How did we get so casual about conspiracy theories?
I was talking with someone today about nutrition. This person has a PhD in material science. They mentioned eating beef daily and I asked about the cholesterol implications. The answer was about a vague ‘they’ wanted us to think that, but it wasn’t true anymore.
I hear the vague ‘they’ so frequently now it’s just a normal conversation. In truth, as soon as I hear the vague they I dismiss the speaker’s credibility on the subject, but how did we get here? Vague they wanted us to think X is a valid counter argument by the most highly educated people in our society?
This sounds like more of a rant than a question, but I do truly want to know how this happened? Was it pop culture like the X Files that made conspiracy theories main stream? Was it social media? When will the vague they stop being an accepted explanation? Has it always been this way and I didn’t notice?
Thanks, love you!
MKUltra was a secret government program that experimented on people using LSD and torture. The man who became the Unabomber was one of its victims.
COINTELPRO was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting American political organizations that the FBI perceived as subversive. This included feminist organizations, the Communist Party USA, anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists in the civil rights and Black power movements (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement , Chicano and Mexican-American , and independence movements (including Puerto Rican independence groups).
The Iraq War was predicated on “weapons of mass destruction” which the government knowingly lied about.
The United Fruit Company backed a coup in Honduras.
General Motors conspired to collapse the streetcar industry to gain a monopoly on public transportation.
Cigarette companies suppressed information on the health effects of cigarettes.
Oil companies suppressed information on the environmental effects of fossil fuels.
Purdue Pharma conspired to suppress the risks of Oxycontin and to expand the use of the drug to levels they knew would cause addiction.
My point is, there are true conspiracies all the time. The internet has made it possible for more people to know about it. Unfortunately it has also made it easier for false conspiracy theories to propagate
Also, the fact that those conspiracies were real severely eroded trust in institutions both government and corporate. For example, does anybody really believe the FBI stopped suppressing leftists in 1971? Hell no; they just started calling it something other than COINTELPRO that’s still classified.
Yes, there is ample evidence that we should be distrustful of capitalist, imperialist states and the corporations & capitalists which run them. Previously. Previously.