What All Conspiracy Theorists Believe

Conspiracy theorists are often depicted as tin foil hat wearers with wild ideas about Earth being flat, gravity somehow being fake and dinosaurs never having existed. But the vast majority of conspiracy theorists hold no such opinions, and they are certainly not fashioning hats out of tin foil.

Conspiracy theorists come in a great variety, with most of them having a few pet theories that they firmly believe, along with a broader range of things they may be sceptical to without being sure what to believe.

What separates conspiracy theorists from mere sceptics are their firm beliefs, of which there are a small handful that all conspiracy theorists agree on. As things currently stand, there are three seemingly unrelated things that every conspiracy theorist believes. They are:

1. Global warming is not man made
2. Covid is not an existential threat to humanity
3. There was massive fraud against Trump in the US election

To believe any of the above items will automatically label us as conspiracy theorists by the more level headed portion of society. It's therefore interesting to note that a person believing one of the items to be true, also believes the two other items. These beliefs come in groups, which begs the question as to why such beliefs group together. They don't seem to have much in common, so why do they appear together in the mind of conspiracy theorists?

The answer to this is that there is a belief in an underlying conspiracy that people in power are directing against the general public. This underlying belief is based on the idea that there is a lust for power and money at the top of government and corporations that work together to form obstacles and taxes aimed at small entrepreneurs and labourers. A desire for conformity, and fear of being labelled crazy by our peers, is then used against us to prevent this idea to gain widespread acceptance.

Any theory that has at its base a belief in government and corporations as anything but benevolent is immediately attacked as a conspiracy theory, leading to the current state of affairs where there are three theories lumped together without any direct link to each other except an underlying belief that evil always lurks in the halls of power.

An interesting consequence of this is that any discussion on one of the three main conspiracies mentioned above has a tendency to bring in the two other ones as well. Covid, climate change and Trump have repeatedly been linked together, not only by conspiracy theorists, but by everybody else as well. The only thing contested is whether these beliefs are false or true.

This in turn highlights the true importance of the upcoming legal deliberations as to the scale of fraud in the recently held US elections. It's not merely about Trump and Biden, it's about Covid and climate change as well. If Trump wins, climate change and Covid industries are likely to fall as well. If Biden wins, these industries will thrive, and conspiracy theorists will have to retreat back into the shadows from where they emerged.  

Tin foil hat

By Rory112233 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link