Why do people believe conspiracy theories?

[Eris!]

The fact that you don't even try to provide an actual explanation tells me that it would be far from simple and pose more questions than it answers.

"I'm being combative and condescending from our very first interaction, why are you not going out of your way to convince me of things?"
Kill yourself lol i don't give a shit about explaining anything to you retard. If you want to go to your grave being wrong that's fine with me. I will make zero effort to change your mind.

 

[byuu]

"I'm being combative and condescending from our very first interaction, why are you not going out of your way to convince me of things?"
Kill yourself lol i don't give a shit about explaining anything to you retard. If you want to go to your grave being wrong that's fine with me. I will make zero effort to change your mind.

I'm not asking you to change my mind about Jews. I'm asking what's a simpler explanation.

 

[Eris!]

I'm not asking you to change my mind about Jews. I'm asking what's a simpler explanation.

A simpler explanation is that all of the jews obviously coordinating and infiltrating our government are coordinating and infiltrating our government and are not just, by sheer coincidence across thousands of miles and hundreds of years, consistently looking like they are.

 

[byuu]

A simpler explanation is that all of the jews obviously coordinating and infiltrating our government are coordinating and infiltrating our government and are not just, by sheer coincidence across thousands of miles and hundreds of years, consistently looking like they are.

What are you even on about? We're talking about 9/11.

One explanation is "Islamists caught America off-guard, managed to hijack passenger planes, and crashed them into centers of Amerrica's international influence, the thing they hate most in the world"
Another one would be "A shadow organisation of Jews orchestrated a false-flag attack where Islamists caught America off-guard, managed to...."

It's already more complicated! And it doesn't even go into all the autism about jet fuel melting steel beams and secrets messages in Windings.

 

[Eris!]

One explanation is "Islamists caught America off-guard, managed to hijack passenger planes, and crashed them into centers of Amerrica's international influence, the thing they hate most in the world"

That explanation leaves a gaping hole of a question of why we suddenly attacked Saddam. That's more complicated than Mossad coordinating it, who have an obvious motivation.

 

[byuu]

That explanation leaves a gaping hole of a question of why we suddenly attacked Saddam. That's more complicated than Mossad coordinating it, who have an obvious motivation.

Saddam has been on America's shit list for forever and it provided a convenient casus belli?

And what of the holes the other explanations leaves? For example why target the Pentagon and WTC which are headquarters of Jewish tricks? Why not destroy something more symbolic like the Statue of Liberty? Or why use Arabian terrorists and not Palestinian ones? That would be much better for Israel. Or why is there not a single shred of solid evidence for such a massive conspiracy?

 

[Smolrolls]

If I were to wager a guess, I'd say it's done out of a need to think the world is a lot more secure and controlled than it actually is, a sort of reassurance (or as @Homoerotic Cougar-kun would put it, mental masturbation)

Honestly, this probably would've been the main reason before the 2010's.

Plus, some people talk about conspiracies because they find it fun and interesting to research and follow as opposed to a thing they sincerely believe in. I'm a firm believer in Hanlon's Razor and Occam's Razor, but I'll admit conspiracy theories are morbidly fascinating.

However, I think the increasingly common phenomenon of normies believing in conspiracy theories or things that are a hallmark of conspiracies is because of how utterly batshit insane the world has become in the last decade or so.

It doesn't help that in the past five years, a lot of weird shit has happened that lend credence to the possibility of conspiracies in general, and then you have major events like Obamagate, the various Project Veritas leaks, the Finders documents, the mysteries and bizarre media coverage (or lack thereof) of the Las Vegas shooting, and the downfall of Jeffrey Epstein that revealed a lot of conspiracy theories were at least partly true or were at least not as far-fetched as it seems and had a basis in true events.

So once conspiracy theories used to be for fun/mental stimulation, now it's used to make sense of the world, much like how the bible/christian religion assures people that if they do good in this life, they're welcome into a better place. Or much like how the Romans worship the state, for the betterment of the State and its Citizen, give themselves meaning/higher purpose to strive towards by making themselves paragons for their people to follow.
By make sense of the world I mean these crazies having sex with animals & kids, drugging kids, SJWs, outsourcing, mass immigration, rioting, pandemic etc... result from mundane stupidity: For attention, money and labor by these out-of-touch corporatists and bureaucratic, and sick fantasy by sick people who think they're self/righteous and good when they're just dead weight like the meat shields some of them will become. Nothing too fancy or deep you read in a well written novel or comic, just animal instincts like hoarding gold, attention and sexing the first thing you see.

 

[💗Freddie Freaker💗]

Because most elites will never tell plebs the full story about important things and it's silly to trust them. All governments have secrets.

A simpler explanation is that all of the jews obviously coordinating and infiltrating our government are coordinating and infiltrating our government and are not just, by sheer coincidence across thousands of miles and hundreds of years, consistently looking like they are.

Never assume groups are hiveminds.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/ellen-feldman-nazi-germany

Some of the Jewish men who fought in Hitler’s military had been drafted. Others were patriots whose fathers, grandfathers, and uncles had served in the Imperial Army in WWI, and dutifully enlisted. One survivor described himself as a German first and a Jew second.

 

[Eris!]

Never assume groups are hiveminds.

I don't recall saying they were. Your dishonesty is showing.

 

[💗Freddie Freaker💗]

I don't recall saying they were. Your dishonesty is showing.

all of the jews

I guess it was just a misunderstanding.

 

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

I just want to put forth that as 2020 has progressed, I find Hanlon's Razor to be a lot harder to apply. It's getting hard to assume stupidity on every front when it's clear that only some are stupid while some people are clearly operating out of malice under the same pretense.

 

[Str8Bustah]

the simple fact that a conspiracy is only a conspiracy until it's proven to be true makes me doubt the whole 'conspiracies are not real' line of argumentation, as what it essentially does is create a self-fulfilling prophecy-it's false because it's a conspiracy, and it's a conspiracy because it's false-which can then be used to smear anyone who figures out that something outside of the ordinary may be going on, even if they over or underestimate the degrees to which that is the case.

a conspiracy should be a conspiracy regardless of whether it's false or true, and should never immediately be assumed to be false from the outset, otherwise you end up denying the existence of events and objects like project mockingbird, MKUltra, Die Glocke along with a myriad other anomalies that have since been proven to be real or true long after their passing.

 

[Yuuko Aioi]

For example why target the Pentagon and WTC which are headquarters of Jewish tricks? Why not destroy something more symbolic like the Statue of Liberty?

WTC was insured, and I guess demolishing two skyscrapers in a huge, dense city would be a stronger message than destroying a tourist attraction surrounded by water. It would also fuck with the economy, that's more fear, and it looks like it's an adequate justification of mass surveillance and collecting large amounts of biometric data. Sure, rebuilding the WTC did cost more money than the insurance paid for the two towers, but on the long run this is extremely profitable. You get more and more productive, powerful and rich while the cattle gives up everything, little by little, for the illusion of safety.

Then there was that 2.3 trillion dollar story, which is probably not exactly "missing" money, but it's a lot of money, As far as I know it was a big story until next day. Maybe that has something to do with the plane that flew into the pentagon.

I really don't want to talk stupid shit, because to be honest, I have no idea what happened. And it's easy to see that every single thing that happened on 9/11 is completely believable. My problem is that ALL of those things happened at that day. That is simply not believable. The WTC7 collapse? The Odigo Messenger? The dancing israelis? All the political bullshit since then? Meanwhile Israel's politics are the exact opposite of the USA politics? And the "as a white person" type jews, the "fuck the patriarchy" jews, the "you're 7 years old and you have gender dysphoria" jews, the "import more migrants, because the economy that fucks you is more important than your standards or choices" jews and "all your white traditions are obsolete and you should be ashamed" jews have double citizenship, so they can make the whole world a shithole and they'll still have a comfy home. If you connect these little possibilities, the whole chain of events is so convenient... Well, for jews. Us? Well, everything sucks, but that's life, right? Somehow after billions of years of evolution we're still not worthy of the truth about our own lives, but surely there isn't a conspiracy against us. It's just we're really, I mean really unlucky, constantly, all the time. Questions not allowed.
This is inhumane.

Sorry about my (lack of) English.

 

[Snuckening]

There's an inbuilt predisposition certain people have towards 'teleological thinking'- The tendency to reject the the idea that things "just happen", and instead, to attribute whatever event to being part of some deliberate plan by some hidden agency. Both hardcore conspiracy theorists, and the deeply religious (groups that often overlap) score very highly for teleological thinking, because they both share the same basic idea- That you can examine the world, look at historical events, (((co-incidents))), the media, your day-to-day life, esoteric books, etc, pick through all the secret, hidden, coded clues, and discern the hidden meaning that everyone else is too dumb and brainwashed to notice, and discover the all-powerful, unseen agency that REALLY controls the world (whether that agency is god, or satan, or the loominarty, or Freemasons, or whoever). Psychologists also call it "hypersensitive agency detection".

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982218308637

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281405422_Someone_is_pulling_the_strings_Hypersensitive_agency_detection_and_belief_in_conspiracy_theories

And, what would you rather be? Some ordinary pleb, who just accepts what mainstream science, historians, etc say, just like everyone else? Or one of the special few who are super-duper-woke and red-pilled enough to see through all the lies, and to recognize the REAL truth, the truth that all those sleep-walking, NPC sheeple are too dumb and too brainwashed to notice? Someone who's a valiant crusader for the REAL truth, against the evil liars who are the cause of everything bad in the world? There are some pretty major emotional pay-offs, to believing that only YOU are smart enough to see that the Jesuits are sterilizing us with chem-trails, or that Ellen de Generit mainlines adrenochrome, or whatever. And some big incentives, for why someone who already buys into a conspiracy, wouldn't want to give up that special super-woke status, just to become an ordinary nobody, who's only point of difference is that they were once dumb enough to believe that earth is flat and space is fake.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

I just want to put forth that as 2020 has progressed, I find Hanlon's Razor to be a lot harder to apply. It's getting hard to assume stupidity on every front when it's clear that only some are stupid while some people are clearly operating out of malice under the same pretense.

I agree with this. In this day and age, it's getting far more difficult in figuring out what the motivations of these people are. In fact, I'd argue there's been a bit of an increase when it comes to those who willingly believe in conspiracies than those who are just stupid or are trolling to get a rise out of people. Especially when (surprise surprise) sites like YouTube or 4Chan are concerned. Even more when country or world-changing events like asteroids, COVID or the BLM riots are brought into the picture.

 

[H3LLH4MM3R666]

WTC was insured, and I guess demolishing two skyscrapers in a huge, dense city would be a stronger message than destroying a tourist attraction surrounded by water. It would also fuck with the economy, that's more fear, and it looks like it's an adequate justification of mass surveillance and collecting large amounts of biometric data. Sure, rebuilding the WTC did cost more money than the insurance paid for the two towers, but on the long run this is extremely profitable. You get more and more productive, powerful and rich while the cattle gives up everything, little by little, for the illusion of safety.

Then there was that 2.3 trillion dollar story, which is probably not exactly "missing" money, but it's a lot of money, As far as I know it was a big story until next day. Maybe that has something to do with the plane that flew into the pentagon.

I really don't want to talk stupid shit, because to be honest, I have no idea what happened. And it's easy to see that every single thing that happened on 9/11 is completely believable. My problem is that ALL of those things happened at that day. That is simply not believable. The WTC7 collapse? The Odigo Messenger? The dancing israelis? All the political bullshit since then? Meanwhile Israel's politics are the exact opposite of the USA politics? And the "as a white person" type jews, the "fuck the patriarchy" jews, the "you're 7 years old and you have gender dysphoria" jews, the "import more migrants, because the economy that fucks you is more important than your standards or choices" jews and "all your white traditions are obsolete and you should be ashamed" jews have double citizenship, so they can make the whole world a shithole and they'll still have a comfy home. If you connect these little possibilities, the whole chain of events is so convenient... Well, for jews. Us? Well, everything sucks, but that's life, right? Somehow after billions of years of evolution we're still not worthy of the truth about our own lives, but surely there isn't a conspiracy against us. It's just we're really, I mean really unlucky, constantly, all the time. Questions not allowed.
This is inhumane.

Sorry about my (lack of) English.

I can partially answer your question, WTC7 collapsed because it was hit by several hundred tons of debris when the towers collapsed. You can see huge multi-story gashes on the side of the building. It was also burning for over 8 hours, the sprinkler system wasn't functioning, and firefighters weren't actively trying to extinguish it. Because the building was evacuated in the morning, their efforts were on search and rescue.

Things might have gone differently if it was built to standard building codes, but federal buildings are/were legally exempt from those codes. Which is why the sprinkler system wasn't functioning, the collapse of the towers destroyed the underground piping. If it was built to code it would have had water tanks on the roof specifically for the sprinklers

 

[Yuuko Aioi]

There's an inbuilt predisposition certain people have towards 'teleological thinking'- The tendency to reject the the idea that things "just happen", and instead, to attribute whatever event to being part of some deliberate plan by some hidden agency. Both hardcore conspiracy theorists, and the deeply religious (groups that often overlap) score very highly for teleological thinking, because they both share the same basic idea- That you can examine the world, look at historical events, (((co-incidents))), the media, your day-to-day life, esoteric books, etc, pick through all the secret, hidden, coded clues, and discern the hidden meaning that everyone else is too dumb and brainwashed to notice, and discover the all-powerful, unseen agency that REALLY controls the world (whether that agency is god, or satan, or the loominarty, or Freemasons, or whoever). Psychologists also call it "hypersensitive agency detection".

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982218308637

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281405422_Someone_is_pulling_the_strings_Hypersensitive_agency_detection_and_belief_in_conspiracy_theories

And, what would you rather be? Some ordinary pleb, who just accepts what mainstream science, historians, etc say, just like everyone else? Or one of the special few who are super-duper-woke and red-pilled enough to see through all the lies, and to recognize the REAL truth, the truth that all those sleep-walking, NPC sheeple are too dumb and too brainwashed to notice? Someone who's a valiant crusader for the REAL truth, against the evil liars who are the cause of everything bad in the world? There are some pretty major emotional pay-offs, to believing that only YOU are smart enough to see that the Jesuits are sterilizing us with chem-trails, or that Ellen de Generit mainlines adrenochrome, or whatever. And some big incentives, for why someone who already buys into a conspiracy, wouldn't want to give up that special super-woke status, just to become an ordinary nobody, who's only point of difference is that they were once dumb enough to believe that earth is flat and space is fake.

I know that when I say thinks like above, I sound like an idiot. And it is frustrating, because honestly, you're right about that predisposition.
But that predisposition was useful for millions of years. If some of us are seeing a dangerous pattern, then the danger might be or might not be there, but the pattern itself is there. So I think it is worth considering that it might represent the reality.

I can't think of any other "conspiracy theory" that I agree with or I see. So I'm not really the "conspiracy theory" guy. But the jews-against-white pattern I can't unsee. And it is doubly frustrating, because I don't even want to see it, I wan't to deliberately unsee it, but what the media wants to talk about, and how it wants to talk about those things makes it impossible to not recognize the intent behind it. And as I've said, I'm talking about coincidences. Lots of them. I don't mind a coincidence. I don't mind two really weird coincidences coinciding with each other, but when you ask questions about something and more than half of the answer is "it's just coincidence" and the rest of the answers doesn't even make sense, well, I think you are obligated to think about how the world operates around you.

There is no need to associate the too many coincidences around 9/11 with flat Earth or chem trails or fake space. I think you're probably not naive enough either to think that we as citizens of the world have all the information about our governing systems, and we are allowed to change everything for the better. So trying to find a pattern or guessing what is happening is normal, I think. Also of course there is the messiah complex that can make people try too hard to find the answers or at least the enemy, but I don't think that's my case here.

About Hanlon's razor: We are talking about people, who are making decisions about large populations of people. It would be nice to know the intent of theirs to know what the solution would be. But for finding the problem itself? I mean if we have to start somewhere, then before the "is he stupid or is he malicious" fork on the diagram there is the "should he be in charge" question, where it doesn't matter if he's stupid or malicious, he shouldn't make important decisions. And with the jews that's the problem. When they say, "Oh, it looks like we meant this? No, it's a coincidence, we're the good guys", then the "civilized" way to react is to say "Oh, okay" and then smile. We have to believe the good intent every time they say something that will mess with our lives on the long run. I find this discrimination outrageous.

Sorry for the long rambling, basically what I'm saying, there is a jewish conspiracy, and there might be ridiculous theories about their goals or origins, but there are also really logical and simple ones too. Handling this as one thing sure makes it easier to find ridiculous details and discard the whole thing, but that doesn't make the weird and destructive coincidences go away. Only if people who label conservatives as nazis could imagine that maybe if the nazis are capable of acting evil then maybe it is possible for other groups of humans too...

 

[Yuuko Aioi]

I can partially answer your question, WTC7 collapsed because it was hit by several hundred tons of debris when the towers collapsed. You can see huge multi-story gashes on the side of the building. It was also burning for over 8 hours, the sprinkler system wasn't functioning, and firefighters weren't actively trying to extinguish it. Because the building was evacuated in the morning, their efforts were on search and rescue.

Things might have gone differently if it was built to standard building codes, but federal buildings are/were legally exempt from those codes. Which is why the sprinkler system wasn't functioning, the collapse of the towers destroyed the underground piping. If it was built to code it would have had water tanks on the roof specifically for the sprinklers

Well there is the video about the collapse of the WTC7, and I'm sure you can explain that too, but I still won't be able to believe it. Why would a building's main pillars collapse before the building itself collapses? The pillars were damaged so badly, that they failed under their own weight? And then the rest of the building followed? Maybe I just have no idea how stable (or rather unstable) an otherwise fully functional building is. But it has to survive at least a minor earthquake, so I assume it wasn't made of cardboard. Also maybe I'm just not into "demolition porn" or whatever, but I've never seen a concrete+metal+glass building getting completely destroyed by fire alone. Also, back to my previous post, coincidences. A day before: panic. Where is the huge amount of money? Next day: Oh look, the twin towers! Meanwhile offices in WTC7 getting destroyed, and the pentagon is being attacked. Lots of paperwork destroyed, and suddenly military spending is not on the news anymore, USA's next target is.

Your answer/explanation otherwise sounds pretty much acceptable, or at least close to it, but putting it into the context of all the coincidences still makes it ridiculous. I mean, all of the explanations of every event on 911 can be reduced to a pattern of "well, it supposed to be A, but because of B it was actually C". And you chain these patterns together, and if you look at a single one, you can say that "well, these things happen". But you can't really say that flipping a coin 100 times and getting tails 100 times isn't suspicious.

What normally would happen is "Hey, those planes are off course. Call the military."
And basically that would be the end of it. But the whole chain of events suggests that the only thing "Osama Bin Laden" had to do, is to really focus on being angry, and then the butterfly-effect will fuck up New York.

 

[H3LLH4MM3R666]

What normally would happen is "Hey, those planes are off course. Call the military."
And basically that would be the end of it. But the whole chain of events suggests that the only thing "Osama Bin Laden" had to do, is to really focus on being angry, and then the butterfly-effect will fuck up New York.

I'm basically rehashing arguments I had with truthers from 2005, but a common question is "Why didn't military jets shoot down the hijacked planes?"

The answer is because it takes longer to get jets in the air than people seem to assume. "Scramble-ready" means a jet is ready to take to the skies within 24 hours. Also the military had less than an hour to respond, the FAA alerted NORAD of the Flight 11 hijacking at 8:37 and it hit the WTC about 10 minutes later. The hijackers turned off the plane transponders so it was pretty much guesswork as to where the planes were located and going. A couple of fighter jets were scrambled but because they can't teleport, they got nowhere near the planes by the time they crashed

Also there were plenty of other building besides WTC that were destroyed that day, nearly every building across the street from the WTC was damaged or destroyed by debris. Such as the St. Nicholas cathedral, which collapsed despite the fact that no planes hit it. Was it a bomb?

The series of events that day are just completely incongruent with any hypothetical false-flag attack. Assuming the government did want to destroy the towers with bombs, why bother with the planes? They could just claim the terrorists planted the bombs, like they did in 1993.

But I suggest you look up some non-truther videos about controlled demolitions just to see how much construction work goes into planting demolition charges. It's not as simple as dropping a couple of packages, there's weeks and months of preperation. Most of which involves breaking down walls, reaching the steel support beams, drilling holes into said beams, cramming them with demolitions, and then running miles of copper wire. Things which nobody witnessed in the weeks leading up to the attack. Also take a look at the sheer volume of explosives needed to take down "normal" buildings. The WTC would have needed hundreds of tons of demolitions to pull off and there's no possible way they could have gotten it past the front door without getting noticed.

 

[Unassuming Local Guy]

I just want to put forth that as 2020 has progressed, I find Hanlon's Razor to be a lot harder to apply. It's getting hard to assume stupidity on every front when it's clear that only some are stupid while some people are clearly operating out of malice under the same pretense.

Hanlon's razor is just another word for optimism, and optimism is stupid.

It's true that there are a lot more stupid people than evil people, but stupidity does not preclude evil, or vice versa. In fact, I would argue a synergistic relationship there. The dumber someone is, the more likely they are to act in a manner wholly consistent with the concept of evil.