Saturday, August 13, 2022

The danger of conspiracy theories

James Meek wrote in the London Review of Books (22 October 2020):

The danger of conspiracy theories is not that they promote action to tear down society but that they delegitimise, distract and divert: they divert large numbers of people from engaging in political action, leaving the field clear for the cynical, the greedy and the violently intolerant. 

They distract them from questioning authority about society’s real problems by promoting a gory soap opera as if it were real and the result of "research". And they delegitimise the idea that institutions – courts, parliaments, the education system, the salaried media - can be anything other than malign.

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