Why does everyone believe in conspiracy theories nowadays?

things happen that no one expects
not because we hide them from each other
but because we hide them from ourselves

mostly because our egos refuse to accept our not knowing,
even knowing most of the time we really don't.

everything doesn't have to "be fine",
to still have nothing to do with people telling each other what to pretend

 

Well not everyone. Mainly Retrumplicans.

 

I wish all people were just Supporters of the law and constitution. Life would be easier.

As for beliefs, most people just believe what they want. These beliefs subject to change at any moment.

 

Because they're afraid, confused, and feel powerless. The world is a violent and chaotic place. Conspiracy theories give the reassurance of security and predictability via simplistic, easily understood (if erroneous) answers to complex existential questions. Being one of the select few who possesses "the secret" gives people a (false) sense of importance and personal power. Cults operate in precisely the same way.
We have a K-12 educational culture which eschews teaching logical analysis and critical thinking for memorized bits of out-of-context data that can be regurgitated on demand by rote, and a militant and bellicose religious minority that tirelessly works to repress education and science while promoting blind faith and obedience, in particular the notions that facts don't matter and all theories are created equal; creationism is just as valid as Darwinism (despite the 100-odd years of accumulated empirical evidence for one, and absolute zero evidence for the other), and despite all historical evidence to the contrary, America was founded by and for White Christians as an explicitly White Christian nation. We now have several generations of adults who passionately believe in Manifest Destiny without being able to cogently articulate it, and cannot reliably distinguish between their opinion and objective fact.
Once someone buys into a conspiracy theory, they are more susceptible to others; if you can convince an otherwise rational adult that the world is 6,000 years old and there aren't any dinosaurs because they couldn't fit on the Ark, you've got them; you can now convince them of anything, no matter how preposterous. Add that willful gullibility to some carefully cultivated confirmation bias, and you see the strategy of the Republican Party's unholy alliance with the American Taliban and the resultant MAGA cult. Reich-wing hate propaganda seduces White males into the ridiculous notion that millionaires like Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage are just ordinary working-class guys, just like them, sharing the same values (prejudices) as them; who then piggy-back their Fascist agenda onto that contrived sense of affinity. The reason they are collectively so outrageous is because they desperately need outrage; they're constantly dangling the false security carrot of easy simplistic answers in front of their viewers while whipping them mercilessly with the stick of incendiary outright lies carefully crafted to stoke their ethnocentric fear; Democrats aren't just Socialists, they're demonic pedophiles who eat babies; Honduran child refugees at the border are really Islamic State jihadis cleverly disguised in hoodies coming to inflict Gay marriage on everyone and steal Christmas. To keep people on Food Stamps believing that billionaires shouldn't pay taxes and people without health care that Medicaid is evil, it is utterly essential to thoroughly repress frontal cortex rational analytic thought, so they keep poking their amygdala lizard-brains with sharp sticks, keeping them in a perpetual fight-or-flight response of sheer existential terror, which to no one's surprise they express as violent paleolithic 'us versus them' rage. The atavistic survival instinct overrules all other higher brain functions, which is why you can't even begin to reason with them unless you can find a way to first rinse their brains of all of the catecholamines Fox News keeps constantly flooding them with.

 

I agree with your post, but I am not sure we can know reality. We learn, we try, and we believe we know, yet my reality is far different than others. I think we can be united only by Love, and Compassion for each other.

 

Conspiracy theories go up and down along with the Hollywood trends of invading aliens and Stannic Cults. I'm working on how to popularize conspiracy theories among academics, about their students. Its easier than it might sound, all you require are the appropriate euphemisms and analog logic.

 

Human beings tend to have a strong aversion to REALITY.

AKA - people are idiots.

OP, I know that's not what you want to hear but...

That IS the TRUTH of the matter...

AKA - REALITY!

 

Belief in conspiracy theories is a symptom of powerlessness | Edward Snowden

 

Belief in conspiracy theories is a symptom of a culturally stunted sense of humor, something Snowden doesn't comprehend. English, for example, is a dualistic language that suppresses even the knowledge that it has a second grammar, because it deliberately favors classic logic over fuzzy logic. If you're going to talk about how people think, it helps to know how to use a dictionary.

You could say each culture decides what its OK to laugh about, and many of them would rather you cry or get angry, than laugh at them, because humor can used to easily expose countless lies of the wealthy and powerful. Conspiracy theories reflect how much we bullshit each other and ourselves, with the US being famous for producing a line of crap a mile long. The issue for Snowden, is the salt-of-the-earth humor is being suppressed, or more people would be flat out accusing conservatives of being blatant liars not worth giving the time of day.

 

The CIA can't overthrow foreign governments without conspiring. All it takes is more than one.

I think some people believe them because they've been involved or witnessed it first hand. I love newspapers.com -- you can see everything chronologically, and it seems like the only difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is 1-50 years.

 

People have been conspiring for thousand of years and will continue til the end of time.

 

precisely. people, most of us even, network with at least few others, so we believe in what we engage in ourselves.
be that as it may. some of them are bit of a ways out there. mostly why people believe in the ones other people come up with to con each other,
i mean when this is so extreme of the probabilities being so low, gullibility i think, also i think people hunger for strangeness while feeling confined by their neighbors beliefs,
to be hesitant to openly admit doing so. so they follow the herds of the illusion of safety in numbers, like if everyone else is making an idiot of themselves, maybe no one will notice.
i mean its silly to not just openly believe that most strangeness is a good thing which it is. but these, kinds of harmful rumors because some people believe they get something out of what they encourage other people to believe, well that's not really a very good or useful thing, no matter how normalized.

 

most conspiracy theories start out as humor.
or is that most humor starts out as conspiracy theories?

either way probably explains my lack of enthusiasm for either.

 

Because real conspiracies do happen, but most end up like the one below

 

Tin
Foil
Hat