Quote from: challengerX on June 03, 2018, 09:45:40 PM

People that think they're the ones in the know when they're the most easily manipulated are extremely depressing but fascinating at the same time. I can't figure out if it's just stupidity or what.

Plain stupidity is a part of it but it's got a lot to do with feeling disenfranchised. Many of these people are or were outcasts that are often uneducated, anxious and uncertain. Conspiracy theories are a way for them to get back at an unjust world and make it understandable. All of the successful, accomplished and intelligent people that outdo them in every way aren't actually doing any better at all because they're just puppets being controlled. "Normal" people are blind rats in a maze whose fancy degrees, good social relations and many accomplishments are meaningless bits of cheese while they're the ones who made it out of the maze, are "in the know" and see things how they really are.

Most of these conspiracies are a convenient way to make complex things easier to understand and manage. Complicated scientific issuess (vaccines, global warming, space travel...) and political happenings are a lot more manageable when you don't need to understand any of it and can instead reduce it to "it's all fake, the evil government & big companies are behind it all". Your own failures and shortcomings are a lot more bearable when they're not really your own but (in part) due to the shadow government spraying chemtrails and manipulating everything. You might be an underachiever but surely that doesn't matter when everything is controlled by people keeping you down and you've got more important (conspiracy) things to focus on. After all, you're the good guy who sees through the lie and faces down the pure evil elite that apparently occupies itself with digging holes in the dirt next to an Arizona highway to rape and kill children, or something.

The world's a shitty place and people look for security, order and validation. Some can't find these things normally and fail due to their own stupidity or other cirumstances. When that happens, everything becomes a lot more manageable when there's some kind of conspiracy that played a part in it all and that allows you to blame and fight against an easily classifiable scapegoat instead of trying to understand highly complex issues. It starts as a little seed ("I can't believe 9/11 happened because it's so horrible and now I'm reading (fake) news posts on Facebook it looks like some things don't add up") that just grows. And when one of those theories has taken a hold due to stupidity, ignorance and lack of information ("the government is covering up the 9/11 truth and the powerful media people are in on it"), it's a quick descent down a very deep rabbit hole ("since I can't trust any of the traditional media I follow TruthSeekerFreedomWarrior1776.blogspot.com which taught me all big companies are manipulating me and vaccines cause autism and global warming is a Chinese hoax and Democrats cover up for child raping devil worshippers"). It's utterly insane but to some it unfortunately makes sense. Last year I had a PM conversation with some guy on B.net who thought 9/11 was done Obama (not Bush, not the government, but specifically Obama - somehow). To him, demonstrable facts were lies and untold amounts of scientific hard evidence was fake and fraudulent. As soon as anything threatened the validity of any part of his story, he'd conveniently ignore it and go "what about X" before spamming another 10 links to conspiracy sites. Like you said, it's sad and depressing to see.

I live in AZ and I'm pretty sure the most fucked thing we got going on right now is a murdering spree of a detective and attorneys. It ended but these weren't even on the news