Conspiracies are skill issues

One day I had a conversation with someone who was the standard cultural right-winger: against “wokeness”, angry at Disney movies and practically convinced that thousands of kids were gender transitioning every week. I personally am not interested in these cultural war issues because they never seemed real, just fake outrage fed by people whose interests are aligned with having an outraged population (influencers and politicians). However I still tried to have this conversation with him, but from an economical point of view, trying to explain that companies are really just people constantly figuring out how to make money, if that means a movie with a minority so be it; but he was adamant that there was some sort of liberal agenda set up by a secret government with the goal of planting ideas he didn’t like.

My initial answer was to really do my best to explain how impossible this theory was by way of simple economics. That maybe because most cinemas are in cities, which are more liberal, Disney decided to make movies for them, or maybe that Disney lost its creative touch when they became a giant holding company instead of a studio and now just remakes classics intended for a different audience as they struggle to create new franchises.

But no, it was deeper than that for him, much deeper. There couldn’t be any simple explanation as to why the ideas he liked weren’t “mainstream”, there had to be a group with an agenda to specifically erase “people like him”. People like him could be anything he felt he was a part of: white/male/straight/cis/religious. The conversation turned to me trying to understand why he would think that, why would be the reason for such a group to want to eliminate you. He had these various theories, always assuming that “his group” was a threat to the supposed secret group; the threat always came down to be that “his group” was superior in some way. All conspiracies really just stem from that idea.

I was still trying to understand his reasoning a bit more even though he sounded irrational, and I said that if he genuinely believed that his group was superior, why aren’t they the secret group? Why aren’t they the ones manipulating everyone? Why are they the victims? I think that kind of broke his brain for a moment. He had other conspiracies to explain how it got to where we are now, but the conversation ended there.

We kept talking every now and then, not always about this, and I could see the evolution in the conspiracies, always irrational, paranoid and still rooted in his group being somehow superior (note that the group he attached himself to changed a few times) as all conspiracies are.  With these conversations (with him and other people like him) I ended up noticing something: on one hand there’s the need to be the superior group but on the other hand there’s the victim mentality that places them as the inferior group (in their own logic, not mine); and they can’t reconcile the two, I think that’s what broke his brain in the first conversation.

You might think “okay what’s the point? You’re just saying that conspiracists are irrational” and sure I’m not saying much here, but it tells me something that I think is relevant: conspiracies hide a feeling of inadequacy for their proponents, it goes deeper than providing a group to belong to and a cause to fight for, it provides an excuse for not living up to the standards you, or the people around you, have.

Furthermore I think it explains a lot of the methods used by the right-wing in this past decade. They are trying to reconcile the reality of "being inferior" with the fantasy of "being superior", and if you're convinced that the illegitimate current secret "superior group" is manipulating everyone, and that it's working, then it doesn't take long to conclude that you should use the same manipulation methods to win; and I think that's exactly what's happening. You end up doing exactly what you think the enemy secret group is doing. You see it in things like Musk (publicly) buying elections while accusing Soros of doing the same without evidence. Or actually censoring ideas you don't like after spending a decade "defending" free speech. (I also think it partly explains Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but maybe I'll write about that another time.)

However, while these methods might work in the short-term, they never do in the long-term, because as we saw they are rooted in irrational thinking. You could even argue that they lead to these ideas being shunned for the foreseeable future, at least until new generations forget about the past and the cycle restarts.