I have been doing some reading/viewing on conspiracy theories and have found them interesting. Something that is potentially even more interesting is people's responses to conspiracy theories. For some reason, people want to believe that conspiracies do not exist. In the face of mountains of evidence, people want to stay naive.
These reality TV shows have been a big hit for years now with Survivor often listed as starting the genre. Does anyone remember the first survivor? The winner, Richard, was great at manipulating people and conspiring against them behind their back.
Brothers and sisters conspire against their parents.
Students conspire against their teachers.
Employees conspire against their bosses.
In all these cases, there are minimal gains to be won. Richard won a million dollars, but I think it is pretty clear that people will conspire for much, much less.
So how about for much, much more? The government and big businesses control billions and sometimes trillions of dollars. Do we really think there are not any conspiracies going on? A common idea is that there would need to be widespread buy-in into the conspiracy for large organizations to be doing something like that, but Enron disproves that idea. One of the largest companies in the world was corrupted by just a few men at the top.
I am not advocating that anyone look for conspiracy theories everywhere all the time, but I also think being too naive is bad also. As with practically everything, extremes are bad. Do not accept everything government or business (through media) gives you without thinking about it critically.
