Much has been made of the notion that conspiracy beliefs are "irrational," resulting from people paying too much attention to emotions or other aspects of the Intuitive mind. In this week's blog post I argue that conspiracy beliefs actually exploit flaws of the _Narrative_ mind that predispose people to accept leaps in logic or counterfactual claims. https://sites.google.com/view/two-minds/blog
conspiracy theories go very far back very far back --without going into history, from personal experience it's the kennedy assassination.
"Conspiracy theorists" is a CIA term invented to besmirch those with ideas contrary to Gov't narrative. Approximately 70% of the population accept as doctrine the pronouncements of those whom they consider "authorities". They do so without question. Meanwhile, about 30% of the population will have doubts and do research when "authorities" such as the Federal Government and Big Corporate (including Big Pharma) make public statements. In other words, that 30% investigate. They will accept "theories" only after checking competent testimony, researching, using reason and logic, and not just intuition and emotional feeling. An essay by Dr. Emanuel E. Garcia, MD, sums up naive and uninspected beliefs vs. research: https://newzealanddoc.substack.com/p/the-naive-belief-in-governmental?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1144743&post_id=116496485&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email.
Whether governments are benevolent or harmful, I feel compelled to note that the post above illustrates multiple points from my blog post: (a) questioning others' motives (i.e., the CIA invented this term to besmirch others -- even if true, it doesn't seem to apply to my cute little example about the Loch Ness monster), (b) a sense of suspicion (i.e., "authorities" are not to be trusted -- the scare quotes convey suspicion), and (c) ad hominem arguments (i.e., people who agree with government policies are by definition using intuition and emotional feeling rather than reason and logic --- we actually don't know how they decided, and for different people it could be for different reasons). I also specifically mention the example of people who believe in conspiracies telling others to "do your homework" (above, stated as "have doubts and do research"), as a shorthand way to discount commonly accepted beliefs without actually providing evidence to the contrary. The above post was likely not intended to promote any specific conspiracy theory, but it does seem to fall prey to some of the same logical arguments that lead to conspiracies' acceptance.
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