The problem with conspiracy theories is that they’re trying to assign a single point of blame to a complete systemic failure. The feeling is that if we can simply find out who is doing this and boil it down to one person or one group we can then simply attack that group and solve all our problems. That’s exactly the ox that fascism has yolked on its ride to power in every single generation.
I think it’s very natural to just want a threat to be known and made tangible.
Things are so insanely complicated, that fixing systemic issues feels insurmountable. It makes one’s head spin and feel rather helpless because it requires either power en masse or concentrated power in the right hands. Especially when there’s bad guys that defend and praise the broken system, but their elimination still wouldn’t fix it.
But man, if there was just some mustache-twirling mastermind in a lair somewhere sending out emails to all the other bad guys, and we took him out to save the world…Hooray! Much simpler! That would be a much more preferable scenario. A cinematic face-off against Skeletor / Palpatine / Rupert Murdoch / whatever, rather than trying to undo the corrupting influence of masses of oppressed people all thinking “But this broken system benefited me so it can’t be that bad bro.”
The problem with conspiracy theories is that they’re trying to assign a single point of blame to a complete systemic failure. The feeling is that if we can simply find out who is doing this and boil it down to one person or one group we can then simply attack that group and solve all our problems. That’s exactly the ox that fascism has yolked on its ride to power in every single generation.
Very well put.
I think it’s very natural to just want a threat to be known and made tangible.
Things are so insanely complicated, that fixing systemic issues feels insurmountable. It makes one’s head spin and feel rather helpless because it requires either power en masse or concentrated power in the right hands. Especially when there’s bad guys that defend and praise the broken system, but their elimination still wouldn’t fix it.
But man, if there was just some mustache-twirling mastermind in a lair somewhere sending out emails to all the other bad guys, and we took him out to save the world…Hooray! Much simpler! That would be a much more preferable scenario. A cinematic face-off against Skeletor / Palpatine / Rupert Murdoch / whatever, rather than trying to undo the corrupting influence of masses of oppressed people all thinking “But this broken system benefited me so it can’t be that bad bro.”