Andrew McIntosh – On Conspiracy Theories (Ineffectual Whinging)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWA-nqxSDLY[🡕]
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that conspiracists are right. Covid didn’t exist, millions of people are dying from Covid vaccinations, there’s a global elite who are all satanists who raped and ate children who want to enslave humanity through environmentalism, they’re all humanoid lizards who live in the Hollow Earth, advertisers put pornography in billboard posters, both Trump and Bolsonaro won their last respective elections, 5G towers cause to control people’s thoughts, nothing ever happens by accidental chance…
The question is big: so what?
So what, if that’s what really what’s going on? What does it matter? Because even if some, or all, or none of those things were true, there’d be nothing anyone could do about it anyway. If these elites really are as powerful as they’re said to be, there’s no way anyone can bring them down. Certainly not through social media posting and the occasional walking around with a placard with your mouth whole open.
One of the main reason for getting into conspiracy theories is to get the illusion that by doing so, you’re exercising some kind of agency in the world. If the world seems like an irrational chaotic place, believing in a kind of a cult system working behind it with its own agenda, gives the impression that the eerie irrationality and chaos is in fact rational and orderly, thus giving a code of meaning to it. What’s more, by believing whatever the particular conspiracy system is you believe, you give yourself credit for being “smart enough” to understand it.
The problem here is that even if the conspiracies are true, it doesn’t make a speck of difference to our position in the world: weather everything is being definitely manipulated behind the scenes by evil geniuses, or weather everything is – as I like to think it is – just bullshit cause-and-effect, the only thing that remains constant is that none of us have any real control over it. Whatever our world views might be, we do not have agency in those worlds, or the real material whole we all languish in. We really are a lot smaller and less important that we believe ourselves to be or would like to be, and realizing that can be pretty depressing. Still, pretending to know what’s really going on, being part of a scene that knows it all, and looking down on all the normies who just can’t handle the truth anyway, is a reasonable method to dodge the blatant fact that we’re all just cyphers in a world that’s out of our control, however chaotic it may seem or actually is.
In that, it doesn’t matter a speck if the conspiracy theories are true or not: we’re all just as helpless in such scenarios as we would be if the world for us – like the universe it floats around in – is just a result of material physical events that we barely know, let alone understand. One way or the other, we’ll always be insignificant.