this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Conspiracism is not truth-tracking. It's rooted in an emotional response to feelings of lack of control. By saying false things and getting away with it, the conspiracist feels greater control over their life. "You can't stop me from lying, therefore I have power."
Hence why authoritarians love conspiracism: authoritarianism promises that if you repeat the doctrine and smash the Leader's designated enemies (the "conspiracy"), you will regain the control that was taken from you. This also illustrates why "left" authoritarianism (e.g. Stalinism, Maoism) is really rightist: it does not actually offer freedom or equality, but rather rigid hierarchy and escalating falsehood and cruelty.
If you follow Nazism, Stalin, Hamas, Trump, or Netanyahu and smash the designated enemies who the Leader tells you have been conspiring against your nation ... you do not get freedom, you just eventually become the next enemy to be smashed. Of course really your Leader has built up the enemy to threaten you: authoritarians never seek peace, because peace removes the need to fear and hate.
(None of this is new. Orwell and Sartre both described it in the 1940s.)
This kind of inappropriately equates conspiracy theories and conservatism but I assure you that the anti-GMO, 9/11 Truther, and even the original vaccine pushback were not from the right
There's even crossover. The New Age/NESARA movement has a pipeline directly into Qanon, a movement at opposite views to NA stuff.