All thinking is conspiracy thinking, vol. 1

There’s a thought I’ve been noodling on lately. You already read it in the title. Can you guess what it is? Very good! It’s how all thinking is conspiracy thinking.

Now, I know what you’re thinking right now, “Emily, you can’t be serious! I’m very smart, and all of my thinking is A+ definitely non-conspiracy.” I know you’re thinking that because I am a part of the deep state and when you went and got a flu shot last year, you were actually injected with a blood router so now you serve as a node in the mesh network of pure evil and I can read your thoughts. And also that wasn’t even a medical practitioner that injected you! It was just someone off of craigslist. They did start medical school later that year, however.

But that’s not the point. The point is that you are, unfortunately, wrong. I think. And here’s why.

First of all, I have recently learned that there is a whole field dedicated to studying conspiracy thinking, which means that there are experts and research and what not and I don’t know 99% of it. But I did read an article last week about a currently popular CT.

I was quite taken with this article and the whole world of conspiratorial thinking. It seemed so fun! So exciting! To be in the know about something that other people just don’t get, to be a part of a group that is definitely on the right side, to be able to explain current events in a way that makes sense deep in your bowels.

Are you seeing it now? In the course of my 40-minute education, I learned that CTs have some specific characteristics. I’m going to ignore those and instead focus on a characteristic that I found compelling, which is that adherents of CTs do not need evidence for their beliefs. The belief comes first, and everything that follows is evidence for it, no matter what it is.

What if, instead of being the A+ non-conspiratorial thinker that I usually believe myself to be, I am actually approaching the world with a set of hardened beliefs. I accept the things that fit more easily, and often reject things that don’t. (I’m sure some of this is inspired by Thinking Fast and Slow).

I posit, then, that conspiracy thinking is a subset of “normal” thinking. It just has a few more trademarks and a smaller pool of people that fall into it.

The topic of CT has piqued my interest because I find it incredibly easy to feel very very good about how correct my beliefs are and how smart my thinking is. And yet, I also aggressively filter evidence and frequently do not seek to challenge the beliefs that I have. So that’s something to think about.

For what it’s worth, I still do think I’m right most of the time. And when I’m wrong, I quickly forget that I was ever wrong and believe I was right all along.