this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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In spite of the fact that they never happen and that government mass surveillance isn't a thing and hasn't been exposed repeatedly for decades and that we all know they have not been aiming to do this exact thing for the better part of a century and that they are genuinely evil and literally never prove themselves to be over and over and over.
There is that, but in a more general sense I think people like conspiracies because they have a deep need to believe that there is an intelligent direction to human affairs, even if it is malign, and that the world is not actually chaotic and uncontrolled at the largest scale. It stems I suppose from infancy when even while we pushed at them we needed to know the unfathomable rules our parents set came from a better understanding of things than was available to us.
This take I buy. My grievance is like, with people who lambast "conspiracy theorists" (because apparently that's a term for a fucking social identity we actually have to use in 2026) fall in the same trap as those who drop Dunning-Kruger effect- as we all know we all think we are smarter than average, and dumb people especially believe this, alas, just because you think you're smarter than the average doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong.
Just because you believe in a conspiracy doesn't mean there isn't one. There are informed opinions. They are rare, and hard to come by, but still. Technically correct = best correct.