Conspiracy or Worldview?
Which better explains the cause of unusual things happening in our world?
What is so difficult to understand in life is cause and effect. Somethings are obvious. For example if I practice a musical instrument every day, in time I will get better at playing that instrument. It doesn’t solve every musical performance problem, but it is a basic required discipline. The more you practice the better you will become.
Then we come to thinking about those links or connections that are not obvious at all. This is the reason for science and research. The first example of this that comes to mind has to do with Magellan’s crew (Magellan died on the way) who circumnavigated the world for the first time in 1522 and how many of them died or were crippled by scurvy? Later people discovered that the problem was lack of eating citrus — which eventually led to the discovery of vitamin C.
What about looking for cause and effect in our own lives?
We want answers and we believe that knowing them will improve the quality of our lives. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Sometimes because we believe something was caused by something else it results in us making decisions. We might decide to invest in a sure-thing enterprise only to lose our money. This then might cause us to decide that no risk is worth it or that we need to dig deeper in researching things before investing again. No one knows for sure but we generally attempt to understand cause and effect principles as best we can.
There are two ways to look at cause and effect human nature. One way generally leads to a dead-end and the other can help connect a lot of dots.
A Conspiracy is something a few people plan that manipulates a large population of people, possibly the whole world. The problem with looking at the behavior of people, banks, businesses, and nations as the execution of secretive conspiratorial plans of a few is that the larger the potential conspiracy the more likely it isn’t one at all. This is because it requires more and more people to go along with the plan and not tell anyone. Eventually the people who are needed to go along with the plan are working against their own best self interest, then everything falls apart. Certainly conspiracies exist in the micro but as an explanation for everything going on in the world around us it doesn’t quite work. No one human person or a few are responsible for all the problems we face.
On the other hand, training populations to believe certain narratives can result in people taking actions that seem to align across disciplines like politics, science, finance, as well as the military. When a Worldview becomes accepted by enough people then large populations can be manipulated and will go along voluntarily even when it is obviously not in their best interest to do so.
Figure out the common worldview and you will begin to see obvious common purposes between open borders, pandemics, and drag queen story hours.
When people discuss conspiracies it is usually to discount them. This is because we are not in on the conspiracy and are just trying to put together circumstantial evidence. Funny this is very attractive to highly intelligent people.
More subtle and insidious is the development of worldview which rewards students in very material and social ways. It seems obvious to me that a student at UC Berkeley will have a more enjoyable experience as a Marxist than he or she will as a Republican. Is this due to a conspiracy? No. It’s human behavior when one worldview become dominant. Most students of a conservative bent will choose to go to another university. This, in many ways, explains red and blue states.