Discerning gullible people, with judgment
In these last decades, conspiracy theories blew up. Stuff inside vaccines, UFOs, chemtrails, but-you-can’t-see-the-stars, it’s weird for a building to collapse just because a large airplane crashed into it at 750 km/h, and so on…
Usually, when I watch some press reports, or I notice how widespread some ridiculous “documentaries” are, or I read some comments on the web, I’m left speechless. Then, however, I remember that it’s always important to distinguish between the extreme cases and the other ones. Beware: not because those less extreme are anything close to being right, not at all, but because when we come across those, we need to assimilate them (and, optionally, criticize them) in a different way.
In fact, any opinion has a large group of hopeless cases, but they only represent the radicalized version of that idea.
The most significant difference between hopeless cases and the other cases is the level of education, but also the level of suffering and of personal anguish. Usually, the radical cases are an awful mix of certain levels of ignorance and mental illness.
In this sense, if we get a dude noticeably missing a sound mind who’s talking about microchips during the rally, or we get your boomer family member who’s telling you about something he read on the smartphone, we can interpret these two cases quite differently.
In the second case, Internet is something new for them, like a slot machine magnified a thousand times, they don’t have the skill to check the sources because on Google you need to know how to write the keywords well and, I’m not saying to use stuff like “site:”, but at least be conscious about the nature of the website you ended up reading, and question its reliability, or they don’t even know about the concept of “checking the sources”. Of course, television and whatnot don’t help.
Then there is the case of the young student with good grades and a cheerful personality that believes about some aspects regarding UFOs; and so, at that point, things get seemingly more complex.
But in reality, since we’ve just understood that it’s not about a conspiracist-or-not-conspiracist question and it’s instead a range of variables, we need to remember that there are e.g. young girls that believe in Bach flower remedies or that want to unironically read your palm. Therefore, if one is open to things like that, it’s understandable that their confusion in regard to some conspiracy theories are greater than the one of e.g. an atheist teaching, I dunno, chemistry.
So you can’t put this young person in the same category of the hopeless cases when in reality he/she simply is a bit confused about that specific topic and didn’t have enough time to get (or is not that good at getting) a better and more correct knowledge about the matter. Or, navigating the scheduled tasks of one’s life, they just let themselves be bewitched by that thrill, without spending time on boring self-reflection because after all, it’s nice, at first, to believe in something mysterious. When dopamine hits, it just hits, not much can be done.
The issue with religions, apparently less stupid because spiritual in nature, actually is very similar, that is, even here we find both the hopeless cases (e.g. priests who are not just pretending for their own benefit, but those who actually believe in what they do – yup, they exist), the middle ground cases (e.g. the hyper-cultured theologian who still wants to wallow in fairy tales anyway because it feels good), and the young and smart philosophy student who happens to also be religious (and maybe tells you the usual thing «Well I don’t believe in the exact God of the Bible, but I believe on a certain idea of mine about blah blah…»). Well, facing this young person too, as we did with the previous one believing UFOs, we could ask ourselves how is it possible that even among those who know how to use a computer and with no clear mental illnesses, there are believers of various religions. The answer is that the variables rarely equal zero, and even the healthy cheerful person still must face the problem of death, which is a problem that’s about your psyche – an issue that again is about personal suffering and anguish (even though less than an anti-vaxxer suffering from PTSD who’s talking about microchips). There is always a patsy inside each of us.
So, this last young man we talked about, could be basically defined as an ontological conspiracist.