Last week, I wrote about how conspiracy theories, spread increasingly widely through ignorance and the internet -- on everything from Obama's birth certificate to alien visitations to end of the world alarmism and anti-vaccination idiocy -- were making it harder for us, as a civilization, to rally behind real, science-based solutions that may help us solve real problems.
Take climate change. When conspiracy crackpots make wild claims about it being some diabolical government plot, they make positive governments efforts more challenging to implement (see: Obamacare and the Tea Party). Ironically, they also further corporate interests that are only too happy to continue making money pumping carbon-based pollutants into the atmosphere.
While I did receive support and encouragement for the post from the Twittersphere, I also hit a nerve. Apparently you can accuse the government of poisoning people with fluoride but you can't call the people who do batshit crazy. And boy did the conspirati zombies come out to play.
Their responses taught me, and I use that verb loosely, that:
Conspirati believe they are critical thinkers and you are not: Much in the same as Sarah Palin believes she is a critical thinker, conspiracy theorists don't have any real use for conventional science. The scientific method that's been used to investigate and acquire knowledge based on empirical and measurable evidence for 500 years is ridiculed, replaced with cherry-picked, half-baked reasoning to bolster often unprovable beliefs. Take for instance a new bit of conspiracy garbage I discovered: chemtrails, ostensibly poison delivered by airplanes, visible by tell-tale trails of white chemicals off plane wings. In the reality-based world, these are contrails -- water vapor triggered by a plane's exhaust. As critically thoughtful as these conspirati think they are, they appear to have never asked why evildoers would poison us out in the open instead of simply pouring poison into our water system in the dead of night. This critical thinking eludes them. As it does when they claim that native Americans kept their hair long because it provided them with power -- but sadly not enough power to defend against invading Europeans. This is reminiscent of 2012 end-of-the-worlders who put so much faith in the prophetic abilities of the Mayans, the same people who never saw the Spanish coming.
Conspirati don't understand actual science: As alluded to, they don't seem aware of how scientific theories are rigorously tested, retested and openly testable. They still actually make farcical statements like "evolution is just a theory" without, seemingly ever having looked the word up in a dictionary. (Presumably the dictionarati have altered the definitions of words to discredit them.)
They also actually still childishly claim that -20C weather on a Sunday in February disproves that the global climate is warming over time. They discount evolution because we haven't found "missing links," seemingly unable to grasp that natural selection is a gradual process that takes place over millions of years and that species don't begin and end like presidential terms.
As far-fetched as evolution or climate change are to them, they do find it entirely credible that aliens created humans my merging their DNA with that of apes, even though it's hard enough to impossible to combine genetic material from a pair of related species, let alone two that would have evolved on entirely different planets.
And they still go on ad nauseum about the dangers of vaccines, but Penn and Teller (okay, mostly Penn) explain it better than I ever could.
Conspirati don't grasp the time space continuum: For instance, they'll have you believe Sumerian tales popularized by books like The Twelfth Planet, that another planet in our solar system approached or crashed into the earth and extinguished the dinosaurs, but never stop to wonder how the Sumerians, who lived 65 million years after this catastrophe, knew this. (Maybe aliens told them.)
Conspirati insist on deluging you with mountains of online "proof" and when you discover logical gaps in this material so big you could fit a UFO through them, you're called "closed-minded" and not a critical thinker (see above). And when you invite these folks to read, say, even a Wikipedia entry on the theory of evolution, they tell you it's not to be trusted because it's crafted by the Illuminati, the Rothschilds or Barack Obama. Or they just tell you to fuck off because you're so darned closed-minded.
Conspirati believe if you vilify their ludicrous ideas, those ideas must be true: This is called the Galileo fallacy after Galileo Galilei who was persecuted by the Catholic Church for discoveries about astronomy that were eventually proven right. As RationalWiki writes, it's not enough "that you are scorned by the establishment but also that you are correct -- that is, that the evidence supports your position. There is no necessary link between being perceived as wrong and actually being correct."
Conspirati believe everything real is hidden: Information is always being kept from us or censored, and decisions are always being made in dark rooms by all-powerful men, very often Jews, of course. (Never mind that 99% of the world is run by non-Jews. See 'critical thinkers' above.)
That last point may be the most important to understanding conspiracy crackpots, if that's even possible. Because if you listen to what they say about the all-powerful puppet-masters who make decisions that allegedly affect and direct our lives, it starts to sound an awful lot like religious faith. You know, God and/or the Devil toying with powerless and puny humans in ways we can't possibly understand.
In fact, conspiracy theories have been spinning themselves into religions and cults from day one. Think about it: thousands of years ago, ignorant, frightened people had no grasp of science or nature and couldn't understand how thunder and lightning, life and death and the world really worked. So they attributed it all to Yahweh or Allah or invisible malevolent forces.
Today, they just say it's the government or scientists or the Illuminati.
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