A term I just learned about that really describes everything right now: hypernormalisation. The elaborate pretense that clearly and obviously failing systems are not failing and everything is ok. Originally coined to describe life just before the Soviet Union collapsed, but also applies to late stage capitalism.
Crucially, it does not imply a conspiracy. It is engaged in by the majority of society, because the alternative is unbearable and unimaginable.
[#]uspol #canpol
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@dawngreeter
Why are so many people so sure conspiracies don't exist, when we have proof that in the recent past they did exist and that they dramatically altered the US political landscape to benefit specific interests?
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@johnzajac @dawngreeter So, it's not that conspiracies never exist, obviously they do, it's that, at the scale that most conspiracy theories require, they're next to impossible to hide. It's the "two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead" thing, the vaster the conspiracy, the more leaky it gets. Take Snowden, for example. Most people working in tech knew that the NSA was snarfing a bunch of data, maybe not specifics, but it was more "oh, so that's what they were doing".
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@rootfake @johnzajac @dawngreeter I don't think this is a great argument. MKUltra and the early nuclear projects both involved tens of thousands of people. Both had private researchers scattered across the country keeping their mouths shut for decades.
I think the argument against conspiracy theories is that they very rarely predict actually conspiracies (suppression of climate evidence by Exxon), when they do they're full of wild inaccuracies (HAARP, MLUltra), or they are provably false (like a ton of UFO stuff that we now know was created by the US government to keep UFO conspiracies away from learning about top secret weapons development)
Conspiracy Theorists are the butt of a massive joke against them. They perpetuate what's false and distract from what's true.
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@AeonCypher @rootfake @dawngreeter
COINTELPRO comes to mind as a conspiracy that was basically hidden or ridiculed for a half century before being revealed, that involved multiple government agencies and thousands of people.
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@johnzajac @rootfake @dawngreeter That's a great example. Though the people saying it was happening didn't use the phrase Cointelpro and weren't the usual conspiracy theory suspects. They were recounting personal experiences.
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@johnzajac @rootfake @dawngreeter same w MKUltra actually. Hippies amd others associated withthe country culture were talking about it before it finally came out in the hearings.
They didn't have special information, they were targets and were repeating their experiences.
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@AeonCypher @johnzajac @dawngreeter those are great examples! And yeah, lacking any sort of predictive power is another great argument against. The thing about COINTELPRO and MKUltra is that the core teams were actually fairly small. Like, MKUltra was massive, but most of it's size was the CIA funding research into psychedelics secretly, the core team out dosing people secretly and setting up CIA run brothels was a much smaller team that worked directly for the CIA
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@rootfake @johnzajac @dawngreeter the MK family of programs was massive, but most of the people working on it had no idea they were working on it.
I also will not that there is a statistical problem with guesstimate how prevalent conspiracies are. In that we only have measurements for when they are discovered.
What is certain is that we can't take a conspiracy theory as evidence of anything. In fact, it's argue a body of conspiratorial literature is inversely correlated with fact.
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@AeonCypher @johnzajac @dawngreeter exactly! and yeah that's a really good point, there's definitely potential for lots of shady stuff we never found out about. It comes down to the same rule that applies to all knowledge, only believing things when there is evidence to support them. Conspiracy theories tend to operate on the exact opposite logic, creating a claim, then dismissing anything that doesn't support it, they're effectively weaponized confirmation bias.
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@rootfake @AeonCypher @dawngreeter
Speaking of conspiracies...
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@johnzajac @rootfake @AeonCypher I just think we need to keep in mind that one should never attribute to malice what can more easily be attributed to stupidity. Or, as the Brits would put it, cockup before conspiracy.
But more importantly than that, never attribute to either malice or stupidity what can more easily be explained by actors following incentives in a complex system.
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@dawngreeter @rootfake @AeonCypher
I mean, isn't "a large number of powerful people working in secret to hide a plague" and "a large number of powerful people working in secret to hide a plague because there are incentives in the system for them to do so" a distinction without a difference?
Obviously conspiracists have incentives, systemic or otherwise.
Also, this is both unprecedented and literally inexplicable absent a malign conspiracy. We don't do it with any other pathogen.
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@dawngreeter @rootfake @AeonCypher
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@johnzajac @dawngreeter @AeonCypher arguably the difference is that it's not really a secret. It's less "a shadowy cabal is covering up covid deaths" and more "society at large has decided "getting back to normal" is more important than people's lives". There's not really a "plan", just a lot of pressure to make things look more "normal". It's a mostly semantic distinction, but it's important because it changes how we look for solutions.
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@johnzajac @dawngreeter @AeonCypher the conspiracy theory gives a false sense of "here's who's behind this", which is comforting because it creates an enemy that can be fought. The reality is much more complex, and if you don't change the systems, the next group of people in power will just do the same thing.
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@rootfake @johnzajac @AeonCypher @dawngreeter …consider “emergent phenomena,” that is, an unpredictable behavior of a system as a whole that cannot be strictly attributed to any particular component of the system, e.g., stop and go traffic. No individual driver is responsible. It emerges from collective behaviors. “Conspiracy theories” may be bad explanations for phenomena based on what we are predisposed to see, i.e., intentional behavior.
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@meltedcheese @rootfake @AeonCypher @dawngreeter
POSIWID.
Stop and go traffic is a result of a culture bent on getting private, individual cars into the hands of as many people as it can, while not building, expanding or upgrading any alternative means of transportation.
I can see the argument that COVID eugenics is just our system's designed preference for death over equity. But it's not some random thing, and individuals are responsible for their immoral actions, regardless of the system.
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@johnzajac @AeonCypher @dawngreeter @rootfake Definitely agree with the personal responsibility part. In situations as serious as this, it is not excusable to simply follow the crowd.
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