 My name is Sam Vaknin and I am a columnist in Brussels Morning. Today we are going to discuss your favourite topic, conspiracies. The ruling Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, campaigning for votes, floated the counterfactual, twin conspiracy theories of tax on meat and 15 minute neighbourhoods, supposedly intended to restrict people's freedom of movement. Senior, as well as fringe politicians in Poland, Italy, Lithuania and Bulgaria are pushing the eat insects instead of meat, tribe, trope, which originated, or else, on Russian television. Conspiracies are nothing new, but it was the murder of John F. Kennedy, America's youthful president, that ushered in a golden age of conspiracy theories. The distrust of appearances and official versions was further enhanced by the Watergate scandal in 1973 and 4. Conspiracies and urban legends offer meaning and purposefulness in a capricious, kaleidoscopic, maddeningly ambiguous and cruel indeterminate uncertain world. Conspiracies empower their otherwise helpless and terrified adherents. So there's New World Order or One World Government, Zionist cabals, Jewish cabals, Catholic, black, yellow, red, subversion, QAnon, the machinations attributed to the Freemasons, the Illuminati, all flourishing, and all have been flourishing from the 1970s onwards. Paranoid speculations reached frenzied, frenzied natives, following the deaths of celebrities such as Princess Di. Books like The Da Vinci Code, which deals with an improbable, Catholic conspiracy to erase from history the true facts about the fate of Jesus, these kind of books sell millions of copies worldwide. But there is more to conspiracy theories than mass psychogenic illness. Conspiracies are also big business. Voluntary associations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch societies, they are past their heyday, but they still gross many millions of dollars a year. TV talk shows, documentaries, tabloids, dedicated magazines, online forums, games, and YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, they all make hay for content creators and the platforms they are on. Conspiracism is the psychological propensity or proclivity to believe in unproven and unverified oft-repeated conspiracy theories, urban legends, myths, and patent falsehoods, usually involving an evil intent of a cabal to abuse, manipulate, and exploit the unsuspecting peaceful masses. Most people are gullible, sheeple, yeah? Most people believe literally anything and anyone, a well-documented and thoroughly researched phenomenon known as Bayes' Raid, fallacy. People then, having been cajoled into some conspiracy theory or convinced of it or converted into it, they defend their misconceptions fiercely as they actively align themselves with other people. They belong in order to signal their uncritical conformity in like-minded tribes and silos. Frequent exposure in these echo chambers to toxic nonsense solidifies the belief in these outlandish and inane narratives, a phenomenon known as consistency, supported by confirmation bias. Social media leverage consistency is grist to their perpetual mobile rumor and gossip mills. Other cognitive distortions feed into conspiracism too. Consider the proportionality bias, the erroneous conviction that great events are caused and occasioned by commensurately massive reasons, plots, dynamic processes of enormity. But this flies in the face of chaos theory and its butterfly effect. A lone grandiose disgruntled gunman in Texas can rock the entire world with one or two or three shots. We also find patterns where there are no patterns. Apophynia, pareidolia, these are the clinical terms. We connect dots that should remain discreet and unconnected. We find continuities in the disparate and the unrelated, including other people's actions, as related to their imputed motivations and this is known as intentionality bias. Conspiracism is a personality trait. Even after a favorite conspiracy is debunked, decisively debunked, there is a counterfactual residue left and this is known as the continued influence effect. The more you try to argue with a true believer, the more entrenched she or he becomes in his or her misinformation and paranoid skepticism. This is known as the backfire effect. Never argue with a true believer in religion or in conspiracies. Conspiracies, of course, thrive on ignorance. We don't know what causes autism and the anti-vaxxers. There is a smidgen of grandiosity involved as people trust their gut instincts, infallible gut instincts and consider themselves experts, enlightened in the know superior to the sheeple and as adepts. Yapti is a yapi with white trash background. You can find the yaptis mainly in the arts, including the performing arts, fashion on television and in information technology. Yaptis are young, urban, upwardly mobile and trash. They are functionally illiterate. There are high income, schizoid loners and possessed of the manners, habits and values of the underclass. When yaptis do socialize, it is to binge drink, to do drugs, to dance all night and to end up having casual sex with strangers. Yaptis are no families and they are highly itinerant and desultory. They are not as materialistic and competitive as their forerunners, the yaptis. Many of them have serious mental health problems, such as mood disorders and personality disorders, mostly borderline and narcissistic. Yaptis despise learning, hate experts, reject the elites and intellectuals. They are highly paranoid and they are into conspiracy theories. They congregate in professional conventions but otherwise communicate and collaborate exclusively online. They are both amoral and immoral or even defiantly antisocial. They dress like white trash, neglect their bodies except to adorn them with prison gang tattoos and gorge on all manner of medication. They wallow in video games and pointless TV series. They are pathetic, wannabe bad boys and bad girls. The British historian Arnold Toynbee said that when most members of society adopt the behaviors and customs of the ignorant, the impoverished and the inert lower class and when the elites abrogate their responsibility to show the way and to educate, these are the hallmarks of a dying civilization. Yaptis are the maggots on and in the corpse of what used to be the West. But conspiracism underlies even modern psychology itself. Treatment modalities, psychotherapies, belong to either of two camps. The one you see is what you get no nonsense correctional offices, for example, cognitive behavioral therapies, CBT. And the other camp is what you see is what you get conspiracy theories. What you don't see, depth psychology, the unconscious, complexes, shadows. This is what drives the human mind. This is what you should get. It's a conspiracy, of course. The unconscious is a conspiracy theory. Complexes are a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory's shadow is a conspiracy theory. The first school of what you see is what you get no nonsense assumes that overt behaviors and speech faithfully reflect the patients in a landscape. The second group is convinced that manifest conduct and words are there only to compensate for disguise and misrepresent underlying psychodynamic processes, as well as whole continents repressed, festering unconscious material. There's always a conspiracy, a collusion between various psychological constructs intended to hide the truth, the true self. In this sense, everyone has a false self to some degree. See the work by Jung, Goffman, Winnicott. Actually, the very word personality presupposes the existence of a mask. Mask, persona, intended to conceal various fears, fears of abandonment, rejection, ostracism, failure, intended to camouflage thwarted needs, urges, drives, desires, and emotional expression, intended to avoid true intimacy for the dread of being shunned, sadistically criticized, or hurtfully ridiculed, and intended to defend, via defense mechanisms, against the incursion and encroachment of ego-dystonic, uncomfortable, disorienting and painful reality. Psychology is a conspiracy theory. We have an innate need to make sense of the world. The more uncertain reality is, the more inclined we are to impose counterfactual narratives on reality. But it is when these works of fiction, hijack, politics, and science that we are in real trouble.