove them wrong, and the people making money on this stuff have created a relentless and endless string of troll logic that these conspiracy theorists can use to protect themselves and their theory.
The pentagon thing is fascinating because you can debate someone all day and they just keep rolling out "facts"
A plane hit the pentagon.
Nope it was a cruise missile flown remotely by the government
But there were witnesses to the plane banking over the highway.
Nope this shadow on this frame is covering a long range antennae
But it crashed into the building right here.
That hole is to small to be caused by a large jet.
The wings snapped off and the engines, see this debris in these pictures, that's a jet turbine from that type of plane and that's a wing strut.
It was planted by the government
And on and on and on.
While Religion can certainly be a protective measure for people, and a way to easily explain the universe around them, and to certainly make them feel more powerful. It doesn't compare to a lot of the mental logic turns for conspiracy theorists.
The sad thing is that conspiracy theorists are incredibly vulnerable. You look at the sheer number of insane books and videos that people put out and conventions and meetings and websites with merchandise stores. Its crazy the amount of money that's being made off of people that possibly have real significant mental issues and phobias.
the thing you have to take into account is that religion without any central authority is just as wacked out as conspiricy theories, we tend to compare Qanon to the Catholic Church, which isnt fair to either frankly, Qanon should be compared to the Westbro Baptist Church or some back country snake handling pentacostal faith.
That said if Qanon had a band as good as this lot I might be tempted
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the thing you have to take into account is that religion without any central authority is just as wacked out as conspiricy theories, we tend to compare Qanon to the Catholic Church, which isnt fair to either frankly, Qanon should be compared to the Westbro Baptist Church or some back country snake handling pentacostal faith.
The core ideas pushed by both the WBC and the Catholic Church are equally absurd. The former just happens to push there's in a more aggressive and bat#### manner. And, if you take the entire history of the Catholic Church into account, I'm not sure you could even say that.
While Religion can certainly be a protective measure for people, and a way to easily explain the universe around them, and to certainly make them feel more powerful. It doesn't compare to a lot of the mental logic turns for conspiracy theorists.
The sad thing is that conspiracy theorists are incredibly vulnerable. You look at the sheer number of insane books and videos that people put out and conventions and meetings and websites with merchandise stores. Its crazy the amount of money that's being made off of people that possibly have real significant mental issues and phobias.
It's exactly this, and I think why it's important to think of conspiracy theories as serving the same purpose as religious beliefs. They can also be just as innocuous: a slightly lapsed catholic who attends church on the holidays and occasionally confesses or lights a candle while, in their heart, being pretty iffy about a lot of the doctrine is much the same in my mind as someone who's pretty much convinced that the CIA and the Mafia killed Kennedy but doesn't really do anything with that knowledge.
It's when either religious belief or conspiracy theory belief starts to seriously impact behavior that, in either case, you likely have a problem. When religious belief motivates a person to spend their weekday afternoons on a college campus shouting at kids through a bullhorn about how they're going to hell it is probably also motivating that person's political activities, how they spend and donate their money, and what types of relationships they're able to maintain and which they have damaged. These actions are clearly identical to the actions Q and Q-adjacent adherents take, and I think they're motivated by exactly the same human need, which is how they need to be approached if we wish to lessen their influence on society.
If you go take a look at the world of the 'formerly religious' such as youtube channels of former evangelical Christians like Genetically Modified Skeptic or Paulogia, or the r/exmormon subreddit, I think there is a pattern that emerges which is useful for thinking about how to approach friends and family who have fallen down the anti-vaxx/Qanon rabbit hole.
You can't argue people out of their faith. When people leave their faiths it's almost never a 'silver bullet' of evidence or logic which compels them, it's a 'last straw' which they recognize for themselves. It's the accumulated weight of false predictions, bad behavior by leaders, observed counter examples, and lived experience.
In education, when you're trying to solve a repeated behavioral issue, the mnemonic we use is ABC: Antecedent, Behavior, Consequence. Behaviors are preceded by something, there is either a specific trigger or general need, it might be a single event, or it might be something that's built up over time but there is something coming before the behavior that is motivating it. Also, you look at the consequence, what is the person getting as a result of the behavior: attention? Stress release? Being removed from a room they don't want to be in? Whatever the consequence is, it's fulfilling a need the person has (connected to the antecedent) which then connects the loop and results in the behavior repeating. If the desire is to end or modify the behavior, you need to find a replacement for whatever need the consequence is fulfilling and either remove or provide coping skills for the antecedent.
When either religious or conspiracy faith boils over into antisocial behavior, the same antecedent-behavior-consequence loop exists and is what needs to be addressed in order to end or modify the behavior. Personally, I am convinced that in most cases, the antecedent is some combination of our human need to make sense of life and our need to feel connected to others, and the consequence of the behavior is a satisfaction of the need to make sense, a feeling of empowerment, and a sense of connection to our fellow congregants. This is why the internet is so, so powerful at spreading and amplifying conspiracy theories (and aberrant, religiously-motivated behaviors). That's where the connection to the congregation is made, where the consequence of the behavior satisfies the person's needs.
If you have someone in your life who is falling down, or has fallen down one of these rabbit holes, and you want to help pull them out, identifying their antecedent and consequence is essential to changing the behavior. Then you need to help find alternative behaviors which meet the need they're trying to fulfil and remove or provide alternative strategies for the trigger. I've read a lot of stories about people getting into their older relatives' devices and changing their alerts, subscriptions, settings, etc. This is a great idea as you're dealing with a trigger to the behavior.
Ultimately as a society we need to do some thinking about how we meet the needs of our people to make sense and find connection with each other, because people will do these things, they need to do these things, and it's obviously incredibly easy for these needs to motivate terribly destructive behavior.
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Someone posted this helpful video on understanding why people spiral into conspiracies and how difficult it can be to break through with them. https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPd2vfahF/
I don't have a lot to add besides I just wanted to say sorry to those of you in this thread dealing with this stuff with family members. Has to be extremely exhausting. It's just.......sad. My heart goes out to all of you.
When a fully loaded commercial airliner hits the WTC, the wings slice into the building like blades and creates a massive fire that, for the only time in history, causes a steel framed building to collapse from fire. Debris from the plane is found all around the impact site.
When a fully loaded commercial airliner hits the Pentagon, it disappears into a single fireball and no noticeable damage from the wings is left on the building. The only debris left from the crash is the passport of the hijacker found a few blocks away. The hijacker was an amateur pilot flying a fully loaded commercial airliner for the first time who executed a perfect corkscrew descent to crash his plane into the very part of the pentagon that was investigating the $2.3 Trillion dollars lost by Donald Rumsfeld and the department of defense.
I've noticed many of the people I know that spout the conspiracy crap are also religious. Part of me thinks these are just gullible people that latch on to anything easily. Except that once they latch on they don't let go.
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For a pattern-finding, sense-making brain like the one we've evolved, that, to motivate self-preservation, considers itself the most important entity in existence this is intolerable. Sense must be made.
Absolutely. Those who fall prey to conspiracy theories are desperately seeking control in a chaotic world. They prefer to believe bad things happen because the powerful have malign agendas, than to recognize the awful truth that nobody is really in charge and bad things often happen without intent or agency.
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Originally Posted by driveway
Conspiracy theories are religions (and yes, the corollary is also true).
They meet some of the same needs, but religions typically have some positive utility as well. They transmit useful social values, and can give people meaning, solace, and a sense of community. Conspiratorial thinking does not. It’s religion shorn of all wisdom and positive social value.
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When a fully loaded commercial airliner hits the WTC, the wings slice into the building like blades and creates a massive fire that, for the only time in history, causes a steel framed building to collapse from fire. Debris from the plane is found all around the impact site.
When a fully loaded commercial airliner hits the Pentagon, it disappears into a single fireball and no noticeable damage from the wings is left on the building. The only debris left from the crash is the passport of the hijacker found a few blocks away. The hijacker was an amateur pilot flying a fully loaded commercial airliner for the first time who executed a perfect corkscrew descent to crash his plane into the very part of the pentagon that was investigating the $2.3 Trillion dollars lost by Donald Rumsfeld and the department of defense.
must be costing Rumsfeld a fortune to keep all the passengers and flight crew on the missing plane that didnt hit the pentagon living in luxury on a desert island somewhere, handy that the Pentagon doesnt use computers and a central server so obviously all the evidence was destroyed, clearly no one anywhere is aware of the DoD wasting 2.3 trillion dollars, except us.
Last edited by afc wimbledon; 12-02-2021 at 10:56 AM.
People don't seem to understand the weight of 30 stories on damaged columns will eventually cause a chain reaction collapse.
Also there are plenty of pictures of the pentagon damage, including the front landing gear ending up in the center courtyard and all the light poles surrounding the building that were downed by the plane.
When a fully loaded commercial airliner hits the WTC, the wings slice into the building like blades and creates a massive fire that, for the only time in history, causes a steel framed building to collapse from fire. Debris from the plane is found all around the impact site.
When a fully loaded commercial airliner hits the Pentagon, it disappears into a single fireball and no noticeable damage from the wings is left on the building. The only debris left from the crash is the passport of the hijacker found a few blocks away. The hijacker was an amateur pilot flying a fully loaded commercial airliner for the first time who executed a perfect corkscrew descent to crash his plane into the very part of the pentagon that was investigating the $2.3 Trillion dollars lost by Donald Rumsfeld and the department of defense.
Man all of what you're talking about has been debunked years ago.
Spoiler!
the Jet left a 75 foot hole in the building, not 16 feet as some conspiracy insano's base their theory on. The building was re-enforced concrete with less windows then the WTC, it was a far more re-enforced building because its the Pentagon, One wing snapped off before it hit because it hit the ground, Most of the wreckage of the Jet was deposited in the building, The other wing snapped off due to the makeup of the Pentagon walls, etc etc etc.
My advice to most people that live with these conspiracy theories is to go and look at the debunking theories before coming to me with their nonsense.
Super Thermite was a made up turn. Pull it isn't a term to set off demolition charges but to get out of the building. For a conspiracy of this size to work, its impossible to control leakage as the reward money for proof of these conspiracies would be huge, and 1000's of government workers and evil people didn't dissapear in a day.
We've seen how harmful these conspiracy nutters can be. The actions against the Sandy Hook Survivers by Conspiracy theory idiots egged on by Alex Jones was gross and i'm glad he's going to lose every cent that he's made on his conspiracy industry.
Also I can't take conspiracy idiots seriously when they have conventions with dentists claiming to be engineers talking about space lasers. Or using a "expert witness" on the cruise missile theory of 9/11, who was not an aviation engineer but a sales person for Boeing.
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When a fully loaded commercial airliner hits the WTC, the wings slice into the building like blades and creates a massive fire that, for the only time in history, causes a steel framed building to collapse from fire. Debris from the plane is found all around the impact site.
When a fully loaded commercial airliner hits the Pentagon, it disappears into a single fireball and no noticeable damage from the wings is left on the building. The only debris left from the crash is the passport of the hijacker found a few blocks away. The hijacker was an amateur pilot flying a fully loaded commercial airliner for the first time who executed a perfect corkscrew descent to crash his plane into the very part of the pentagon that was investigating the $2.3 Trillion dollars lost by Donald Rumsfeld and the department of defense.
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Absolutely. Those who fall prey to conspiracy theories are desperately seeking control in a chaotic world. They prefer to believe bad things happen because the powerful have malign agendas, than to recognize the awful truth that nobody is really in charge and bad things often happen without intent or agency.
Is it control or surrender? I mean if you suddenly believe that you live in a world where nothing is your fault because the Jews, Bilderberg, elements of the Republican or Democractic party in league with Aliens are controlling everything so all of your life's failures are not your fault, its a powerful inducement for the foolish.
It also gives great encouragement to gun nuts and anti government types because now the whole militia concept in their mind is heavily justifiable because they may need to fight the black helicoptered UN invasion army in combination with a complicant globalist US Government some day, so we need this intelligence and guns to form and effective resistance.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
They meet some of the same needs, but religions typically have some positive utility as well. They transmit useful social values, and can give people meaning, solace, and a sense of community. Conspiratorial thinking does not. It’s religion shorn of all wisdom and positive social value.
You do put things in interesting terms. I would argue that to the Conspiracy idiot they ignore the malignant aspects of their beliefs. They feel it gives them a sense of community, and like mindedness in their minds. Its why you see these well attended conventions and group talks and presentations where they can gather and theorize. So yeah I think that Conspiracy is extremly communal and as mentioned above, give solace in that in a world controlled by evil historical powerful groups that their lack of achievement or accomplishment is not their fault.
And I think though that wile its shorn of wisdom, logic and common sense, to them its of incredible positive social value. They get friends and like minded people, and they feel like they are the resistance in a hostile land.
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Are they bound by the rules of the sea, in their view? Because I'd be fine with dropping them in the middle of the ocean on a raft or something.
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