Can We Please Stop Using the Phrase “I’m Not A Conspiracy Theorist, But…”?
You ARE. Embrace it. Own it. Nothing in the world makes sense unless you assume deliberate actors with an agenda… and your brain is screaming it at you.
I am sick to my back teeth of hearing this utterance.
Especially from otherwise smart people, whose work I admire.
Yes, Ivor… it is conspiracy theory. And that is why it makes sense of everything!
(I also had a recent Jordan Peterson link of him saying: “I’m not a conspiracy-minded person, BUT…” and it made me grind my teeth… but alas, I lost the link. Anyway, you get the idea.)
Three problems:
1. You are agreeing with the intent (and reinforcing the use) of weaponized language. You are saying, Yep, conspiracy theorists BAD. Don’t want to be one of those.
Well, why not?
If you want people to think, why are you legitimizing a known “thought-terminating cliché”?
Using the term “conspiracy theorist” in this way—in contempt, or denial—is a social punishment for following certain lines of thinking.
Why would certain lines of thinking be off-limits? Because they disagree with the herd? Because they disagree with the regime? Yes, but most of all: because they make trouble for someone who would prefer to go on acting in the shadows. Because following those thoughts would expose the deliberate actors behind whatever problem you are considering.
How convenient for those actors that there exists a such a term!
How convenient for them that everyone, including the people who are likely to expose them, are so eager to avoid this label that they will fly away from the target for fear of being hit with its flak!
Please review this Sharyl Attkisson video…
…and note how terms such as “conspiracy, quack,” etc. are weaponized and used to direct our attention away from things, causing us to retreat from precisely the things we should be focused on.
You are falling for it, dummies.
Quit it.
2. If you utter that phrase, some part of you is desperately trying to scream the truth at you: there are deliberate actors with an agenda behind the thing you are trying to explain.
Congratulations, you ARE a conspiracy theorist. Embrace it. Your brain has led you to the unavoidable truth that the world is this colossally fucked up for a good reason, and that reason is that there are certain people who want it that way.
They wanted this outcome.
Why? Because it serves their interests.
Impossible! You cry. No one could deliberately want this evil to be visited on people!
But they do.
You are a good person, so you are trying to ascribe good motives to people. You want to put it all down to accidents and incompetence. But accidents and incompetence do not result in events which are carried out in coordinated global lockstep in nearly every nation in the world.
Yes, the evildoers likely have invented some justification for their evil. They are blinded by causes, or movements, or institutional momentum, or they receive some kind of psychological benefit or social reward for turning a blind eye to truth and what is right. Evil inherently involves untruths and evasions, and yes, incompetence. It has to.
Evildoers might convince themselves they are making the world a better place.
But that does not make it any less deliberate, or any less evil.
The reason you utter the phrase “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, BUT…” is that you’re out of explanations.
When accidents and incompetence no longer carry any more explanatory power, this is where you arrive: Bad guys with bad agendas. Welcome.
3. You would have to be a headless zombie to not see and hear what the deliberate actors are saying, at this point.
They are telling you exactly what they mean to do with the world. They are conducting their conspiracy out loud and at full volume, broadcasting it for all to hear.
The conspiracy theorists have to nothing to do these days but POINT.
Look, we say. Just look at the words coming out of the conspirators’ mouths.
Okay, so argue for a different label if you really want to:
But I say embrace it, and call it what it truly is.
Conspiracy Theorist = someone who understands that world events are explained by deliberate actors with agendas, and who does not evade, shy away, or turn a blind eye to those actors, but instead casts the full light of their awareness on them.
One of these days, somebody in a public forum is going to say “I AM a conspiracy theorist—that’s why I understand what is going on.”
And if I can avoid falling out of my chair in shock, I think I’ll probably cheer.
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I actually said recently to a friend who called me a conspiracy theorist , “ Yes! I love a good conspiracy theory, they’re mostly right!” They thought I would denounce such things.
Conspiracy theorist = critical thinker