 You know, let's talk about conspiracy theories a little bit because I think it's a conspiracy theory that's interesting. You know, they seem to dominate our environment. There seem to be all around us. There certainly seem to be periods of time in which there are more conspiracy theories. There seem to be a rise in conspiracy theories over the last decade or so. Now, I'm not sure that's actually true. So I've read a little bit of the research and some research suggests that actually there's no evidence of an increase in conspiracy theories. What there is evidence of is an increase of our exposure to conspiracy theories and that's because of the web and that's because of social media. That everything, that everything in every way, we have access to any stupid thing anybody says, we immediately get blown up in the media and it immediately gets blown up in social media in particular and we just see it. So it's unclear whether there actually are more conspiracy theories or less conspiracy theories is, you know, it's hard to tell but the idea is that again from the research that I've read and hard to tell how accurate it is that at least in America there seems to be a certain number of people who are susceptible to conspiracy theories. They shift from conspiracy theory to conspiracy theory. That number doesn't increase that much. It fluctuates here and there but it doesn't increase that much. Now whether that is true or not, I don't know. You know, I'm not an expert in this field and I'm sure there's contradictory studies. There's all kinds of studies out there. I don't know. I'm going to lay out what I think makes sense from my perspective regarding conspiracy theories, why I think they appear, what purpose they serve and why some cultures they seem to be more prevalent in some periods in history. I do think they're more prevalent in than others, right? So we will look at that. So first what is a conspiracy theory? A conspiracy theory is different than a conspiracy or a theory about a conspiracy. There are plenty of conspiracies, lots of conspiracies in the world. People conspire to do bad things and conspiracy theories generally have to do with bad things or at least with deception. A conspiracy, you know, all the time. Certainly something like Watergate was a conspiracy. You know, I'm sure Obama and his people conspired for a long time to pass the Obamacare Act and I'm sure Donald Trump right now is conspiring with his minions to figure out how to run a proper presidential campaign and talking to a lot of people in a lot of different places. So there are conspiracies, that is people getting together to plan something out in a sense, in secret, without letting people know, you know, deception might be involved but to achieve a particular goal, to achieve influence. Sometimes it involves actions that are illegal, sometimes it just involves manipulating the system in a way that gets you what you want. And in that sense, again, there are conspiracies all the time. Some conspiracies are illegal conspiracies and the government gets involved. Mafia and others engage in conspiracies all the time and you can have a theory about a conspiracy. You could think, you know, I think this and this and this is happening. I think the Clinton campaign is coordinating with the FBI about going after Donald Trump and if you have evidence for that, if you have evidence for that, if there's some reason that that might be true or if there's some indication or there's some thing you can point to that suggests that that is true, then it's a theory about a conspiracy and there's nothing wrong with that. The key there is evidence. The key there is reasonableness, which comes from evidence. On the other hand, you know, what is a conspiracy theory and again, don't think of this as a theory theory that is here where I think conspiracy theory means one thing that is the combined terminology. This is not a theory about a conspiracy. This is a conspiracy theory which has in our common usage come to me. An explanation for an event that involves a conspiracy that is unmoored from reality that is not where there is no evidence, where there is no fact to support it, that is unreasonable in that it is detached from reality, detached from the evidence, detached from facts. I don't know, there are lots of conspiracy theories that some of them are just blatantly false so it's easy to deal with, but basically they have to do with the fact that there's a group of people out there who want influence, who want to control your life and part of the way they control your life is by feeding you false information, feeding you false information, or by making you think that something happened when it did not, or that something is true when it is not. The most obvious of this is the Flat Earth conspiracy theory. The powers to be want you to believe the earth is round. I think there are a number of explanations for this. You know, they want you to believe, for example, that the earth is not the center of the universe, that the earth goes around the sun, that the earth is in that sense around, but it's not, it's actually flat, and it is the center of the universe and the sun does go around it and they come up with a bizarre physics to explain it all and to explain why this is. And again, the reason why you are told this falsehood, the reason why you are told this falsehood, the reason why you study it, the reason why you learn it, is to diminish the centrality of the human race and the world in the universe. It's a leftist conspiracy to undermine God, basically. Started a long time ago, I guess. And of course, the Flat Earth conspiracy is a ridiculous absurd, it's a joke, but it's not that people actually believe this to the extent that you can believe such nonsense or to the extent that that is even, in any sense, cognition. There are people who advocate for this, who talk about it, who say it, who argue for it, and so on. Another similar conspiracy, in the sense that it takes a piece of information that says everything you've been told about it is wrong. And it's wrong, again, because we wanna control you, we wanna pretend that we're better than we really are. And a good example there is the pretend that we're better than we really are, that the authorities, that the people. Remember, conspiracy theories arise out of a deep skepticism of any and all authorities, or any and all experts, any and all knowledge, that is acceptable by people. So, for example, the moon landing hoax. I don't know if you've heard about this, but there's a whole conspiracy theory out there that there was never any, they never landed on the moon, who weren't capable of landing on the moon. It's all American propaganda to try to make the US greater than it really is. It started in 1976, a self-published book called, We Never Went to the Moon. America's $30 billion swindle. All that NATO money went into somebody's pocket. Maybe the Elders of Zion pocket will get to that conspiracy theory later. And in 1978, there was a movie, Capricorn One, in 2001, there was a Fox documentary, conspiracy theory, did we land on the moon? It actually gave these idiots airtime. Now, there are millions of people who debunked this. It's just stupid to even think about debunking it, but one of the things that makes conspiracy theories, interesting, but easy to detect, easy to detect, is conspiracy theories attribute to the powers to be unbelievable efficaciousness. The powers to be are really good at what they do. They can fool you into thinking we went to the moon when we did not. They can create whole illusions like the earth is flat when the earth is round and convince you of it and cover the truth up efficiently and effectively. So these elites that we don't trust, that we don't believe in, that we don't like, that we, these experts, these university professors, whatever, they are unbelievably effective. Or the government that we think is corrupt and insane and inefficient and horrible in every respect. But when it comes to the conspiracy that I favor, they are amazingly good at hiding it, at deceiving you that it doesn't exist. And that's one of the characteristics is it associates unbelievable abilities and capabilities to people who otherwise were pretty skeptical about the ability to do pretty much anything, right? So, there's a bunch of these. Of course, QAnon is the latest. It assumes there's a whole democratic party apparatus that is amazingly efficient at abusing kids and children. And of course, there was such a apparatus. So it wasn't exactly the democratic party, but it was, you know, what's his name? The guy who had the island and who committed suicide or maybe was killed, who knows this conspiracy theory about that as well. But it wasn't the kind of conspiracy that gave it political incentives. Almost always, this is Epstein, there's almost always a political good versus evil, my camp versus your camp. And of course, political conspiracy theories are not unique to the left or the right. They are shared by both sides. The irrationality is not limited to any particular side, QAnon on the one hand, but on the left, you have all kinds of conspiracy theories about who runs the world. The Brandenburgs and the Elders of Zion. Of course, left and right, I mean, when it comes to conspiracy theories, they often share the same conspiracies because in terms of running the world, both left and right share the conspiracy theory, not all left and right, but the people who are engaged in conspiracy theories almost all share the conspiracy theory that it's Jewish bankers or bankers or the Rothschilds or the billionaires or something like that that is associated with it. And Jews seem to pop up in every single conspiracy theory from Kanye West to 9-11 conspiracies. I mean, notice the 9-11 conspiracy theory suggests that the Bush administration was super effective and efficient not only to blow up the buildings themselves but to arrange for the airplanes to fly into them at the same time so they could pin it on the Muslims, wasn't their fault. And of course, they were unbelievably efficient. Everything happened just according to plan and then they managed to cover it all up so that they basically convinced 99.95% of all the civil engineers in the world that the way the towers collapsed was actually feasible and actually the result of the airplanes going into those buildings. All of this was so beautifully orchestrated they are so effective that it's unbelievable how good the Bush administration is at planning, organizing and executing a complex operation. They can't take over Iraq properly. They can't execute a war in Afghanistan but they can pull a 9-11 off seamlessly, beautifully. Oh no, they did it so that they could invade Iraq so that they could go off to Saddam Hussein so they could get retribution for his father, he did it for his father. You know, Saddam Hussein had a hit on, this is not a conspiracy theory but it is a conspiracy. Saddam Hussein actually hired Hitman to kill George Bush Sr. So this was revenge. It's for the oil. Don't you know the Bush family? Really, secretly? Don't tell anybody, please? I don't want to spend false accusations but they really control the oil in Iraq so the whole war was there so that they could get control over the oil. And of course nobody knows that, there's no paper trail, only I know it. Maybe a few Iraqis. But funnily enough the Iraqis don't know it and the Iraqis government doesn't know it and the fact that Iraq gets all those revenues they don't know it. So they did it for the defense contractors, they did it for something else, they orchestrated entire 9-11, entire 9-11 they put together for this. Of course, there was an alternative explanation for 9-11 because we don't actually believe the Bush administration is that good, is that efficient, is that smart? No, the much more credible explanation for 9-11 is that the Jews did it, the Mossad did it. That Israel did it, maybe with the corporation of some people in Bush administration, maybe not, but they managed to hide it from anybody, they managed to plant bombs in all of the towers, they managed to collapse all the towers, again for 99.5% of all civil engineers to believe that this was even possible, that the planes doing it caused it because they claim of course is that there's no way that a plane going into a building and that jet oil burning would actually cause the towers to collapse down. Their claim is that that is impossible and they bring out the two civil engineers in the world who agree with them and they fall all the rest, all the rest are completely fooled by it. And they have an explanation for tower seven, which is inconsistent with explanation, 99.5% of civil engineers have fought why it fell, it doesn't matter, but it's the Jews did it. This is by the way believed extensively in the Middle East, we'll get to the Middle Eastern conspiracy theories in a minute. So the Israelis and the Mossad are super efficacious. The Bush administration is super efficacious. And it's easier to blame it on the Mossad because the Mossad has this aura of invincibility. One of the reasons it has an aura of invincibility is because nobody advertises their failures. But if you read up about the Mossad if you really read up about Israeli intelligence, you discover that just like everybody else in life, they too have failed. They're not quite as invisible, invincible. In all other conspiracies, Princess Diana's murder, it wasn't Fayad, it wasn't an accident. It was the world family, they were trying to get rid of her. It was King Charles, he wanted to marry this other woman. This was an easy way to get over the whole thing. Of course you've got GFK murder, so it's not the only murder that's that. You've got, oh, this is my favorite conspiracy theory because this is the only conspiracy theory that I was actually, I won't say, I never bought into it, but I was actually engaged with that I can remember in my life. I don't know if you guys, I mean, you guys might be too young to remember this, but there's the conspiracy of Paul McCartney's death. So if you take, is it Sergeant Pepper or the White Album? If you take one of the albums of the Beatles albums and you put it on a record player and you, with your hand, spin it backwards, spin it backwards, right? Then what you hear is Paul is dead, now you don't really hear Paul is dead, but if you expect to hear Paul is dead and you really focus on hearing Paul is dead, you will hear Paul is dead. And there's a bunch of other stuff about how they are walking over the crossroads in some of the album covers and there's a million, no, no, no, it's Paul McCartney, it's definitely Paul McCartney, it's not John Lennon, there's no conspiracy theory. John is really dead, but there's that established conspiracy theory that I, as a teenager, I remember actually doing that with the Beatles album, actually playing it backwards to hear Paul is dead, Paul is dead, and Revolution Number Nine on the White Album, Mark says. And there's also clues in the different Beatles covers and this was a whole thing in the late 1970s I remember about Paul McCartney is dead, right? JFK's assassination, of course, there were vast conspiracy theories there and we can talk about why it's, you know, I think a big reason here is the fact that the government won't actually release all the documents about the JFK assassination. Why isn't the information just public? It's decades ago, there's no intelligence that can be sourced. I mean, it might make some people look bad, but who cares, it's a long time for now. So one of the things that feeds conspiracy theories is definitely the hesitancy of the authorities to disclose information and to be overly secretive and generally the tendency of the government to be overly secretive. There should be very few secrets in government, I've said this before, very few secrets in government. Government is our servant. It shouldn't withhold information from us. So the idea that some of the JFK documents have been redacted that many of them have not been released is just crazy, crazy, right? And there are a million conspiracies about JFK and I think because, in particular, because it's such a big event because it's so unthinkable because the government has been so unwilling to disclose all the information that it has to what extent was Harvey Oswald involved with Phil and the Blank, Castro, Soviet Union, organized crime, CIA, Lyndon Johnson. I mean, my guess is he wasn't involved with any of them. My guess is that anybody's conspiracy around this is just that, just a conspiracy theory that is detached from reality, detached from facts. But there are some real questions that people have certainly about the motivation, particularly given that Harvey Oswald was killed so quickly. You know, there's maybe one of the more ancient conspiracy theories was the protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is a document that appeared in Russia in 1905 that describes how Jews were undermining, small group of Jews, powerful Jews, were undermining Christian morality, finance, and health in an attempt to take over the world, in an attempt to dominate the world. People as prominent supposedly as Henry Ford and Mel Gibson have in one way or another promoted this. Henry Ford paid to have half a million copies of the protocols of Zion published in, and of course the Nazis used this as part of their propaganda machine. So Elders of Zion is one of the many, many, many conspiracy theories that involves Jews running the world or attempting to run in the world and attempting to corrupt all of you Christians and really being in league with the devil. It's the one conspiracy theory, kind of broadly speaking, that really pisses me off because why aren't they contacting me? I wonder if Yom Khozoni is part of it, but they haven't contacted me. So anyway, I'm kidding, it's a joke. But it's out there and when you listen to Kanye and you listen to others talk about the Jews and the power the Jews have and the Jews controlling the media and things like that, it echoes the protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's just modernized, it's just in different format, but there's Jews are often in the middle of a conspiracy, often in conspiracy theories, particularly conspiracy theories associated with power and associated with wealth and associated with finance. In the 1980s and 90s, there was a conspiracy theory in the United States that actually had some horrific consequences. It was this idea that there were satanic forces all over the country, that there were daycares at schools that they were abusing children. And Geraldo did a famous NBC special, Devil Warship, exposing Satan's underground. Satanic experts went out there and they found children who were willing to testify that they had been abused. A lot of this turned out to be false memories. There was a real panic. A lot of people's lives were destroyed. A lot of schools, people who ran schools. There's the famous case in 1983 of a panic around the Macamartin preschool in a trial. Parent accused the daycare owners of sexually ablusing their son and it just got blown out. It took seven years, seven years before the daycare owners were finally acquitted and had the charges dismissed. One of them was jailed for five years. So conspiracy theories can really, I mean, they can become really nasty and really scary. And they can have real consequences on real people's lives. People like Jerry Springer and Geraldo capitalized on this the same way as today you get, what's his name? It was just ordered to pay a billion dollars to the parents of the school shooting because he claimed that it was a parkland. They claimed that it never existed. It was a hoax, it was a conspiracy theory. I mean, this is happening around us. This is happening every day, Alex Jones. And of course people like Scott will defend Alex Jones because hey, he's not the left. We should align with Alex Jones. His conspiracy theories all attack the left. So they're good. I mean, these are horrible people destroy lives, destroy people. All in the name of what? Making money for themselves and spreading falsehoods and disinformation and conspiracy theories and ugliness. I mean, there was maybe the most famous conspiracy theories before QAnon, a conspiracy theory that our, your favorite president, President Trump was heavily involved in spreading, heavily involved in it. And that was the, and this, again, if a president of the United States is involved in a conspiracy theory or if somebody running for president is involved in a conspiracy theory, how can you vote for him? How can you vote for somebody who takes a falsehood and just repeats it and propagates it with no facts, no evidence, nothing? Well, that's what Trump did with Barack Obama's birth as a, birtherism, he wasn't born in the United States. No, no, no. That birth certificate is fake. What is the evidence? Any evidence? Any evidence? Anything to suggest that that's true? Now, as I said, conspiracy theories on both sides is plenty of conspiracy theories on the left. And you could argue that at least the, the catastrophizing of climate change is in a sense a conspiracy theory. They don't have facts associated with it. There's no evidence. There's no science. I mean, they might be for climate change, but the catastrophizing of it, the hysteria, the panic. You could argue that population bomb was a conspiracy theory. Remember COVID in 5G? That was, that was a beauty. That was a beauty. If the Chinese were spreading COVID through the 5G network, don't install 5G because it's spreading COVID. So let's step back a minute and ask kind of the question. Why, why do we have conspiracy theories? Why are they so popular? Or at least why are they popular? I don't know. So, but why are they popular? Why do they exist? And I think they exist for the same reason in a sense that religion exists. They exist because people need explanations. And reality is complicated. It's complex. And real explanations can be complex. And real explanations are often not satisfying. Real explanations don't fit maybe into a particular tribe of views of a particular political worldview. But it's also true that things happen that we don't have explanations for. Particularly in a pre-science era, we lived during thousands and thousands of years. Human beings lived in a pre-scientific era in which we didn't know what the hell was going on around us. But we needed explanations. We needed to know why. We needed to have a theory. And of course, religion stepped in. In a sense, we needed philosophy. We needed explanations for the very basic knowledge that we have. And then we needed explanations for the concrete events that happen around us. And if there's no science, as there wasn't, then you come up with all kind of bizarre explanations. And you could go back to middle ages and God, all the superstitions and all the pseudo-scientific stuff. I mean, they all, in a sense, explanations, even if they're not based on anything, no facts, no evidence, they're all, in a sense, conspiracy theories. But man needs to understand. And when you have an educational system and a world that does not value reason, that does not necessarily value evidence, that does not necessarily value facts, a world that is not oriented towards evidence. Again, reason, rational thinking. Trying to suddenly introduce rational explanations. Trying to explain the complex history of Islam and why Islamic radicals would think that blowing themselves up and killing them in order to attack the United States and hopefully put a dent in its power. Or even just the physics of why these buildings, if you look at the Twin Towers, why they so beautifully, beautifully, in quotes, collapsed so symmetrically, so in such an organized way when that looks like a controlled explosion. So what reality actually requires, what understanding the world actually requires, is thinking. It's the conceptual faculty. And when people are not at the conceptual level, and when you don't trust the authorities, when you think the world is against you, when you think, when you're afraid, when you don't understand the world around you, and the people explaining things to you seem to be not interested in your interests, but that actually, and they actually scare you a little bit, then you revert to what we are without concepts, and that's perceptual level. Conspiracy theories are perceptual levels mentality. It's the way a perceptual level mentality deals with the world. It's why so many people in the world out there think the world is a zero sum game. Just for example, there's a good conspiracy theory at the left that the world is a zero sum game. That we became rich by making Africans poor, by making Indians poor, by making Asians poor, whatever, that's insane. It's counter to all the evidence, and it just doesn't explain the world because it's perceptual level. It's a need to explain, but an inability to do so. And the fact that the authority is the smart people, the knowledgeable people, are not very good at explaining, and when they do explain, so often, like after 9-11, so often they lie to us, so often they deceive us, Bush for example, refusing to name the terrorists as Islamic. So the why is we need explanations, and we need them to be simple. If you're not very smart, or if you're not conceptual, which is not being smart, if you're at the perceptual level, the explanation better be simple. It's much simpler to say, the Bushes did it for money. The Jews did it for power. Then to say, well, these ideologies in the world and their struggling for dominance, and the one wants to exert its influence of the other, and these poor people who have nothing, and yet are radical, religionists are willing to commit suicide in order to achieve this goal. Just not as tight, not as nice. I don't know anybody who wants to commit suicide. I don't know anybody who wants to do jihad. I mean, this sounds nutty to me. Now, who is susceptible to conspiracy theories? And so who is susceptible? I think people who hold a promise of consciousness perspective, people who reality is not a reference. People's opinions are a reference. Emotions are a reference. Their own subjective emotions are a reference. Perceptions are a reference. And in that sense, in that sense, the people most susceptible to conspiracy theories are religious. People who are religious are the most susceptible to conspiracy theories as they've already bought into the biggest conspiracy theory ever. It's all God's doing. An explanation for everything. It's the neatest, most effective conspiracy theories in all of history. Why did this happen to me? God did it. Why? Who knows? God has his reasons. They're good reasons. He cares about you. He loves you. He's killing you. He's killing your kids. But he loves you. Why is he killing you and your kids? It's, you'll find out, and it's all good for you because this is out of love he's doing this. I mean, God, has there ever been a more horrible conspiracy theory than that? So it's religious people that are most susceptible. You know the region and the world or the nationalities where they are the most conspiracy theories? I'm curious if anybody can guess where in the world you have the most conspiracy theories? I mean, conspiracy theories everywhere. Every culture has it because every culture has primacy of consciousness. Every culture has its mysticism. Every culture has its form of religion. But which culture has the most, the more virulent, the most powerful, the most prevalent, the most dominant conspiracy theories? Yeah, it's not the United States. It's the Middle East. By the way, Daniel Pipes has written, one of Daniel Pipes' books is all about conspiracies in the Middle East. And it derives from their religiosity. It derives from their existence already of theories, explanations for the world that are devoid of evidence. Once you accept that explanations are possible for things without evidence, there's no limit. There's no limit to the conspiracy theories you can absorb. And of course, this is why conspiracy theories are so prevalent among evangelicals. So among Americans, it's they're much more prevalent among evangelicals who even among the Christians are the least rational. Evangelicalism is a much more emotional connection to God. It rejects kind of the Catholic attempt to use logic and rationality in dealing with theology. So you have among evangelicals, this is where QAnon has thrived. They're very susceptible to conspiracy theories because they've already accepted. Emotions is a tool of cognition. They've already accepted explanation after explanation after explanation of events in the world that they preachers tell them about with no evidence, no facts, no explanation, no real explanation, no explanation connected to reality and proven logically. Logic is irrelevant among evangelicals. And the more mystical evangelical, the more susceptible they are to conspiracy theories. So, and so you have to have a privacy of consciousness, primarily I'd say this is religionists. Of course, the left also has its versions of privacy of consciousness, which often impact them in the same way and encourages them or makes them opens them to be susceptible to conspiracy theories. And of course, I think it also requires a certain lack of self-esteem, a lack of efficaciousness when it comes to reason and rationality, it comes from a certain fear of the world because one can't explain it. It is a search to reduce your fear through quote explanations. It's a search by people who are fearful of reality because they've rejected it, they're fearful of reality to see order in the universe. We all want order, we want explanations, we want to understand and conspiracy theories provide that order, they provide explanations. Oh, I see why Trump lost, how could Trump lose? He's the greatest president all of human history. Americans, all Americans know this, so how could he ever lost? Well, because the powers to be Democrats, Jews, the operators of voting machine companies, whatever, conspired to cheat, that's the explanation because I can't explain it otherwise. If he's the greatest of all time, which is already a delusion, then they must have cheated. 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