Sunday, October 08, 2017

I'm special, so please affirm my uniqueness

I wish to invite my reader into the murky world of Internet conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theorists are nothing new, having existed for many decades, but the Internet has given them a wider audience to disseminate their ideas to. I find them too frustrating to engage with directly. Writing about them on here is the only way I can comprehend what influences them, on my own terms. By choice, I have had little to do with such people, keeping my distance from them, and only read their ideas to inform myself about them.

If memory serves me correctly, my initial exposure to conspiracy theorists happened one day I was walking through a pedestrian mall in Melbourne's central business district. Various groups are permitted by the city council to set up trestle tables to distribute literature to passers by. I was bailed up by a member of the Citizen's Electoral Council (CEC). He persuaded me to pay ten dollars of my hard earned money for a copy of their monthly news magazine.

On April 28, 1996, Australia's worst ever gun massacre took place at Port Arthur, Tasmania, when a lone gunman killed 35 people. The magazine claimed that the gunman was brainwashed into carrying out the massacre by an intelligence agency. After the massacre, the federal government passed gun control laws, outlawing semi-automatic weapons. These were the same types of weapons that the gunman used in the massacre.

The CEC is a controversial political organisation, described by its opponents as racist and anti-Semitic. It isn't hard to put the pieces together, and see that this is not slander. It is true. They claimed that the Port Arthur Massacre was a false flag operation, deliberately staged by the Australian government so that it could pass laws to disarm citizens. The CEC opened my eyes up to the worldview of conspiracy theorists.

I now know that the CEC is not the only group to promote these ideas. It also had a counterpart in the Australian League of Rights. I thought that they might have folded, but they maintain a (badly designed) website, so I guess that they are still active. Fast forward a few years, to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent emergence of the so-called "truther" movement, which claims that the attacks were an inside job, used as a pretext to start wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to curtail the civil liberties of American citizens. These truthers are another subgroup within conspiracy theory circles.

Every time a shooting massacre takes place, or an act of terror takes place, Internet conspiracy theorists take to social media platforms to predictably and sensationally claim that these are also false flag operations. These are designed to move the world towards one world government. This happened again in the days after the recent Las Vegas massacre. As of today, I have yet to find a satisfactory answer why this line of thinking only seems to apply when these things happen in the United States, and not outside the Western world, or the Anglosphere? In the minds of these people, what is so special about the United States?

I had to ask myself this question. Is there a common thread that links groups like the CEC, and internet conspiracy theorists? Doing a bit of research shows that whether they realise it or not, these conspiracy theories originate from the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This is a fraudulent document that appeared in the early 20th century. It outlines an alleged Jewish master plan to dominate the world. It was further promulgated by Nazis, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, and in parts of the Arab and Islamic world. Disarming the populace and creating false flag terror events are two aspects of this so called plot.

It is not palatable to explicitly name Jewish plotters in these theories, hence the need to refer to them using veiled references to international bankers, the Illuminati, or the New World Order. This doesn't make them any less offensive, not just to Jewish people, but also to all the victims of shooting massacres and terrorist attacks.

What motivates these conspiracy theorists, then? They're not all racists or anti-Semites. According to a recent article in Psychology Today, "people are drawn to conspiracy theories because of an underlying need for uniqueness. In other words, a need to be different from other people by embracing beliefs that are out of the ordinary. Just as this need for uniqueness can cause people to develop unusual hobbies or seek out experiences that set them apart from the crowd, conspiracy believers adopt unusual beliefs about the world that make them feel special or above average. Our sense of social identity comes from the groups to which we see ourselves belonging."

Additionally, "for conspiracy theories, one of the factors that makes their belief so strong may well be the sense of personal identity that comes from belonging to a particular group, i.e., the minority that "knows" what is really going on, may cause them to reject any evidence that might shake that belief. This can also cause them to look down on people who may not share their beliefs, i.e., "the sheeple" who are easily fooled."

I also wonder if at least some of these people are isolated loners, and spread these theories to get attention from their peers, who them affirm their self perception of themselves as being special or above average for having this special knowledge about world events. I also have no doubt that some of them must also suffer from paranoia. If that is the case, they don't need encouragement, but compassion, to be carefully challenged and rebuked, and treated.

https://www.culteducation.com/reference/larouche/larouche9.pdf

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2265/abstract?campaign=wolearlyview

http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p13661/mobile/ch07s03.html

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/media-spotlight/201708/what-makes-conspiracy-theories-so-appealing

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/International_Jewish_conspiracy

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007058

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Truth_movement

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