busyI have a very low belief in true conspiracies, because I have very little faith in human competence. "Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead." The bigger the group, the bigger the blab. So while it's not impossible for people to form conspiracies, it is very difficult to keep those secret for very long. This makes them generally implausible.
However, there's another dynamic that produces very similar results and works with human nature. I call it a discontinguous conspiracy. It's deliberate, but it's not tightly coordinated. It involves lots of people separately deciding to use the same methods to pursue the same goal. Consider racism. If a white man in the South wants to murder a black man, he can be pretty confident that the jury will consist of white people like himself who don't really disapprove of killing black people and thus probably will not convict him should he land in court. It is not required that they know each other or plan ahead, merely that they use the same playbook.
I've met all kinds of conspiracy theorists. At a chemtrails convention I attended there was pretty much the full spectrum.
A lot of conspiracies are either partial truths, or things tangent to a truth in some way. Insofar as I know, most planes don't spray things on purpose. But cropdusters do, bugsprayers do, the airline industry is one of the most eco-hostile, and this has been proposed as a means of geoengineering to fight climate change.
We all know that conspiracies exist; we all suspect people in power of being involved in many kinds of conspiracies, even if it's only something as banal as accepting campaign contributions to vote a certain way on certain types of legislation.
It's not a conspiracy theory that politicians are for sale. It is heavily documented fact, to the point that America is not a democracy but rather a plutocracy (if you focus on its control by rich people) or an oligarchy (if you focus on its control by a small group). Campaign donations are just one of many ways that rich people purchase politicians, and votes on specific legislation. And countries fall on a scale of corruption from very low to very high, in case you want to have fun comparing differenc
If you want to know how plausible something is, do some research. Sometimes you can't tell for sure, but other times it is really fucking obvious.
A belief in religious supernatural occurrences (like miracles) is a scientifically implausible belief, and yet it is not considered particularly fringe.
You know what else is scientifically implausible? That people fall out of airplanes and survive. But it happens occasionally. It's amusing to watch devout materialists contort as they try to explain them. If you're a devout materialist and fall out of a plane, you're doomed to die upon impacting the ground. Now if you aren't that materialist, you have some options left -- petition your god(s) for a miracle, try to learn levitation in 5 minutes, and so on.
Also, if you're into miracles, check out the Catholic archives. They are really quite meticulous about ruling out all other possible explanations before moving someone's marker toward the Saint rank. This can be a useful tour of how to do that.
Big Pharma: The theory that pharmaceutical companies conspire to maximize profit by selling drugs that people do not actually need
Remember, they're in it to make money, not to help people. Here is just one example highlighting this problem. But it doesn't require a conspiracy. All it requires is some number of people in those companies to care more about money than about health ... which is kind of a lot. They don't have to talk to each other or agree in advance. Just someone makes a pitch, someone makes a product, someone makes an ad campaign, and nobody along the way says, "Maybe we shouldn't do this." Because people objecting to business practices tend to get fired and replaced with less picky employees.
Flat Earth: The theory that the Earth is flat, but governments, business, and scientists all pretend it is a globe.
This one is fun because you can literally check for yourself, if you use a tall tower, an airplane, or a boat.
The demarcation line
While conspiracy theorists might individually focus on one particular theory, like 9/11 or chemtrails, it's very rare to find someone who only believes in one conspiracy theory. They generally believe in every conspiracy theory that's less extreme than their favorite one.
One of my quirks is that I don't tend to regard a lot of things as certain, but rather as more or less probable. I don't have a stance on some issues because I have not yet gathered enough data or examples to support one model or action over the others. Some things are more likely than others. Some have a huge amount of beans in one scale and a handful on the other. But I do keep an eye on the beans. Just because something isn't convincing doesn't mean I'll ignore it. It's a datapoint, unless there's an identifiable flaw in its source or processing. (A lot of scientific studies are flawed, for instance.) Something might, eventually, shift. Or not. Germany had a surprisingly large pile of beans on the "actually got a clue this time" side before falling back into its usual fucked up behavior. Damn, they made it almost a century.
So the closest I come to a demarcation line has to do with what if any evidence is available, whether a given concept is tangent to a truth, whether a conspiracy is necessary to produce the effect, and whether any of that is actually useful. What model best fits the available data and observations? That much is science. But philosophy warns not to get too certain of anything. Don't believe everything you think.
