There's no easy explanation for the appeal or spread of conspiracy thinking. Instead, there are many, well, theories. max_read writes
Photo: Joshua Lott/AFP via Getty Images It took almost no time from the delay in reporting the results of the Iowa Caucus for the online conspiracy theorizing engine to start up. Employees for the companies responsible for the app that seemed to have caused the Iowa failure were quickly linked to Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 effort; Twitter threads were spun out based on FEC records showing that Buttigieg’s campaign had paid the app developer.
Why, though? There is, fittingly, no easy explanation for the appeal or spread of conspiracy thinking. Instead, there are many, well, theories — some overlapping and reinforcing, some contradictory, all of them useful in understanding the shadowy power of the conspiracy theory in the 21st century. Conspiracy theories are a way for people to exert control over or within unstable, complex systems. If the Enlightenment gave people the tools to think in terms of conspiracy, it’s the condition of modernity itself that’s made them particularly attractive. For centuries now we’ve lived in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent world, ruled over by shifting and unstable arrangements of bureaucratic institutions and free markets.
Think of, for example, how Republicans recently rejected, en masse, the preferred candidates of their party’s elites and turned to a wildly anti-establishment presidential candidate — and, in turn, how many mainstream news media outlets failed to sufficiently reckon with the possibility of a Trump presidency in 2015 and 2016. In both cases, socially crucial institutions failed in their duties of representation, calling further into question their legitimacy.
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