Conspiracy, cause and effect, and heavy weather

[andygates]

While deconstructing a piece of shoddy journalism for some local frothy pagans last night, I got to musing on conspiracies and why it is that people are so keen to believe this stuff.  Turns out I'm not the only one: studies, as they say, were done.  People like to assign a big cause to a big event and a little cause to a little event.  This means that 9/11, which scared the hell out of a whole nation and wrecked a skyline, cannot just have been two dozen angry nutters.  Diana's driver can't just have screwed up.  The causes are too small to fit into a satisfying assumption that big begets big and small begets small.

The flipside of this a priori belief is that the little guy cannot affect big things, and of course that's a big problem when trying to persuade people en masse to change their behaviour. 

Bruce Sterling nailed this in Heavy Weather.  People, he reasoned, ain't going to change, and the big systems - governments, economies and the like - have too much inertia to change.  Kyoto's a good example: If you can get a mere framework in place inside fifteen years, you're doing well, never mind implementation.  In Heavy Weather the ecological disaster was undeniable but there was no way to act - people wouldn't change and institutions couldn't - so a conspiracy was created which attempted to halt the destruction by physically destroying the damaging infrastructure. 

I find the irony that the same monkey-headed belief mechanisms that concoct conspiracy theories could be responsible for a situation which requires a genuine global conspiracy to be deeply pleasing in its symmetry.

I also tend to agree with the need for an officially nonexistent transnational series of massive structure hits, but that's just me.  Eschatology and ego mean that I am a big cause, dammit. :)

Comments

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

The solution, surely, is not to try to persuade people to change the world, but to change their little bit of it. One person or town can't change global warming, but they can band together to share cars or even have 'walking buses' for the school run to reduce pollution in their town. In the process, they'll be helping cut down their carbon emissions.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

But carbon has NO effect at that scale. So why would they bother?

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

They're not doing it for carbon. They're doing it to cut local pollution from car exhausts/ lower traffic and improve road safety. It benefits their tow directly. The carbon reduction is a bonus.

Then you get 10, 100, 1000 towns wanting lower pollution and fewer traffic accidents and things will start to be more significant carbon-wise.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Worth a try. :)

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

Sounds like an interesting read.

You mentioned several things which I believe will contribute to the fall of man, so to speak. The idea that the little guy can't affect big change tends to lead to indifference. Why should someone care about what's happening if they feel they cannot change it? If society, by and large, feels that indifference and continues to breed, their children are not motivated to feel or act; it takes seeing people either lose control of themselves or take control of something they dislike to awaken responses. Responses=responsibility.

Maybe at some point in their lives, these offspring will encounter something that awakens their sense of responsibility, but if you have more and more disaffected people populating the world, experiences during which such responses could be triggered will dwindle. At some point, you reach a critical mass, and there truly won't be enough people with strong beliefs to change anything. They'll be too spread out to connect themselves, among other things. Something with the power to destroy the world we've created comes along- weather shifts, or an epidemic, etc- and no one does anything.

If anyone survives (besides the zombies, of course...), they're hardly likely to be immune to human cause and effect any longer. At that point, it'd be interesting to know whether they'd repeat the same cycles, or examine what went wrong within society and attempt to build a better one.

It makes sense to me that a true conspiracy could force the hand of change. People tend to have strong reactions to manipulation, real or psychologically manifested, and will fight to end it. Politicians often play on this, just not on a grand scale, by using a back door strategy to put new things into place.

Back door strategy is essentially a conspiracy theory which works on the mind, rather like the Wizard of Oz. People are so cowed by what they think they're seeing that the fail to see how the man behind the curtain is manipulating their responses. It's a perfect way to get what you want: tell the public that you want to enact some law that puts into place an idea they abhor, and while they're busy arguing over how to keep you from getting your way, sneak your actual goal in through the back. If you get caught, you just tell the masses that it's your "compromise," and they'll be happy to accept it because it's less polarized than the original distraction.

If you can use conspiracy psychology in that manner, I can't see why it wouldn't work as a shield for actually helping mankind.

Gods, I hope that was at least partially coherent.

(I actually would really like to know how carl42nz would interpret all of this, but as you may have noticed, his journal's been deleted. :( )

carlnz42

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

Oops, thought he was on your FL, too, not just Ravenbait's. My mind, it flees...and with good reason!