Why conspiracies?
By DRAGOș VODă
Published 2025-09-25 20:23

On the popular image board 4chan, a conspiracy made the rounds a few years ago, Jeff Mangum saved Anne Frank, the singer and guitarist of the band “Neutral Milk Hotel”, a cult classic for indie rock enjoyers, went back in time and saved Frank and made the album “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”, of course, this is obviously false, there are many holes in the theory, how could he go back in time? How could he fight the nazi army? But the more important thing is that many people believed this conspiracy, but why is that? How could they believe such an outrageous story.
Since the ancient times people made up conspiracies, Livy questioned whetever Romulus really ascended to heaven and the senators actually killed him and destroyed his body, it seems that this need for conspiracy and emotion of paranoia is a natural human reaction and not a response to modern social reality and production of labour, it has more to do with our natural tendency to produce and make stories to explain what is happening around us, the ancient myths were used for the same job as conspiracies, to explain what is happening around us, they are the stories we tell each other, but conspiracies take on a much more harmful form, while myths were used to explain reality, conspiracies are used to explain delusions. The people who usually believe these theories are not simple-minded, mentally unwell people, but people with certain emotional needs which they got deprived of, they are a safety net, so they can feel safe in their hostile environment, beliefs in certain conspiracies came from their social reality, people who thought that the government harms its citizens believed that the September 11th attacks were made by the US government and not by terrorists. However there are certain personality traits which indicate a higher chance of believing in conspiracies, that is antagonism and paranoia level, we are all antagonistic and paranoiac in some way, we may think that a group of people are talking behind our back despite nothing telling us that they do that, as paranoia is a natural part of the human psyche, the feeling of anti-paranoia, the idea that nothing ever connects and nothing makes sense is even more awful than high paranoia. Conspiracy theories also exert on us a certain of fascination, many maximalist and hysterical realist writers such as Pynchon and Delillo used conspiracy theories as a motif to explore new ways of understanding, representing such a complex and deep topic as government control and epistemology through the lens of humour and absurdism, events with seemingly no important meaning are actually connected, to offer meaning to a character which is isolated and scared.
Conspiratorial perspective can produce harmful consequences which can effect the health and being of a human, many people who believed that the covid epidemic was a hoax went into the streets without their mask and got sick. Of course, conspiratorial thinking is a core belief of fascist regimes, they are a structural part of the ideology, false history takes precedence over real one, Jews were considered by the Nazi regime as greedy humans who controlled national banks and brought the downfall of high art, everything which went against the Nazi spirit was considered heretic, paintings like the one from Otto Dix, which reflected the horrors of war instead of celebrating it were considered degenerated, any human or idea against the Nazi regime was considered “Jewish”.
Technological innovation and the internet brought conspiracy theories to the average person’s house, you do not longer need to be in a certain area to hear about the conspiracy, you can just log on your favourite internet website and it is there, at your finger, if mass media made the process of conspiracy easier to get around, the internet accelerated the process at an unseen level. The conspiracy I presented in the beginning and other ones, like the idea that demonic sigils are hidden in circuit boards inside our computers, as inside them occult magic is itched. If it were not for people coming together on the internet to form these theories, they might as well have never even been thought of, as the consistency of the thought might have been sparce.
In conclusion conspiracy theories are another part of our modern lives, but something which existed since the birth of civilization and the acceleration of human connection through the internet brought a never seen before ability to create new conspiracy theories.
References: (1) Scientific American
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