At some point we all got smart enough to realize that, even if everybody believes it, it still might be totally wrong.

1000 years ago that kind of thinking would get you burned at the stake.

So ya, progress.

Mk ultra, contra, sterilization of native American women and the intentional infection of African Americans, operation snow white, operation mocking bird, 5 eyes, the business plot, the ongoing business plot 2.0

Uhhh that one room that’s capturing the internet in real time, I forget it’s name.

False flags throughout history.

Food is definitely a weird one. A lot of us were taught advertisement slop (the food pyramid) in science class. And we witnessed the boom and bust of fad ‘diets’ pushed by well-respected yet-to-be-disgraced lunatics. Nowadays both those things merged and live on as the Instagram ‘health and wellness’ influencer industry.

You better start believe in conspiracy theories, because you’re in one

I don’t know, but I started realizing that nearly all of the holiday traditions I’d ever participated in originated by way of some well received piece of advertising. It’s all a mess. It’s all people lying to each other for power, influence, and resources back to the very beginning. The internet certainly allows for messages to travel and build to critical mass faster, but humanity and this behavior originated together, only the tools change.

https://www.pbssocal.org/food-discovery/food/revisiting-the-evils-of-the-food-pyramid

Food is a weird one. I’ve heard it wasn’t just lobbyists but an attempt to drop inflation, by prioritizing low input foods over high input foods.

When did academic journals just start publishing nonsense? When did conspiracy theories like a shadow cabal of evil people that record the rich and powerful abusing children become obvious reality? When did literally hundreds of government officials state UFOs are real, they’re not human, and there’s a good chance they’re not natural phenomena?

Science only has trust if you can trust those with the means to verify the work, do actually verify the work. The reproducibility crisis in all scientific fields was at a peak before LLMs were on every single phone; now there no such thing as trustworthy peer reviewed research that can be reproduced, even if the money was there to test everything that was published.

Tl;Dr the entire scientific world lost credibility and a whole lot of conspiracies were proven real as more CIA docs got declassified. Anything might be true at this point.

I feel in this new world ruled by social media and the need for online attention as a measure of self worth, conspiracy theories are the low hanging fruit answer to standing out and getting that attention.

Honestly I think that this isn’t in inherent to the modern world, in earlier ages it “they” was probably attributed to gods and what not. “Why does lightning spark fires in the fields”: “They (the Gods) are probably angry at our insolence”. Fast forward to the present where religion and the supernatural have less hold on human thinking and that type of idea is shifted to a nameless, faceless “they”, orchestrating and manipulating events in secret.

For a fun look at this occurrence, read James Tynion’s fantastic Department of Truth comic that deals with the truth and popular American conspiracy theories.

Paranoia is a survival trait dating back to our ape ancestors.

I think it’s always been this way, but social media has for sure exacerbated it. People really want to believe there’s some big order, some grand control, somebody in charge that all makes sense somewhere somehow.

“They” don’t want you to know because its all about power and control is weirdly a lot more palatable than “shit just happens”.

MKUltra was a secret government program that experimented on people using LSD and torture. The man who became the Unabomber was one of its victims.

COINTELPRO was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive. This included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement , Chicano and Mexican-American , and independence movements (including Puerto Rican independence groups).

The Iraq War was predicated on “weapons of mass destruction” which the government knowingly lied about.

The United Fruit Company backed a coup in Honduras.

General Motors conspired to collapse the streetcar industry to gain a monopoly on public transportation.

Cigarette companies suppressed information on the health effects of cigarettes.

Oil companies suppressed information on the environmental effects of fossil fuels.

Purdue Pharma conspired to suppress the risks of Oxycontin and to expand the use of the drug to levels they knew would cause addiction.

My point is, there are true conspiracies all the time. The internet has made it possible for more people to know about it. Unfortunately it has also made it easier for false conspiracy theories to propagate

• Actual conspiracies and manipulation (leading to probably most imperial wars of the 20th century till today)
• A justified distrust in the government, who people identify readily as not defending their interests in the slightest
• Conspiracy theories straight up cooked up by states to misdirect, or propagated heavily from media that are either state aligned or conveniently left unsanctioned
• The manufacturing of a climate of anti-science (in the US specifically)

Are the main reasons I can identify for why it’s become such a norm. When things like MK Ultra, Cointelpro, Operation Gladio…etc are all declassified, the bar gets puts pretty fucking high for what states are willing and able to do.

Speak for yourself. Whenever I hear the vague “they” I ask who exactly that is supposed to be. Sometimes in earnest, sometimes I just sarcastically throw it back at them: They?

But as far as I can I try to make sense of what people are trying to tell me.

BTW a PhD does not protect one from being nuts, please perish the thought.

In the case you mentioned I’d really like to know why they said it wasn’t true anymore, in addition to who “they” are.

The answer was about a vague ‘they’ wanted us to think that, but it wasn’t true anymore.

I hear the vague ‘they’ so frequently now it’s just a normal conversation.

If you want to know what “they” someone might be talking about, then ask them. Some conspiracies are very much real.

Michael Parenti, 1996, Dirty Truths: Reflections on Politics, Media, Ideology, Conspiracy, Ethnic Life and Class Power:

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary.

Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history.

Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people.

At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95).

Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.