"What's amusing to be is how anyone can look at the incompetence of governments across the world, and conclude they'd be capable of any kind of organized conspiracy against the general population."
You see conspiratorial thinking as some kind of bug in the thinking of insuffciently skeptical and analytical minds; a branch of stupidity. But it's not. It's a self-defense mechanism which, like other things considered antiquated and ineffcient like borders and control over immigration saves people from mass death.
These things don't exist because people are stupid and can't reason. They exist because people aren't stupid and do reason and then believe in their own mind's creations.
No matter how smart or sophisticated or computer-aided your reasoning is, no matter how big your data set becomes, you will only match and elucidate upon, but not beat, instincts which evolved under real Darwinian pressures which make you aware and wary of things which kill en masse.
The listed examples are conspiracies by the dictionary definition - "a group of people acting in harmony to a common, illegal end" - but I don't think they're the same thing the parent poster was referring to. Conspiracy theories generally revolve around some secret action by the government or other large organizations, not open slaughter. A better example might be COINTELPRO.
Technically the government itself is a form of conspiracy against the general population. But people don't know that, even educated people, because political science isn't mandatory in higher education. But labeling something as conspiracy theory is a useful tool to silence discussions about all the evil governments and large organizations do.
Right. Conspiracies happen all the time because there are plans, which if understood by those upon whom the planners wish to enact them, would be rejected by their targets.
That describes most plans people have.
So the planners deceive and dissemble. That is how the world has always worked.
What's more, it's instinctive knowledge that this is happening all the time. Suspicion of those in power is a human instinct which, like all instincts, optimizes our survival chances under the conditions for which it evolved. WRT to political conspiracies, those conditions still hold today.
The way to think about conspiracy theories is the same way you think about inventors and inventions.
Nature produces inventors (conspiracy minded individuals) many of whom produce only harebrained inventions ("conspiracy theories" so called) some more who produce hit and miss inventions and a few which produce inventions which are overwhelming important and matter to survival ("Hitler is going to kills us all, we must flee right now!" - spoken by a Jew in 1933 Munich).
What this mapping between domains, inventions and conspiracies, also implies is that just because someone was wrong about one conspiracy doesn't mean they are wrong about all conspiracies and their credibility should not be automatically bankrupted if they believe one or two false conspiracy theories.
I do read some conspiracy theory sites and like to hear plausible (non-alien/ lizard people) ones because I want my mind to at least entertain the idea. It's like panning for gold. Most of it is nothing. Once in a while, maybe a little taste of something and I retain it dimly awaiting future possible supporting evidence.
For example, the "desperate labor shortage" and "Americans don't like STEM" meme is a clear conspiracy amongst employers and attorneys and their clients to control engineering wages and have more of the profits go to business owners. I used to not know about that "conspiracy theory" then I heard it and wondered if it could be true then over time the evidence for it became incontravertible.
Tell that to the Jews in Deutchland circa 1931...
Tell that to the Kulaks in the Ukraine in 1930 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor,
Tell that to the educated classes in China under Mao;https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/mao-murd...
You see conspiratorial thinking as some kind of bug in the thinking of insuffciently skeptical and analytical minds; a branch of stupidity. But it's not. It's a self-defense mechanism which, like other things considered antiquated and ineffcient like borders and control over immigration saves people from mass death.
These things don't exist because people are stupid and can't reason. They exist because people aren't stupid and do reason and then believe in their own mind's creations.
No matter how smart or sophisticated or computer-aided your reasoning is, no matter how big your data set becomes, you will only match and elucidate upon, but not beat, instincts which evolved under real Darwinian pressures which make you aware and wary of things which kill en masse.