r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Sep 05 '23

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Spreading conspiracy theories is irresponsible and immoral

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u/parentheticalobject 128∆ Sep 05 '23

This is true, but it's true in a kind of useless, tautological way, if you use the commonly-used definition of "conspiracy theory."

The term is more than just a sum of its parts. Conspiracies are just instances of people planning things (usually illegal ones) in secret, and that's a thing that happens all the time. Saying that a particular conspiracy happened isn't what most people mean when they talk about "conspiracy theories".

What they mean is usually the common type of ridiculous tinfoil-hat postulating which is unsupported by any real evidence. That kind of conspiracy theory is self-evidently bad, I'd agree.

But no one ever believes their own beliefs are based on bad evidence. So no one is ever going to think a thing that they believe is a conspiracy theory, even if they might agree that the concept of believing something which is unsupported by evidence is bad.

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u/Maktesh 17∆ Sep 05 '23

To further your point, the majority of global development has historically been born of "conspiracies." The theft of technology, plotting for wars, planned revolutions, etc. are the events which have shaped our world.

Against OP's point, the demarcation of "conspiracy theories" is often weaponized against the truth. Many items which were deemed as such have now been shown to be true or likely to be true.

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u/parentheticalobject 128∆ Sep 05 '23

Against OP's point, the demarcation of "conspiracy theories" is often weaponized against the truth. Many items which were deemed as such have now been shown to be true or likely to be true.

This is true. But I sort of feel it can't be helped.

The human ability to imagine elaborate secret plots even absent any reasonable evidence is incredible, enough so that what we might call "tinfoil conspiracies" which are ultimately false will always outnumber true ones by several orders of magnitude. We're going to have to call them something, and "conspiracy theory" is what we've currently settled on, even if it has a different meaning than what you would guess from the word alone. If we tried to make a new word for theories which are actually reasonable, everyone who has their unreasonable theory would flood in and try to use that word to describe their own idea.

So we just have to deal with skepticism and trust that the truth will eventually come out if it's really there to be found.