My own hypothesis is that conspiracy theories are a pathology of class consciousness. Feel like there’s a nameless, faceless THEY that makes all the calls, that lies to you all the time, and that absolutely does not have your best interests at heart?
Well…
…you aren’t wrong.
If you are a normal person there is a conspiracy against you, there has always been a conspiracy against you. The system does not have your best interests in mind. The system (even without any malice from its actors!) simply sees you as a resource to be consumed. Always a part of the means, never a part of the end.
The pathology comes when instead of figuring out what’s to blame[1] which is hard work (especially since the left’s been pretty firmly hijacked) you simply alight on a satisfying story that lets you blame someone with a face. See, it’s not very emotionally satisfying to blame ‘fundamental deep-down inadequacies in the way we organize into larger groups and how we prioritize resource distribution’ because you can’t punch those. It’s best to blame… oh, whoever. The Other. Reptile people. Doesn’t really matter, as long as you have licence to hate them and they have faces you can punch. And since no group, no possible group can influence the world to the extent it’s actually broken, it’s natural to start ascribing to them impossible powers, infinite wealth, divine foresight. Eventually it makes quite a story. And people like stories.
[1] The crusty old lefty in me wants to say ‘capitalism’ but it goes deeper than that to the very foundations of how societies structure themselves and what human-nature-in-groups is.
So what you have is the belief into a sort of protean half-formed conspiracy that gets concretized either by a story you tell yourself or a story you hear that seizes on the elements already present. This is why it looks like a contagion. The people ‘infected’ already believe. They just aren’t, quite, sure what it is they believe in until they hear someone with a slick story that covers so beautifully precisely the half-formed thoughts they’ve been having.
But I didn’t do the research on this. It’s just an impression I’ve formed from reading about this.
