geo wrote: ↑Sat Dec 11, 2021 11:30 am
I suspect many who suggest the "election was stolen" know that what they say is not really true. But if you're part of a movement, you disseminate its creed. It's what identity politics is all about.
The nature of conspiracy thinking seems to me to primarily function to cover up other beliefs that people find embarrassing, unsayable or confusing.
The belief among Trump supporters that the US Federal Election last year was stolen by the Democrats is a perfect case in point. Their real belief was that democracy enables inferior people to take power so the USA needs a dictatorship. Because such overt prejudice and authoritarian sentiment is considered morally illegitimate, the emotional opposition to a progressive change of government has to be presented in a covert way.
People find it okay to say the election was stolen, despite its flagrant falsity, because it allows them to organise toward an authoritarian political system while cloaking that desire with the veneer of support for democracy. Their alleged moral stance is that it is only them who are supporting "true democracy". This message serves to confuse the social debate and conceal their true authoritarian views.
Such authoritarian cloaking is somewhat like how Roman Emperors insisted they were true Republicans while completely removing the substance of distributed power that was the essence of Republican Rome.
Similar conspiracies operate with climate change. The conspiracy theory that climate change is a hoax enables people to continue to support the fossil fuel economy with a clear conscience. Rather than the cognitive dissonance that comes from saying "I want something bad", denialists use the psychology of conspiracy to insist that what everyone else thinks is bad is in fact good.
Unfortunately there is an equal and opposite conspiratorial mindset on the progressive side, with the idea that anything that might delay the shift away from fossil fuels simply reflects conspiracies run by energy companies. That leaves no space for dialogue with the view that cooling technology could be a better immediate climate priority than decarbonization of the economy.
I hope this is just some sort of a drinking club. 
