The real fallacy of conspiracy theorists (and their defining characteristic) is not that they are factually wrong, but rather that their relevance filter is broken; it's a defect of pragmatics (over-mentalization), not of logic or semantics as such. This defect is closely-related to narcissism, albeit externally focused and (generally) negatively-valenced (someone like Eckhart Tolle might be said to be a pronoiac, which is the same type of reasoning defect but with positive valence).
But "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you" --- and as relevant, while I've been critical of people who presume that the System has it In For Them on Twitter, it's plain that the purplehaired apparats have a similar if oppositely-valenced misguided belief in the import of their activities as do many a bAsEd & reDpilled Twitter histrionic. One shouldn't try to read the Mind of a vast impersonal events or the forces of history, nor perhaps even of culture -- but one can always get a sense of what the KGB or similar monocultures are thinking based on their actions, if you take my meaning.
The execution of Charles I was at the hands of the same Calvinist/Puritan/Manichean dichotomy of good/evil that runs through American history and motivates elites and populace alike. It is so ingrained in the American psyche, if we can generalize here, that any attempt to analyze a situation and find root causes, such as group narcissism or profit motive, is overlooked if it doesn’t yield evil geniuses with the conscious intent to do harm. The dichotomy is alive and well in group narcissism, for which innocence and purity require an absolute, metaphysical evil beseiging them--unified and conspiring against them. The concept of whiteNESS, an abstraction, is needed for this, to explain the fact of the enemy already within the gates (e.g. blacks who don't go along with the program).
The real fallacy of conspiracy theorists (and their defining characteristic) is not that they are factually wrong, but rather that their relevance filter is broken; it's a defect of pragmatics (over-mentalization), not of logic or semantics as such. This defect is closely-related to narcissism, albeit externally focused and (generally) negatively-valenced (someone like Eckhart Tolle might be said to be a pronoiac, which is the same type of reasoning defect but with positive valence).
But "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you" --- and as relevant, while I've been critical of people who presume that the System has it In For Them on Twitter, it's plain that the purplehaired apparats have a similar if oppositely-valenced misguided belief in the import of their activities as do many a bAsEd & reDpilled Twitter histrionic. One shouldn't try to read the Mind of a vast impersonal events or the forces of history, nor perhaps even of culture -- but one can always get a sense of what the KGB or similar monocultures are thinking based on their actions, if you take my meaning.
Well said
Love the Dickinson quote re: Russiagate. Thanks for writing!
This is what Job is about.
The execution of Charles I was at the hands of the same Calvinist/Puritan/Manichean dichotomy of good/evil that runs through American history and motivates elites and populace alike. It is so ingrained in the American psyche, if we can generalize here, that any attempt to analyze a situation and find root causes, such as group narcissism or profit motive, is overlooked if it doesn’t yield evil geniuses with the conscious intent to do harm. The dichotomy is alive and well in group narcissism, for which innocence and purity require an absolute, metaphysical evil beseiging them--unified and conspiring against them. The concept of whiteNESS, an abstraction, is needed for this, to explain the fact of the enemy already within the gates (e.g. blacks who don't go along with the program).