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60% Of Britons 'Believe In Conspiracy Theories'

I think the real number is 100%. Every criminal case that involves more than one perpetrator is a "conspiracy theory".

conspiracy
/kənˈspɪrəsi/
noun

  1. a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.
 
I am a briton and I believe in conspiracy theories, but it really depends which ones. Believing something a little funny is going on between Russia and the US does not mean that one believes the queen is a lizard or that the moon landings were faked.
 
Unfortunately the media's idea of "conspiracy theory" is that anyone who believes such things are nutjobs etc. and in addition, the only conspiracy theories which the media seem to think exist (or want to tell us about, at least) are the 'main' ones which quite often can be outrageous.

There are loads more conspiracies to be found than the ones we're regularly told about.

And even with the mainstream ones, just because overall they might sound a little 'out there' does not mean that the entire thing is outside the realms of possibility. As an example; (and not saying my opinion either way) - screaming "the moon landings were all faked" is one thing, but what about the idea that they did go, but that some of the photos were faked, because for technical reasons the ones they took didn't survive the journey back or etc.? But most of the time this part of it won't get mentioned; it's just "Some people think we didn't go to the moon! Aren't they crazy?"

The mainstream media likes to paint everything they're not comfortable about, with the "conspiracy" brush just to discredit people and make the masses think that anyone who believes in such stuff must be wrong/crazy/misguided/certifiable/etc.

Gotta shut down that mistrust of authority, at all costs! :boss:

There are many conspiracies I give credence to. I keep an open mind. But not too open or my brain will fall out, as they say.

What worries me more, is the amount of people who do believe the government and mainstream media.
 
I give limited credence to conspiracy theories, I like your moonlanding analogy, Zeb. I also think there were conspiracies at least after the fact with both JFK and 9/11 (for example) - anyone investigating themselves is going to do their best to mitigate blame, even if they are only covering up incompetence rather than malpractice.
On the other hand, I am increasingly horrified by the human capacity to believe any old nonsense that they find emotionally satisfying, especially when it centres on resentment and blame. A balance has to be struck between the two, it's hard to know where it lies.
 
Ogdred_Weary said:
I give limited credence to conspiracy theories, I like your moonlanding analogy, Zeb. I also think there were conspiracies at least after the fact with both JFK and 9/11 (for example) - anyone investigating themselves is going to do their best to mitigate blame, even if they are only covering up incompetence rather than malpractice.
On the other hand, I am increasingly horrified by the human capacity to believe any old nonsense that they find emotionally satisfying, especially when it centres on resentment and blame. A balance has to be struck between the two, it's hard to know where it lies.
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"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

There's the problem, if I believe JFK was murdered in a conspiracy, fair enough, there's evidence that may have been the case, but it's not going to affect my day-to-day life very much. If, however, in the 21st century I take to the internet every five minutes raging against lamestream news and spreading the most outrageous bullshit to prop up my reactionary, moronic, rabble-rousing rhetoric, then there's a big problem because this privileged position of being in the know that I like to see myself in, that there's no way I would be fooled by what the authorities want me to think, means I'm going to be lost in a morass of confusion falsely posing as reason.

Reality has become a lot more plastic thanks to deliberate ignorance posing as savvy. A lot of the time it's best to admit you don't know everything, you may get it wrong sometimes, and demonising journalists en masse is far from helpful. Sure, some of them seem to make a living from reposting tweets, but many more are researching and working things out beneficially.
 
60% of Britons ... ? I wasn't asked.
Re: Brexit and the Media - I'm fed up with people I've never met telling me why I voted the way I did.

Damn, that sounds conspiratorial
 
Coal said:
Me.
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Seriously, though, that's either solipsist or a half-truth, unless you were joking. Plenty of mainstream news reports are linked to and extracted here, and I haven't noticed a huge amount of posters, yourself included, decrying them as 100% fake news (or even 60%) every time they appear. Opinions are not formed in a vacuum, neither is your view of the facts of the world.
 
GNC said:
Who do you believe, then? David Icke? Alex Jones?
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Can't speak for Coal but given that he was agreeing with something I said, I thought I should reply anyway :)

My impressions of David Icke and Alex Jones (and admittedly I don't really watch/read their stuff in a while) are that they come across as completely outlandish but there are probably some things that they are right about; it's just that those things will get lost amongst the outlandishness. So the majority of people will write them off as idiots or whatever. I don't write them off; I think they probably have a point about some things.

I don't know that I believe anyone per se (certainly not automatically); government, mainstream media, youtube channels - well, with youtube it's fair to say that there are a lot of obviously rubbish videos but equally there are a lot of really well thought out ones.

We keep an open mind, really (me and Mr Zebra). I wish more people would do that instead of just blindly trusting everything they're told.

Distrusting the media doesn't mean that we necessarily think everything they say is fake - it's more that we're open to the possibility that there may be more to the story than what they're presenting.
 
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GNC said:
Seriously, though, that's either solipsist or a half-truth, unless you were joking. Plenty of mainstream news reports are linked to and extracted here, and I haven't noticed a huge amount of posters, yourself included, decrying them as 100% fake news (or even 60%) every time they appear. Opinions are not formed in a vacuum, neither is your view of the facts of the world.
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It seems I was altogether too laconic there.

Expanding this out "I read a variety of news sources, including, but not limited to, the BBC, RT, Al Jazeera, the Intercept. I then make up my own mind about what might actually be going on. I accept this might be wrong."

Schrodinger's Zebra said:
Can't speak for Coal but given that he was agreeing with something I said, I thought I should reply anyway :)
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I was agreeing with your statement...
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
What worries me more, is the amount of people who do believe the government and mainstream media.
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...and suggesting that most people do seem to believe unequivocally in a single news source which they ascribe to be 'the news, the whole news and nothing but the news'. A disturbingly large number of people in the UK believe in just one newspaper and/or the BBC and I think this is a bad thing.
 
Coal said:
It seems I was altogether too laconic there.

Expanding this out "I read a variety of news sources, including, but not limited to, the BBC, RT, Al Jazeera, the Intercept. I then make up my own mind about what might actually be going on. I accept this might be wrong."
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I don't think that's wrong at all, I think it's a very good standpoint.


Coal said:
I was agreeing with your statement...
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Sorry yes I know you were agreeing to it (and thank you), so hence I decided to reply to GNC's question because it essentially equally applied to me because he was asking something of you because of something of mine you'd agreed with.

(And now I'm all tangled in knots). :)


Coal said:
...and suggesting that most people do seem to believe unequivocally in a single news source which they ascribe to be 'the news, the whole news and nothing but the news'. A disturbingly large number of people in the UK believe in just one newspaper and/or the BBC and I think this is a bad thing.
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It is indeed a bad thing. :nods:
 
No one has pointed that this article is talking about 60% of Insular Celts, I had no idea they had conspiracy theories in those days, I don't recall reading about it in Asterix or the Horrible Histories series.
 
Coal said:
It seems I was altogether too laconic there.

Expanding this out "I read a variety of news sources, including, but not limited to, the BBC, RT, Al Jazeera, the Intercept. I then make up my own mind about what might actually be going on. I accept this might be wrong."
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That makes more sense, thanks, and handily contradicts my fears of your solipsism, but most of the major news sources are in general agreement about most stories, not so much any spin a more biased report may want to put on them, but many facts are hard to disagree with without going full paranoid. What worries me is when the facts are obfuscated to the extent that extreme self-interest trumps any sense of reason, or even empathy, leaving nothing but confusion.

The whole story will never be the whole story thanks to the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, but you can acquire a general idea of what may or may not be going on, even if it that is up in the air at the point you're learning about it.
 
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