A giant part of the engine that powers the Great Wheel of Conspiracy Theories is the intoxicating allure that anyone who follows along will be ‘in the know’, and once all is revealed, everyone will come crawling back them begging for forgiveness and fawning praise on them for being so ahead of the game and in-the-know.
The desperate attempts at convincing everyone around them are an early sign of Conspiracy Brain, and is what then leads to the further effects of Conspiracy Brain, which is everyone around them getting annoyed, yelling at them or pushing back with an attempt at a serious debate, and then self-isolating and choosing to only associate with a clade of similarly-online weirdos who self-reinforce one another and enable a greater separation from the plot that the rest of us are following along to. The overwhelming majority of these people are not grifters, they are rubes. They are believers, not the cynical, power-obsessed, fascist element that is using them to put a bridle on federal power.
I know I asked the question originally, but I only asked because it has been such a present thing in my (meatspace) life. I’ve seen friends and family disappear down the same hole, all the same way, and all the same end up here, at ‘crazy asshole filling every square inch of his 1989 dodge hooptie with magic marker writing’ all the same. I don’t get why it happens this way.
My best guess is that this is the last way possible for people who have been deeply isolated by anger and rage to communicate their dumb theories to people they haven’t exhausted yet. Perhaps the effect of utterly exhausting everyone around you is the common cause of it all.
That is not necessarily true.
A giant part of the engine that powers the Great Wheel of Conspiracy Theories is the intoxicating allure that anyone who follows along will be ‘in the know’, and once all is revealed, everyone will come crawling back them begging for forgiveness and fawning praise on them for being so ahead of the game and in-the-know.
The desperate attempts at convincing everyone around them are an early sign of Conspiracy Brain, and is what then leads to the further effects of Conspiracy Brain, which is everyone around them getting annoyed, yelling at them or pushing back with an attempt at a serious debate, and then self-isolating and choosing to only associate with a clade of similarly-online weirdos who self-reinforce one another and enable a greater separation from the plot that the rest of us are following along to. The overwhelming majority of these people are not grifters, they are rubes. They are believers, not the cynical, power-obsessed, fascist element that is using them to put a bridle on federal power.
I know I asked the question originally, but I only asked because it has been such a present thing in my (meatspace) life. I’ve seen friends and family disappear down the same hole, all the same way, and all the same end up here, at ‘crazy asshole filling every square inch of his 1989 dodge hooptie with magic marker writing’ all the same. I don’t get why it happens this way.
My best guess is that this is the last way possible for people who have been deeply isolated by anger and rage to communicate their dumb theories to people they haven’t exhausted yet. Perhaps the effect of utterly exhausting everyone around you is the common cause of it all.