Conspiracy theories are for losers

I taught secondary social studies and history for thirty-five years. Consequently I became familiar with various dubious theories, for instance that the moon landing was fake, or that JFK was killed by a second gunman firing through a storm grate. I thought adolescents particularly prone to conspiracy theories. Since retirement and spending many hours online reading blogs, political sites, Facebook posts, and tweets, I've realized that is not true. From "The Rise of the Respectable Conspiracy Theory":

.... An interesting study published last year concluded that neither the Left nor the Right are systematically biased towards conspiracy theories. Based on 20 surveys conducted in the US between 2012 and 2021, the authors found that around a third of the conspiracy theories they reviewed were more attractive to Republicans than to Democrats, a third were more attractive to Democrats than to Republicans, and the rest were non-partisan. Right-wingers were particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories about COVID-19 while left-wingers were drawn to conspiracy theories about Donald Trump. Right-wingers tended to be more anti-vax when it came to COVID-19 but not when it came to MMR. ....

Some of the best-known conspiracy theories, including the JFK assassination, Holocaust denial, and 9/11 being an “inside job,” were not associated with political views, although they may have been in the past. The authors make the important observation that widely believed conspiracy theories sometimes start out on the Left or Right and become bipartisan over time. Neither the 9/11 “truth” movement nor the JFK conspiracy originated on the far-Right. On the contrary, they most appealed to people who hated George W. Bush and couldn’t face the reality of Kennedy being murdered by a Marxist, respectively. ....

The problem is nobody believes that their own crackpot theories for how the world works are conspiracy theories. If they did, they would stop believing them. Conspiracy theories are for other people—gullible people who belong to the outgroup. They are conspiracy theorists. We are free thinkers who do our own research and think critically. ....

Many of the classic conspiracy theories arise from a sense of disbelief. A simple car crash seemed to be an inadequate ending to the Princess Diana soap opera. JFK was too important to have been killed by someone as insignificant as Lee Harvey Oswald. 9/11 was too enormous to have been mere terrorism. The logistics of putting a man on the Moon were too mind-blowing to have been achieved in 1969. ....

The election of Donald Trump and the vote to leave the EU were similarly shocking to those who had previously regarded those developments as unthinkable. As we retreat into our echo chambers, there is a growing inability to even acknowledge the existence of opposing views, let alone consider them valid. When everyone you know agrees with you, it comes as a shock when the votes are counted and you realise that your side is outnumbered by a basket of deplorables. When something seems unbelievable, the temptation is to simply disbelieve it and reach for alternative explanations.

Conspiracy theories are, in every sense, for losers. When your side is losing in ways that you find inexplicable, extraordinary explanations become appealing. The centrists and the sensibles who hold high-status opinions went a long time without losing, but in the past decade have suffered several major defeats. At the same time, conspiratorial thinking has entered the mainstream like never before. Is this a coincidence? A conspiracy theorist would say that there is no such thing as a coincidence and, in this instance, they would be right. (more)

Christopher J. Snowdon, "The Rise of the Respectable Conspiracy Theory," Quillette, March 31, 2023.