Leaving consensus reality
"Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear." — Hannah Arendt
People think conspiracy theory is a way of thinking, but it's really an argumentation defect where people get greedy with evidence, having to find a route, however ridiculous, from any new phenomenon to a core belief they are invested in defending.
Bluesky
"When one's concern for ideas, no matter how dedicated and sincere, reduces them to the service of some central limited preconception or some wholly external end, intellect gets swallowed by fanaticism. If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to... See more
"For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst." (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism)
No secret societies
1832 illustration by David Claypoole Johnstone mocking the 1831 Anti-Masonic Party convention
This is a crucial point: conspiracy culture does not challenge the hyper-individualism that is at the heart of so many crises reaching their breaking points. Instead, it mirrors it, putting all the blame for society’s ills on singularly powerful individuals: Fauci. Gates. Schwab. Soros.
Naomi Klein • Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
The effect of conspiracy culture is the opposite of calm; it is to spread panic.
Naomi Klein • Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
I think there are legitimate use cases for these tools (think automation) but the one thing they cannot and will never be able to do is replace what happens in a human brain in that moment of crisis. truly insane that we're pushing an entire generation to forget how to think