https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qbATKglyUD4
I’m glad you’re back, but keep it down because today what I’m talking about once again are conspiracy theories. They’re different types, what’s really going on, why we should care, what conspiracy theories in general are good for, and this is sort of a follow-on to my earlier conspiracy theories video. I realized that a lot of people still have some confusion or some incompleteness around this issue. Also, conspiracy theory videos seem to get a lot of hits, so let’s be honest about that. I think I have a little bit more to add, so I wanted to add that to kind of help you out, especially if you’re conspiracy minded or whatever, to sort of sort out what might be going on with you, what might be going on with your friends who are conspiracy minded, and it’s sort of somewhat related to issues around anxiety, which I did a video on, and hopefully this framing will help you and help others to sort of break out of the worst aspects, we’ll say, of the conspiratorial thinking. And so what does and doesn’t matter about conspiracy theories? See, I think that the number of total conspiracy theories, or the number of people engaged in them at least, is a good measure of how unstable your society actually is, because what I think they’re measuring is the comfort level with which people have in the structures that we have. So if you feel the structures are intact, you’re not gonna need conspiracies to explain what’s going on. If the structures aren’t intact, then what that really means is they’re not intelligible to you, and intelligibility, big deal. And this is when we start to try to find intelligibility, we’re trying to build a way to understand this, to relate to this, to deal with it. We’re trying to build a narrative structure that will flow and explain what we’re seeing, or allow us to have some control over what we’re seeing. And so there’s really, there’s different types of conspiracies. There’s the organized conspiracy, and this is typically, when people use conspiracy, this is what everybody thinks everybody means anyway, right? Where there’s some shadowy figure at the head of the table, usually has a cigar, and he’s got a low voice, you can’t quite see him because he’s in the shadows, and he tells everybody like, go do this, and go do this crazy thing, and that crazy thing, and then we’ll take over the world. Yeah, that’s definitely the way people see them as organized. But there are really other more common types of conspiracies, not to say, and I’m not saying that conspiracies aren’t real, there are conspiracies. Some of them are organized, absolutely true. A lot of them are hybrids, because sometimes people organize stuff, but it doesn’t work that way, like they don’t really have a firm grip, a level of control, or even a level of influence that they need. So what they do is they get people involved in these schemes and try to generate other methods of getting their conspiracy, their plan across, right? And so in that way, it’s not a conspiracy because people don’t know about it, right? But that’s more, and one of the ways people do that is with stupidity, conspiracies of stupidity. So a conspiracy of stupidity looks something like this. If I were to tell you that we’ll say a certain drug doesn’t work, and I’m just like, put that, it doesn’t work, and then you could rename the drug, or reclassify the drug, and then people would get suspicious, and they might not take it, and they don’t realize they’re being manipulated into not taking something. They’re just stupid, right? Because they’ve believed something that is not true. And a lot of people fall into this, because there’s a lot of categories where people are stupid, and I mean like everybody. So what ends up happening is people do things by default, right? They just, oh, I don’t know anything about that, so I’m not gonna engage with it. But I heard something bad, and we prefer bad information over good information, evolutionarily speaking. So it’s very easy when you hear something to just sort of believe it because it might lead to a bad outcome. So we prefer to believe things that lead to bad outcomes, even if we have better information at hand that can tell us, oh no, that drug’s fine, like there’s nothing wrong with it. And this does happen a lot. This does happen a lot, but these conspiracy stupidities are not organized. There’s no one running them necessarily. They may be the result of an organized conspiracy from a very small number of people, and you know, that’s roughly a disinformation campaign, but it can also happen by accident. So people are really dumb, and then if you bring to them a really good idea that’s really brilliant, but not easy for them to understand, they won’t go for it. And it’s like, well, why did they reject my plans for a new super efficient carburetor? Because they didn’t believe you, and they’re stupid. And that’s happened, by the way, not that particular example, but examples like that have happened where, you know, the government’s been offered new opportunities or people have been offered companies new opportunities, and they don’t believe them because they’re too fantastical or whatever. And so in their stupidity and their ignorance, they decide not to fund something or not to go with something or to kill a technology that they actually have. That’s happened many times, happens in tech all the time. You’d be surprised how much good tech we’ve lost because people are like, oh, you know, I don’t know what this does. We better keep it in the basement or it’s safe. That happens. Another type of conspiracy or that looks like conspiracy is narrative framing. And narrative framing works something like this. See, we as human beings, right, we naturally play out narratives. That’s what we do. Narratives are very important. And that’s a method of outsourcing, again, our cognition, right? So we’re not having to think about things all the time. So just like, oh, okay, well, this always works like this. So I’m always going to interact with it like this and everything will be fine. When the narrative is broken and you don’t notice, it looks like people are acting as if something isn’t true or is true that obviously is not or it’s like, wait a minute, they look like they’re acting against reality. And when people act against reality, we assume either they know something we don’t or they’re being paid or bribed or they’ve got some grand scheme. And most often they’re just acting out the narrative as they always have and they don’t know any better. And that’s different from stupidity because in stupidity you were doing something and now you stopped because of the fear basically. Whereas with narrative framing, you’re just acting out the way you acted out. One way to think about this is if you always go to the bank and when you’re at the bank, they take your transaction and then they let you leave and then you go to the bank and they decide to reject some of your transactions and you don’t know what to do, you might just leave. Like, what do I do? Why didn’t they take my transactions? And this actually, this happens. Sometimes people are just playing through the course and you see this all the time actually. Why didn’t you ask them why they didn’t take your transactions? Well, I don’t know. Right? People do that. They actually, when things don’t work the way they expect, they don’t have a narrative or a script to play out. They’re used to everything just kind of working and then they’re totally confused. Totally confused. And it manifests in all sorts of ways, all sorts of ways, especially when rules change and you don’t know the new rules because they’re often businesses in particular, but also governments change the rules without telling anybody. And you don’t necessarily know the impact. You know, things aren’t reciprocal anymore. I remember ages and ages ago, I had money on float and it changed the banking float rules at the federal level without really telling anybody. And I was taking advantage of those rules. And yeah, that hurt me financially pretty badly because all of a sudden a bunch of checks bounced. They shouldn’t have bounced because they had plenty of money in the account. But nope, nope, nope. The bank steals your money and then you don’t get to steal it back. Very asymmetrical. And then that just causes a problem. And when a lot of people do that, right, or when it’s something that’s a big deal, like an election, when people are playing out a narrative and you see obviously, well, this narrative isn’t the valid narrative to play. It should be asking these questions. Why aren’t they asking questions? Why aren’t they looking into things? Why aren’t they doing investigations? Well, we never investigate elections. That almost never happens. And so they’re just playing out a narrative. But because the narrative is obviously broken and wrong, you’re like, what’s going on? Why is this happening? And like, fair enough. But it’s not necessarily a conspiracy. It’s just people doing what they would do under normal circumstances and not recognizing the circumstances aren’t normal. And then there’s another type of conspiracy that, you know, again, and these last couple have not been real conspiracies, I’ll say. They look like conspiracies. It’s very easy to kind of try to find intelligibility in them. This one I call common proximal goal, not really a conspiracy. So what happens is people get together and do a thing and you think that they’re organized when in fact they all have completely different goals. They all started from completely different starting points. So one example of this that I like to use is a riots. So if you have riots in some place like, I don’t know, Seattle, you might imagine there are three types of people in Seattle rioting there and there may be more. I’m just using three because three is easy to prove and easy to see. There are real anarchists who really want to be anarchists and do anarchy things. Whatever that means to them is kind of irrelevant. We’ll just throw aside the definition of anarchy, the real definition, and say people who are pissed off with government and actually want to change and are willing to use some force to do it. Right? So they’re upset about their lack of control because there’s four of them and if they all vote, nothing happens, which is generally what happens. And so they want control because they’re sure that whatever they’re bringing in is way better than whatever we got. And those people will do violence. Now, once somebody does violence, whether it’s throwing rocks or lighting things on fire or just basically going up against the police or trying to break into buildings or whatever they’re doing, that normalizes a whole bunch of other behavior and it sets the stage for other people to engage in different ways. So another type of person that say was rioting in Seattle and other places is the looter. They don’t have the same goal as the anarchists. They don’t care about the government. I’m sure they’ll say they do just to pretend because yeah, I’m with those guys. See what those guys are doing? I’m with them. Why am I with them? Because they’re doing what I want to do but for a different reason. But now my group’s bigger because all those guys, all those anarchists, yeah, yeah, I’m definitely one of them. But I’m going to go smash this window over here, not that government building, but this business and take some very expensive sneakers. That’s what I’m going to do, right? Because that’s my goal. I don’t care about the government. I just want stuff. So that definitely happened, right? Like we know this happens. And it happens in most riots. And like I said, I’m only going to use three, but there’s probably more. And then there’s a whole other class of people doing this rioting. And they are the heroes of their own story. And this can work a couple different ways, but the way you see on TV generally or see from the news reports or from the YouTubes or wherever you got your information from on the riots, which if you haven’t, very interesting stuff. I don’t suggest spending a lot of time on it because it’s a rabbit hole that endless. But a few key things. These people want to live in the world that they’re creating so that they can feel oppressed so that they feel like they’re the heroes. So I’m the oppressed person, you know, and I’m fighting the fascists, even if there aren’t any. And so what you do is you create a situation where it looks like there’s fascists, or at least from your perspective. So you go out to a riot and you do something to obviously get arrested. Now you’re oppressed because you’ve been arrested. It’s proof that the government is bad because they arrested me, me, innocent me, who’s done nothing. I’ve broken no laws. That’s what it’s all about. And then they imagine further, most of them imagine when they’re in that environment, they’re going to be Schindler. They’re going to be Superman. They’re going to be the one righteous man at the bottom standing up for what’s right. That’s what they imagine in their heads. Another way this can work is sort of the reverse. Now, I don’t know how true this is. I’ve never seen any evidence of any of this. But allegedly, in the riots, there were also people with badges, right, secret people with, although if they have badges, they’re not very secret, I guess. Known associates of government agencies will say who were also in the riots rioting and creating a worse riot? Well, yeah, because they want to be the heroes of their own story. So if I have a job and my job is to, among other things, quell riots, not having any riots is kind of a problem for me. It’s a job security issue. But if there are riots and they’re really bad, then I can come in or my agency can come in, the agency that I’m part of, by the way, because I’m a superhero too, can come in and push that down, man. Yeah, now we’ve made a small problem bigger so that we can feel better about our involvement in fixing the small problem that we made bigger. That happens. They just have a hero complex. They want to be the heroes of their own story. So they’re making that story happen by acting as if, right? Jordan Peterson talks about this act as if. So they’re acting as if and they’re creating the story so that they can be the hero of that story, whether they oppressed and downtrodden victim or they’re the government official valiantly rioting in to make the large riot go away. It doesn’t really matter, right? They’re both engaging in this whole idea of common proximal goal and trying to find a way that we’re involved in something that’s bigger than us, right? And it’s really big. It’s bigger than the group that we inhabit. It makes our group look bigger, but actually the anarchists have nothing in common with the leaders, nothing in common with the people who want to be heroes. They just don’t have any commonality and they’re not coordinating, not in any real sense, because they all have different goals. Like, how do you coordinate towards different goals? You know, the proximal goal of rioting is the same, but rioting doesn’t have an outcome in and of itself. And that’s where people get confused. But you see riots, you want an explanation for riots, you’ll try to find some intelligibility. And intelligibility is a tricky thing because we need it. We need intelligibility. We need a certain amount of it. And when the world is sort of moving towards chaos and away from order, we’re losing intelligibility in that process and we’re desperately trying to get it back. We just want to get the intelligibility back. And, you know, we’ll try anything. We’ll read random things on the board as code, you know, that is obviously for the lizard people. Duh. Now they know that I’m on their side and where the resources are that they can strip from the planet because I’ve hidden them, because I’m part of the lizard people conspiracy. You know, we want that level of intelligibility because now I know what’s on the board. Like, yeah, obviously, duh. You know, straight from the ancient aliens to lizard people to me. That’s right. It helps us to feel like we live in a world that we can understand. Even if we don’t understand it or don’t want to understand it, that’s not relevant. We can understand it. This is a big thing. People tend to, again, you know, sort of create these binaries, which I’m not a fan of. But actually, there’s almost always three states. So not knowing anything, knowing something, knowing we could know something. Yes. Yes, that’s enough. In many cases, knowing we could know something forces a bunch of types of behavior out of us. Right. And again, we don’t need control. Most people don’t need control. We just need to know whether or not we have to worry about something or in what way or when we have to worry about something. Lots of different ways that we can feel comfortable and safe and OK. And I think we get caught up in this intelligibility by trying to make very complicated narratives out of a very simple thing. If you hire a bunch of incompetent people to run your bank, they won’t be able to do all the transactions correctly. And they won’t be able to tell you why, because they’re dumb. This happens all the time. If you elect a bunch of stupid leaders who have crazy ideas about how human behavior and the world works, you’re going to get very strange, strange results. One could well look at, say, the recent pullout in Afghanistan and say the generals are under control of the lizard people because they they literally say dumb things about why the Afghan army didn’t stand up for them. It’s like you must not be required to take basic psychology or, I don’t know, look at human behavior ever in the world to be a general in the US military. And despite having consultants telling you, no, this is a problem and this is bad and you know, you need to pay attention to this. Well, we trained them and they didn’t stand up and fight for their country. What’s not their country? Training doesn’t make people do things. It just gives them skills. Whether or not they get applied is a whole different, has nothing to do with training. You cannot be trained and stand up for your country. That should give you a hint. Seems like the generals are a little stupid there. Really, I’m, you know, listen to some of the things they say. It’s like, I can’t believe you got that rank and are that ignorant of basic human function. But here we are. Looks, you know, and again, like, I mean, it’s really just stupidity on their part. They’re really just not, they shouldn’t have been made generals. Like, I don’t know how they got that position. They should have taken basic psychology and figured out how things work in the world, especially war and what people will and will not fight for and why. Certainly not money and certainly not the privilege of being in the government. Nobody cares about that. People are not driven by that. Some people are driven strictly by ego, but that’s that that goes away real quick when somebody shows up with a gun. Your ego, I mean, not everybody’s ego, but generally your ego goes away real fast, especially if you’re just a soldier like, well, maybe I don’t want to be a soldier today because guns, right? So it’s, it’s hard to make sense of this, right? Like what the hell is going on? Are all our generals stupid? Maybe, maybe that’s a simple explanation. Like, yeah, we just kind of like got a bad batch in and now we’ve got a bunch of dumb generals who don’t understand basic psychology, basic human behavior. And, you know, on the one hand, this intelligibility is a solution to nihilism because we’re making sense of the world. We have our sense of place in the world. It’s not chaotic. You know, we know there’s lizard people, right? We’re, we’re quite sure that the text on the board is, you know, lizard people speak and tells people where to get the resources so they don’t come down and take my resources. Yeah, we struck a sweet deal there. And it just gives us this comfort because maybe we don’t, maybe we can’t do anything about it. Maybe we don’t want to do anything about it. So it can help with nihilism. If you don’t have a better structure to be in, like, I don’t know, religious structure, that might be good. You know, or you’re outside of any communities because you’re a loner or, you know, all you have is a gamer community, whatever, like these are, you know, different. But it’s good to know that really what conspiracy theories measure, at least their popularity, is the level of uncertainty. The level of breakdown of sense making in a society. And some people get a little overboard. Like they say, oh, I know how to fix this conspiracy. If everybody knew the truth about the lizard people, then that would solve the problem. That’s when things go too far. So the basic problem, and you can do this with people. I do this with people all the time. It almost invariably has the same effect. You can tell people the truth. You can prove to them using facts, using logic, using reason, using rationality. That thing is as true as anything, and they can even agree to the truth of it. And then you know what happens? Nothing. It results in no action. Results in no change on their part, no change in conclusions, no change in thought, no change in patterns of action in the world. This happens all the time. Revealing the truth doesn’t mean anything is going to change at all. There’s lots of reasons for that. I don’t want to go into them because this video is already long enough. But even when it results in action, it’s almost never the action you want or expect. If you tell the truth about Area 51 and there’s actual aliens there, and I’m not saying there is or there isn’t. I have no idea. I really don’t care. It’s really not interesting to me. I mean, it’s fascinating to me, and I love Area 51. But the question of whether or not there’s aliens is actually not that interesting. Because who cares? What’s it going to change if they’re real? Probably nothing. But if you tell somebody the truth, like, there’s definitely aliens in Area 51, you go on TV and you have the goods, it’s right here, here’s all the paperwork. You might just get called a kook by everybody. Because that happened. It’s happened multiple times. Now, how true and how much truth? Again, I don’t know. Maybe there’s aliens in Area 51. I have no idea. I don’t care. But it’s funny to watch what happens when people quote, tell the truth, and then, you know, pilots come out, they see UFOs, they tell the truth, what happens? Yeah, not really what you think. Are you convincing people? Maybe. Maybe you’re making your tribe a little bit bigger? Are you making your tribe bigger? Tribalism, bad framing. Maybe. But are you getting the result you want? Are you getting the changes you want? Are you seeing the action you want? No. No. We’re going to force the government to release the papers because they’ll feel embarrassed, and then they’ll change how they’re working. No, they won’t. The government’s following a narrative. The people in the government are following a narrative. They don’t want to break that narrative. They will sooner lie about the truth or lie to themselves about the truth and continue doing what they were doing, then they will admit the truth and make a change. And change is also hard, to be fair. So don’t be expecting changes just because you tell people things. That’s when these go too far. Also, engaging in too many conspiracy theories, you go too far because there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t intelligible in the world, that doesn’t make any sense at all, and isn’t supposed to. Because there’s an infinite number of facts and they don’t go together necessarily. And the ones we expect to go together don’t often go together. And this is sort of like never attribute to malice what ignorance will suffice to explain, right? Which is basically to say, don’t be thinking people are smart. Usually they’re just stupid. And what you’re seeing is not some concerted effort for them to take over the world and give literally everything over to the lizard people. It’s just that they’re dumb. And what I have found is that people are dumber than I can possibly imagine. And there seem to be more of them than I can possibly imagine. Yeah, that’s a good solid explanation. And we don’t have as much influence and control as we might want. And that’s the problem. Conspiracy theories aren’t going to get us that though. The thing to do is to focus on the smaller things that affect you every day. The things that you can understand easily, can understand easily, that are clearly working. And move as many of the quote conspiracy things like whether or not there’s aliens in Area 51. I promise you I watch a lot of Area 51 stuff. And I’ve read a lot of the paperwork on it. I just don’t care if there’s aliens. But it is so much fun to watch. Is it a black ops? Is the CIA reverse engineering? I mean, it’s fun. And nowadays I don’t do much of that. Why? Because I’m trying to get into a small community. I’m trying to put all my resources into helping as many people as I can to understand things in the world because there’s a lot of things we don’t understand. And push all those things to the side. Because they’re not important for my day-to-day living. They’re not going to affect me. If they come out tomorrow and there are aliens in Area 51, everybody has footage. And it’s live footage. It’s all over YouTube. And it’s on big screens. And everybody agrees. I don’t think anything at all is going to change the next day or the next week or the next month or the next year. I don’t think anything’s going to change in this world whatsoever. And so I just kind of push that conspiracy to the side. And I’m like, whatever. Could be. Could be the cabal of people in the dark room with the cigars. I have no idea. But I don’t think it’s important to me. And I’m not saying nothing would happen. But the things that would happen wouldn’t change my life one little bit. And so I don’t have to worry about that conspiracy. So I don’t have to go down that road. And as many things as we can push off to the side so we’re not thinking about them anymore. So we can focus in on the important things. And I’m not here to tell you what’s important or what should be important. Although maybe I’ll do a video on that. Who knows? If I run out of content or run out of topics. But this is where you need to focus. You need to focus on getting these conspiracy theories off your books as quickly as possible. Figuring out which ones are really affecting you and which ones aren’t. And that way you can live a happier, healthy sort of life. And conspiracy theories take up your cognitive load. And they cause you a lot of worry. And they take away from your ability to watch my awesome videos and try to decipher the stuff on the board. Which is sometimes decipherable by the way. But be that as it may, the worst part about conspiracy theories is that in particular they prevent you from watching my videos and giving me the thing I’m most grateful for. Which is your time and attention.