Why conspiracy theories arise and how to deal with them

In this age of conspiracies and conspiracy theories, it is difficult for a person to understand what is really going on around him. And it's not so much about TV, Soviet newspapers and the American Internet. The dog is buried in the natural human craving to explain and classify everything - a craving that is as strong as the craving to eat or sleep. To understand what is happening now is to predict what will happen next, which in turn will increase the likelihood of survival.

Thanks to the centuries-old process of evolution, only the most capable of learning remain among us. Those who did not learn died. Therefore, in all this time man has developed his own system of learning, the basic principle of which is the patterns.

The principle of this system of self-learning is quite trivial: anything that happens more than 1 time is a candidate for becoming a pattern. All subsequent patterns are usually based on existing patterns. So, a novice skier will learn to ski with the help of information already available to him about the coordination of the body in space, which he could get either by learning to ride a bicycle, or, for example, having previously learned to skate. If there was no bicycle, no skates, and nothing at all, then the training will take place on the basis of the information obtained by experience about walking in the park, or running around the stadium during physical education lessons. Obviously, in this case, training will be much slower than if a person already had experience of classes as close as possible to downhill skiing. Of course, there are exceptions when a person, for example, memorized the wrong shot, which he worked out at home for years, and then got to the coach who grabs his head and says “it would be better if you came completely without skills (wrong patterns), so that I from scratch sculpted a fighter out of you.” It is important to understand that this kind of defective pattern, or anti-pattern, will even interfere with a person’s speedy learning. In this particular case, the “more patterns, the better” model doesn’t work.
But in general, if a person has a bit of consciousness and he follows a diet on the right patterns, then the number of these mastered patterns in his head will steadily increase the speed of learning new patterns – the person will grasp on the fly.




But what if there are no underlying patterns? On the basis of what to build your training?
On the one hand, you could just score and not learn anything – leave a blank page in this area. This would be reasonable, for example, in a situation where a gypsy woman says a few words to you in gypsy and you unsuccessfully try to relate them to something you already know, which leads to the "hang" of the brain, which in this state is quite easy to hypnotize. In the event of a conscious refusal to “patternize,” the person would not be trapped with a gypsy. On the other hand, a person is too afraid not to learn - "What if I miss something?", "What if this information will be important to me?". He's too afraid not to be able to explain the situation he's in, because it could lead to death. That is why so many people fall for gypsy hypnosis - the patterning mechanism always works, and especially sharply it turns on when it turns out that in some field of knowledge a person is completely zero. This is one of the reasons why kids who have nothing learn so quickly — they want to eat patterns in addition to candy for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This is one of the reasons for the concept of God. God is first and foremost man’s attempt to explain what he has not been able to explain by his existing patterns. Can't be explained by science? Let's write this down to a pattern codenamed "God Almighty!" In such cases, programmers usually use the UNKNOWN string.

Another example of excessive patterning is when a person watches a boring movie, finishes a boring book, flips through a stupid free newspaper in the subway. In this case, the person again becomes a victim of his fear of the future and unconscious desire to learn - "What if there is something important at the end of the film?", "What if there is morality at the end of the book?", "What if I see a message on the back page of the newspaper about a magnetic storm or an earthquake?". Of course, in order to justify his stupidity and time spent, a person will then come up with a thousand apologies in the spirit of “you can learn something new from any book”, or there “live a century – be aware of all the novelties of cinema”, but this is already a topic for a separate conversation.

With the passage of life, patterns in a person become so many that there is no particular sense to continue self-education. Why? He already knows how everything works in this world. He knows how to tie his shoelaces and knows how to caress a kitten. He knows how to write a resume and how to solve conflict situations - he already has a solid survival kit. What else do you need?

Years will pass, and this person, even in spite of some intellectual proximity, will gain the fame of a "sage" - by his seniority. Such a person will be approached by younger people, not for intelligence, but for experience. Such people, as a rule, know everything about everything, and if they do not know, they come up with a new pattern of already existing patterns and at the same time already “know”. But this knowledge is literally sucked out of the finger – it accumulates in the same way that profits from non-existent credit money are accumulated – a derivative of air and nothing more. In total, in our country, entire kitchens are teeming with ideal strategists, wise philosophers, economists from God, competent lawyers and brave fighters who certainly know how to govern the state, and not “these assholes in power who purposefully destroy the country.” Such people are a by-product of their own patterned brains. What is also interesting is that in addition to illusions about their own competence, excessive patterning is fraught with another ailment - the invention of conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theory arises when a person is unable to explain something on the basis of existing patterns — for example, how so — man descended from a monkey. In order to fill the gap in his knowledge without destroying the already existing basic patterns on which many other derivative patterns stand, a person comes up with a theory that could explain everything. For example, on the pattern “man is the son of God” can be based pride and respect for himself and his species. Since this pride may have helped him morally in bad times, he does not want to let go of this pattern and admit that man descended from an ape. A person, accordingly, comes up with a new pattern that would not shake the existing design. As a result, we get: “God created man in his image” or “... about 10 thousand years ago in the territory of modern Iraq there was a base of aliens who as an experiment brought people to Earth.” At the same time, the fact that a person looks like a monkey painfully is, of course, meaningless coincidence. In fact, Darwin died long ago. What's more likely? That man is essentially an animal, or that thousands of years ago there were mysterious settlements of little men on Earth, presumably from the planet Nubiru, who were our ancestors? Of course, man is probably just a monkey. But you do not want to believe in it and it is uncomfortable to live with it, especially if you want to consider yourself a cool pepper, a descendant of the gods, a great creation of higher forces. That is why recently there are so many conspiracy theories about the Jydomasonic conspiracy, the gold billion, reptilians and aliens who rule the world and so on.

What do conspiracy theories feed on? All these conspiracy theories are fed by a sincere desire to explain everything that is happening with the help of the magical question “Who benefits from this?”.

This question is often used to get to the bottom of things. Do you know why things happen in this country? Ask yourself, “Who benefits from this?” Want to know why the war in Iraq started? Ask who benefits. Do you want to know who is causing the riots in southeastern Ukraine? Ask who benefits and you will get an answer. And this materialistic model seems to be good, and can explain many of the events that are happening. It is difficult to oppose this approach, because the desire for profit is de facto recognized by many people as part of the nature of any person.

According to this logic, there is someone behind every event. The genius of combinatorics, he calculated the whole game 100 steps ahead, anticipated and weighed all the options, prepared plan A, plan B, plan C and even plan D. It's not stupid people sitting there! They know exactly what they want. These corrupt reptilian Jewmasons.

This conspiracy logic produces selected pearls:

1. Turchynov and Tymoshenko are deliberately destroying Ukraine because Putin promised them money.
2. Ukraine is “merged” as the Crimea was merged. Again, for money from Putin.
3. Yatsenyuk is a State Department agent who orchestrated a revolution for Obama’s money. NATO wants to keep its bases in Ukraine.
4. The whole world has once again conspired against Russia. These bourgeois dream of destroying Great Russia and making Russian people slaves.
5. Kolomoisky fuels tanks and helicopters at his own expense because he wants to squeeze Akhmetov’s business.
6. The oligarchs started the revolution in order to raise prices and thus profit.
7. Tymoshenko was released from prison because it was profitable for Putin to buy gas from him at a high price.
8. The Maidan was fought mainly for Klitschko’s money. They were professional mercenaries from Poland and Montenegro.
9. Yulia put herself in prison in order to wind up a falling rating.
10. The heavenly hundred were shot by order of Turchynov, so that the revolution could continue and he could become acting president.
11. In the Odessa House of Trade Unions, Yatsenyuk organized the massacre to rally the nation around the tragedy.
12. Putin planned a "bloody Saturday" on Maidan on November 30 to squeeze Crimea and the rest of Ukraine.
13. (and this is my theory) — The Right Sector is a project of the Kremlin, which was created specifically to justify the entry of Russian troops.

And so on.

And although these pearls give a lot of positive emotions, the unprepared layman is powerless against them, as an unarmed man is powerless against scrap - all because of the apparent "reasonability" that is based on the concepts of profit and materialism. If we assume that a person does what he does for ideological reasons, then we can say that he does it to assert himself, to think better about himself, so that, in the end, the dopamine hormone fucks the brain like a drug addict and he was high. And in any case, even the most ideological person will necessarily be a gray cardinal, a money bag, an invisible figure in whose hands everyone dances like puppets. He runs the ball. Calmness, sleepiness and murmur, everything is captured, relatives and cronies have long penetrated everywhere. This strong and stable design, however, has its Achilles heel.

Take advantage of health: When heavy rainfall begins, water floods roads and floods underground passageways, sellers of umbrellas get super profits. Why was it raining? So, so, to get to the truth, you need to ask the same question: “Who benefited from this?” Yeah! Those umbrella vendors over there are fabulously gilded on it. It's them! It was they who jumped on a plane that sprayed an aerosol in the sky and caused rain! And with them in the share probably also sellers of raincoats and rubber boots, here are the bastards!
This simple example proved that random processes are possible in the world that were not directed by anyone. Of course, there is a possibility that the sellers of umbrellas really jumped on the plane with an aerosol and so it rained, but the probability of such an event is extremely small, and after the application of the Occam Razor principle is so negligible. Of course, I already understood that there are random processes in the world and in society, but some comrades are so quickly and quietly demolishing their roofs about the events in Ukraine that I had to urgently look for such methods to straighten the brains of poor people. This small example calls into question all conspiracy theories, all of which are based on the idea that everything is captured.

There is also a lighter version:
If the sun is shining, someone needs it.
And after all, all these speculative theories could be quite successfully dissected with the help of Occam's Razor. The world would be much simpler and boring. A world in which there is no evil fate and failure, no genetic inheritance and broad bone, a world in which you are responsible for what happens to you, and, finally, a world in which there is a place for accidents, and, most likely, there is no invisible hand of Big Brother, which is behind every small event of your life.

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/223851/