The Conspiracy Theory Mentality.
12 October 2017 [link youtube]
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you know there's a difference there's a
fundamental difference between wanting to believe and wanting to understand I think it's the difference between immaturity and maturity maybe when you were a kid you wanted to feel you could trust people that's why you feel so burned that you were lied to about JFK or that milk is healthy and this kind of thing you know but you know what part of being an adult is not wanting to believe again I identify as a nihilist because nihilism is fundamentally a critique and rejection of belief and if you as a mature adult want to understand these things you're gonna get lied to again and again the analysis of text you know to be broad that you know to be lying to you is a crucial aspect of research I miss yen all right I got a question from patreon supporter about the conspiracy theory mentality and particular conspiracy theories and thank you for your generous support if nobody supported this channel on patreon it would either cease to exist or we take on a very different format because either I'm doing this for the fewer than 200 people who support me on patreon or I'm just doing it so that my daughter can see these videos one thing and this video even we're going to talk about right now probably as an example some that'd be cool you know I have my daughter see one day and the the unknown and unknowable future conspiracy theories I have been in a position as a specialist at someone working on political science history Asian languages politics First Nations politics and working on all this different stuff sometimes I'm in the pivot position where I'm talking about something within my specialised area of expertise that other people don't know enough about and they perceive me as if I'm espousing something out of a crazy conspiracy theory so to give an example a lot of people are shocked if you know about what happened in the Cambodian civil war that that was a civil war in which the United States supported communists they supported communism now why did they support communist well for one thing one group of communists was fighting against another group of communist unbelief I'm not making excuses for you as foreign policy and for another thing a guy named Richard Milhous Nixon whom you may know from Futurama and The Simpsons I mean Nixon boy he's really a political figure who's who's been in mortal comedy a a lot of you have Nixon I think he's in more comedy than Bill Clinton them you know people never went it but Nixon has become really immortal as a as a figure in common anyway I remember one Futurama especially yes he gets reelected as robot Nixon so anyway something about Nixon but do you remember that was said there was a fashion brand also that was just called next there was a brand of yeah I remember saying embassy ads for their designer watches they just called Nixon I was looking at wondering who really wants a watch that says Nixon on it in 2017 don't know anyway Nixon has become immortalized who knows why well other political figures haven't forgotten but he made a pact with Mao Zedong the leader of China and then that began a period of a strategic alliance what was called the strategic triangle of China in the United States against the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union's LS so for that reason China in the United States were jointly supporting the most notorious the most violent communists in the history of the world the Khmer Rouge the Pol Pot faction of the Cambodian communists and they were fighting against the relatively reasonable communists who were supported by Moscow by the Soviets however my point is here if I talk about that political history with people who know nothing about it with people who grew up in the Ronald Reagan era believing that youth the United States fought against communism over the world well guess what during Ronald Reagan's term of office the United States in this theater of war was supporting communists and that's not a crazy conspiracy theory that's a really basic you know historical political fact so you know I can be in that situation when talking about political history I can be in that situation where I'm talking about Buddhism well I I know things with the Buddhist religion other people don't know where people stop and look at you like you're you're crazy or you're sharing some kind of conspiracy theory type stuff people think that about me because of my interest in veganism oh yeah yeah they think that the factory farm conditions that I talk about conspiracy theories that it's really not as bad as I say it is or really not as bad as these uh videos these undercover videos are yeah that's it I thought you were to say something more like they think that the milk causes cancer is a conspiracy you know yeah yeah that too I think I think some people in my family just recently when I was visiting them they you know I was talking about the connection between a vegan diet and Alzheimer's and they they didn't believe it at all so it's funny but that that's specific thing about the the animal rights issue like are the conditions of the factor that bad nobody's ever taken it that way like but you know you know what that reminds me of is because you know part of my family is Jewish I live my life for Jewish people when you met Jewish people and when atrocities in the israel-palestine conflict came up when their answer would be oh it's not that bad you you should go you should visit you should go to Israel you'll see it's not that bad you're saying that you're like I've just read you the details of like 37 people being massacred when a airport was bombed by the Israelis or something or when you know a small like a children's school in the Gaza Strip was bombs something specific you've just read like oh you'll see it's not that bad it's like what does that even mean it's like well well people are being slaughtered but it's not right you know if I took a vacation I'd see it your way what you don't even like what does that mean but whichever slaughterous conditions what do you mean it's not that bad like what anyway they think the undercover footage is right particularly bad right most places are not that bad like these are the exceptions to the rules but no the rules are really that bad yeah but yeah and also the environmental issues I've had people that's I actually had email from somebody in a United Nations agency pardon me pointing out that there was in effect a conspiracy to try to make the numbers more flattering to the media mystery which is very understandable but they went through it they sent this me this email saying look if you compare this report from 1992 and this report from 1997 the support from 2002 obviously these are made updates it was something like that he said you'll see that actually this guy who was the senior editor he was revising the numbers did more flattering yeah yeah I was in her but this was somebody was involved in the process and knew the contributing authors and knew though but they said look you know if you actually look at the footnotes and look at the math you can actually tell that so that's that's conspiracy of a very different kind anyway I could I could give some examples from Laos and Cambodia fact that kind of researchers bias creeping into what you're doing but not not what we're talking with with the conspiracy thing look I think you know for me so so one criterion you're one aspect of the conspiracy mindset is just when people see something jarring and unfamiliar and they don't know how to evaluate it and they think it's a conspiracy theory like if you're totally if you feel totally out of your depth you don't know what's going on when you're looking at Middle Eastern politics or September 11th 2001 or who killed jasmine or who killed JFK which is now an event in history you and I both know a lot about before we got together you didn't but doesn't happened we we got is one of many topics we've kind of done a little bit of research on together just for our own entertainment um you know so there's more to it than just feeling out of your depth or clutching for rational explanations of things that seem irrational for me what's really striking is that people who have the conspiracy theory mentality what they're doing is never analytical it's never a problem solving and it's never trying to help someone you know this is what I mean like you know if you actually don't understand the mechanics of how the buildings collapsed on September 11th 2001 which why would it be easy but why would that be simple have you have you been to architecture college lately no I mean like you know again my own family part of their work is in architecture I D grow up in in front of architecture steel structure okay your family also get into it you grew up with a fate with relatives who were in the the steel and construction business and so on so both of us actually problem we first learned about severally uh yeah that that's familiar from other things I know about architectural specifications and safety and what happens when steel reaches a melting point and so on yeah like it's not it's not that surprising to us but obviously beyond a certain level of detail you know I can't make this stuff up I've used this example before on the channel you know I can't explain to you the the chemical ideology for why huffing glue destroys brain cells like that's that's really quite complex again deal I know it believe it I've looked into it you know I'm confident that that's true and I'm confident enough to refuse to Huff glue I mean and to urge you also to refuse that glue but no if you want me to break it down for you in that that level you know what I mean I can't do it I can't get into the brain chemistry I can't get into these kinds of details but you know the the people who whether they're looking at the moon landing you know as a conspirator there are people who believe this is fake or whether they're looking at collapse of the towers I'm super xi the conspiracy so step one kinds the first thing we mentioned sense of bewilderment being out of your depth something that's unfamiliar and so on but I think step to another criterion number two there's another really interesting criterion says they sit down and look at all these facts and factors and they're not actually trying to do what analysis really means they're not trying to explain or understand or explicate explicate what happened you know what you can do you can get into the structural engineering questions for why did a certain amount of time elapse before the towers collapsed on Stemper xi why not more time why not less time it's interesting its way if what you're doing is is truly analytical what I see instead is they they take complicated facts they present them as if they're insoluble problems and then use that presumed fact of their insolubility use the fact of their own bafflement to justify some kind of political agenda or some kind of wild speculation now I assure you one of the most extreme I don't know if you'd really remember this do you remember the occupy occupy wallstreet period so did you did you pay attention to the rhetoric at that time I know maybe something else okay yeah you know I just say like yeah I think you had to follow it by YouTube you know what I mean I don't think any of their medium probably some probably some left-wing newspaper is really fun of my friends her older sister was in New York doing so one of those one of the one of the crucial political elements of their platform one of the few things that they had in common across the movement was really this mode of conspiracy thinking even though it's not something salacious as September bombing or an idea which was that they would argue exactly this way they first present you with some confusing facts about how economics works the world economy and then they would suggest that the way fiat currency works is incompressible so fiat currency just means modern standard currency the same kind of currency we have in Canada in the United States and most of the countries in Western Europe it's the meaning of fiat currency I mean fiat currency literally is currency that exists by the command of the state but the command of a national government you know that's how and why it exists with some minor variations in England you might not notice but actually they have different currencies issued by different banks there were some variations out there but and then they would they would present this as if it's this great mystery nobody can understand not something that's covered in every account economics 101 textbook that every universe student even high school students to economics do you understand the present this is incomprehensible and then the next step was for them to present their argument that that the Western world should go back to the gold standard to having currency that's based on gold and you know they did also of course different people would package this in with hysterical conspiracy thinking about the banks and who really controls the world and a secret you know secret conspiracy or what-have-you and you know against me one of the one of the criterias there isn't a sincere interest and understanding it's not analytical they're not giving you an analysis of how currency systems work the American currency works or the Canadian currency works or why governments have overwhelmingly adopted fiat currency over gold standard currency you can really easily that would be high school level economics you make up a checklist the advantages and disadvantages of gold standard currency versus fiat currency versus other types of currency you know like really that's not college level research you could do that you could engage there they're not trying to understand it it's sort of they're using the guise of an expose when really what they're trying to do is give to you a sense of their own bafflement and then say this is inexplicable and that's going to justify my political position you know what have you yeah so I know I didn't get I cannot economics education and so you know I write and I assume most of the people in the Occupy Wall Street movement we're not econ Shores sure so it seemed like a complicated you know like that was one of the most difficult majors at least at my university surely getting into econ was why would it be simple just like architecture before why would like the way world markets were why would it be simple yeah yeah so I can see people saying it's so complicated there has to be some some other explanation well and both both in the left and the right I think there's always been a tendency to want to present the status quo as something that's about to implode you know I mean so left left wingers want to make it out that capitalism is so fragile and so unsustainable it's supposed to implode well we just went through that in 2008 in some ways it's fragile in some ways not it like after World War one people were carrying money around in wheelbarrows you know I mean people were starving if you were begging for food nothing like that happened the United States right in Greece and Spain closer you know Reese's fan I think they did have some starvation I think they did a much more extreme but you know anyway sure I understand economics is baffling but also so on the Left there are reasons to try to depict economics is something much more fragile and it's about to collapse on the right also you find people who whether it's there or they're obsessed with Peak Oil Theory the scarcity of oil prices or the scarcity of oil and volatility prices there are people on the right wing also who latch onto some group of factoids and then want to make out a doomsday scenario I would guess that's just indirectly influenced by Christianity or anything you know the idea that the end is coming and you've got to prepare for it the whole rugged individualists thing you know that's that's a powerful train of thought in you know American and and Western culture you know get ready get ready for the apocalypse there are a lot of right-wingers who literally have a bunker in their backyard you know they have food and you know bow-and-arrow ready to go you know if if they got to go back to medieval survived ok because I mean you can edit this out but just because of Tara and kori McCarthy you know like sure they have this conspiracy theory that there's a white genocide going out like why do you think that right but this this new thing about their paranoia so Tara and kori McCarthy you can watch you just search for the name McCarthy on my chain if you want to know who were talking about I'm not gonna give us an abscess here but you know what's interesting about that is what you were seeing on their website he wasn't claiming that this ethnic change was happening spontaneously in an unplanned way it's not like just though through migration and economics you know like the world's the demographics that will change you know it actually was conspiratorial that they imagined there were people in charge using mind control as a direct quote mind control to you know to to to bring about these things so I mean that's that's really my next point I want to cover too you can really do analysis in political science of who made particular decisions historically and often the answer is secret so we were just looking at a documentary on the American occupation of Iraq if you want to figure out who made the decision to disband the Iraqi army it's it's not a conspiracy but it's also not out in the open you know so like you know as a hypothesis you might say oh well I I assumed or I hypothesize that George W Bush made that decision it turns out it wasn't yeah it turns out the decision was made by Paul Bremer and a very small number of people with Paul Bremer you might also hypothesize you might assume oh I assumed the American house of Congress debated that like that was debated Congress know it wasn't oh so no actually this this one guy Paul Bremer and a very small number of his of his colleagues made made a crucial decision in the history of the American Colonization right but that's real analysis that's real political science is figuring out who made particular decisions now another one that I did research on who decided that the United States should support should support Pol Pot in the Communists in Cambodia and I talked to other Cambodians was none of them knew the answer none of them knew when the decision was made some of them thought it was the decision was made under Ronald Reagan and you know I did the research and I proved no it actually was made by by Nixon and as soon as you know that if you have a feeling for Nixon spirit oh yeah that's the that's the kind of thing Nixon what do you know yeah that's more like Nixon that's something so you know it's funny but I mean conspiracy theories they again what even with the question of who is in charge you know who is in charge of a particular thing or political decision or organization you know there were you know it's hard to know sometimes it sort of who is making the decision give you an example okay while that wasn't Laos there was a major reform of the lotion education system Laos is not a democracy Laos is a communist dictatorship and just from looking at the materials and interviewing a few people face to face I figured out that their new curriculum was to some extent negotiated between the lotion government and the Australian government the asturian government was donating money to pay for it and the Chinese government also got involved you know it's not a conspiracy but it's not out in the open if you look at the textbooks it doesn't say you know we had a committee of people sit down and debate what we should teach the children of this country about their own history and politics but that's the truth you know there was a committee and you can find out who was on that committee and the answer not some mystery has to ultimately with money who's donating money to physically print the books and it was the government of Australia that was donating the most money so so they had the most say now again already what's the difference between this and a conspiracy theory maybe some people if they if they summarize the students oh this guy this bald white guy is crazy he thinks the Australian government was negotiating you know what was in the high school curriculum and primary school curriculum for for this third world country Laos well one of the reasons why this is not a crazy conspiracy theory is that I'm actually just trying to explicate the situation it's analytical it's it's an explanation I'm not trying to do what conspiracy theorists so often try to do obfuscate the facts make them seem incomprehensible and then appeal to invisible powers or something you know it invisible and mysterious powers behind the curtain you know so the the email I got from a patreon supporter it included you know mention of the name David eka I assume his name is pronounced eka some people said David Ikki the David Icke I don't know but he though this is the most extreme extreme kind of uh conspiracy theory where he actually thinks there's some kind of aliens some kind of supernatural you know lizard people disguised as humans so it's like what does this explicate how is this a useful analysis like nobody looks at the history of the Vietnam War and says wow there's stuff here I can't understand let's you know like we can fill in the gaps by appealing to the fact that aliens were involved you know what I mean so it's funny again not to hate on these people but I would wonder if you have this impulse in you if you want to understand the mysterious things in this world why aren't you reading foreign policy magazine why aren't you reading The Economist why aren't you reading and indeed criticizing you know government sources CIA sources but elite the best sources of information available to you and when you read those there will be gaps in your understanding there'll be things you don't understand you know a lot to do with this trust like yes expecting that those are all full of lies like what they're hiding things okay so okay so alright so this I have mentioned on YouTube before but ages ago and I think this is something that vegans have in common with people at the conspiracy theory mindset and there's no doubt there were people who were so shocked by the assassination of JFK or for that matter of the assassination of our case these are JFK was president of the state's Kennedy and his brother was yeah he was running for president of assassination RFK both of their assassinations are very obvious problems in the government's official story there are some people who had that experience even in the 1990s I remember that in the 1990s there were people who found out about it because there was this popular movie about it there are people and then after that they just said they're not gonna trust anything the government ever tell us them about anything and they go into a kind of very strange phony cynicism about their sources of information so to some extent I can sympathize and something like I can't that's a response to a real you know a jarring experience another one I mentioned before is the I was gonna say the Bay of Pigs an incident but actually the Gulf of Tonkin incident the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie from the United States government that had to do with making excuse for starting work I guess you'd have to say expanding the the Vietnam War the US military issue in Vietnam there are people who had that experience as well the American government kalaiy about this they can lie about anything and they went into a kind of total but I mean likewise I think there are vegans I've definitely spoken to vegans like this so definitely there are vegans who look at public health information you look at information about eggs and dairy and they know this is a liar they know this is negotiated between the United States government and for-profit corporations and then they decide forget it if the government can lie and say that eggs are healthy when they're not healthy or this kind of thing then they're not going to trust anything the government has to say this is true can only trust dr. Greger you can only trust someone with a medical degree who had takes more than 30,000 steps a day on his on a Stairmaster yeah you know but I mean ultimately that is also a cop-out right I mean the government doesn't control the Economist magazine the government doesn't control foreign policy magazine the government doesn't control the wealth of sources we have on the ground information for all this stuff you know I remember a real conspiracy that just amused me so this is actually the autobiography of one of my professors one of my professors or an autobiography I couldn't mention you he's actually he's actually vegan I'm not gonna mention him but this guy wrote he was a former professor at University wanto and later became a crazy vegan activist unlike myself anyway Hilux Thunder guy but I remember it is out of our he he mentioned openly he was Jewish and his Jewish grandfather was part of a conspiracy to manipulate prices in a gemstone market in Kazakhstan thinking see that's an example of a real conspiracy it probably was six guys six guys who are trading gemstones in Kazakhstan and they sit down and say look we got to do something about this gemstone market we got we got to get we got it unionize we got a we got a control prices here at this gemstone market in Kazakhstan you know that's that's that's plausible to me you know but I mean on the one hand people who are looking at history sincerely even if you don't trust government sources any any you know complex involuted situation you won't understand what happened okay in the American bombing of Laos the United States dropped more bombs on Laos a tiny country that at that time definitely had fewer than 5 million people maybe only 3 million people in Laos they dropped more bombs on Laos than they dropped on all of Germany in World War two it seems crazy why now you know if you don't trust government sources you can read things from journalists who were there you can read all kinds of first-person perspective accounts there's sort of a wealth of information and you know with some of that some of the decisions you may get the feeling that there is a a conspiracy in the sense that there were other people involved in these decisions you don't know about and you can probably do research on that and figure it out you know sometimes they put it this way there were other people sitting around the roundtable there were other interests at the table that were part of making these decisions that that's what a real part of history you know what I mean and a lot of those people also write on the biographies you know you know those people 20 years later it's not secret anymore they're the ones out of it but of course the other factor is the other factor is chaos you know I think people who believe in conspiracy theories they want to believe that everything's under control they would rather believe there are secret and evil forces controlling things than admit to themselves the extent to which a lot of this stuff is out of control yeah you know like to some extent what the US did it's highly improvised and not well thought through and didn't have a grand plan didn't have a master scheme you know says this crazy racist theory from Tara Tara McCarthy Enquirer McCarthy they're looking at world politics as if all these things are planned I mean you know I think one of the if you're if you're really a critic of immigration policy in a lot of that there is no plan well of time nobody in government is giving careful forethought to the future you don't I mean I wasn't was there a careful plan to destroy Medicare and in America I don't know you guys made a mess of it but you know it may be it may be spontaneous and unplanned yeah sorry there's a free-flowing conversation for 25 minutes at this point but yeah I think you know first and foremost people were into conspiracy theories are people probably want to on some level make the world a better place or want to at least understand the world but they feel out of their depth they feel baffled when confronted with genuinely complex and difficult understand things that may be September 11th that may be how the stock market works are the bank international banking system works how fiat currency works all these examples we've had maybe why certain things happened or didn't happen in the Vietnam War also involuted complex difficult to understand but not impossible to understand really not really you could you can do the work you can you can do the original research you can feel empowered and enlightened by doing honest research but then the problem is they respond to this this feeling of being baffled by not engaging in a sincere analysis and seeking out other sources on the internet that don't engage in a sincere analysis seeking out sources that really just take this sense of bafflement and exaggerate it make it seem that these things are incomprehensible and therefore must be concealing something and now this is the trick this is bringing your audience and people who promote conspiracy theories they often do this some some sense of flair and showmanship Lucia but here's the key here's the golden key here's the secret I'm gonna give you I'm gonna tell you something that the people with PhDs don't know I'm gonna tell you something all the experts don't know we hear that so much with health scams as well as political scams and economic slam doctors won't tell you Yeah right there was this whole stupid it's it's finally collapsed but there was this whole stupid movement of the zeitgeist movement and it was based on 100% economics but really a lot of it was from the position of like drawing in the audience saying oh but here's the real truth about how the banking system works here's what nobody else understands here's what all the people in the ivory tower over there patients understand and it's like dude like if you're just using a normal dictionary not even a dictionary of economic terms you could tell most of our economic analysis didn't make sense anyway sorry but that was a complete complete movement so drawing people in exaggerating this sense of bafflement instead of engaging in some kind of some kind of sincere analysis or explication it would have you and then again I think maybe my third or fourth point maybe I'm skipping one was to talk about you know an impulse of wanting to believe the world is under control that these complex situations down to their minutia they'd rather believe that there's a conspiracy that rather believed even that there's an evil conspiracy controlling these things than to admit the extent to which they may be improvised uncontrolled they may reflect like government incompetence as opposed to a government conspiracy and and I think we already said maybe was point three nine point four there's also a lack of any sincere engagement with answering the question of who makes decisions yeah whether you're looking at the decisions made in the in the Iraq war say in the emergency response ten eleven another great example you know there were conspiracy theories about the u.s. response to Hurricane Katrina the hurricane that wiped out New Orleans you know it's easy to generate conspiracy there's a lot of it was incompetence it's shocking incompetence it may even be criminal incompetence but you know people were told this is a secret planned you know wiped out this in that population or to you know take land away from these there were all these crazy conspiracy theories but again if you're doing sincere analysis you can look at who is in charge who's making decisions and again it doesn't mean they're angels I'm not exculpating these people who's making decisions how are they made that's really classical political science and you will find that information in a lot of reputable sources it takes some thinking it takes some work but there's there's no reason even and again the other factor we met we mentioned this this list even if you feel burnt that in the past you were lied to you were lied to about who shot JFK you relied to about who shot RFK you were lied to about milk and eggs being healthy when they're not okay get your heart broken pick yourself up by the bootstraps and get ready to have your heart broken again you know you never been lied to before homie yeah should life's rough that way your employer is gonna lie to you your best friend is gonna lie to you some girl you met in a bar is gonna lie to you you don't I mean like in life you get lied to and you get light too often but people who don't have a motive nearly as strong as the people who murdered JFK and RFK okay like they had reasons to lie to you you know but sure you know you use that's why I don't want kids to think that there is a Santa Claus that's the first thing or the Tooth Fairy right well or you know the the Noah's Ark thing why why do they want children to believe in this in this story you know there's a difference there's a fundamental difference between wanting to believe and wanting to understand I think it's the difference between immaturity and maturity you know what I mean maybe when you were a kid you wanted to feel you could trust people that's why you feel so burned that you were lied to about JFK or that milk is healthy and this kind of thing you know but you know what part of being an adult is not wanting to believe again I identify as a nihilist because nihilism is fundamentally a critique and rejection of belief and wanting to understand and if you as a mature adult want to understand these things you're gonna get lied to again and again the analysis of texts that you know to be flawed that you know to be lying to you is a crucial aspect of research you want to know what happened in the Civil War read six different opinions from six different angles and maybe all of them are lying half of the time and you figure out you know look you figure out what can be verified as the truth and what things remain unknown or simply require more research a bonus Yin [Music] ba Lu Ciel
fundamental difference between wanting to believe and wanting to understand I think it's the difference between immaturity and maturity maybe when you were a kid you wanted to feel you could trust people that's why you feel so burned that you were lied to about JFK or that milk is healthy and this kind of thing you know but you know what part of being an adult is not wanting to believe again I identify as a nihilist because nihilism is fundamentally a critique and rejection of belief and if you as a mature adult want to understand these things you're gonna get lied to again and again the analysis of text you know to be broad that you know to be lying to you is a crucial aspect of research I miss yen all right I got a question from patreon supporter about the conspiracy theory mentality and particular conspiracy theories and thank you for your generous support if nobody supported this channel on patreon it would either cease to exist or we take on a very different format because either I'm doing this for the fewer than 200 people who support me on patreon or I'm just doing it so that my daughter can see these videos one thing and this video even we're going to talk about right now probably as an example some that'd be cool you know I have my daughter see one day and the the unknown and unknowable future conspiracy theories I have been in a position as a specialist at someone working on political science history Asian languages politics First Nations politics and working on all this different stuff sometimes I'm in the pivot position where I'm talking about something within my specialised area of expertise that other people don't know enough about and they perceive me as if I'm espousing something out of a crazy conspiracy theory so to give an example a lot of people are shocked if you know about what happened in the Cambodian civil war that that was a civil war in which the United States supported communists they supported communism now why did they support communist well for one thing one group of communists was fighting against another group of communist unbelief I'm not making excuses for you as foreign policy and for another thing a guy named Richard Milhous Nixon whom you may know from Futurama and The Simpsons I mean Nixon boy he's really a political figure who's who's been in mortal comedy a a lot of you have Nixon I think he's in more comedy than Bill Clinton them you know people never went it but Nixon has become really immortal as a as a figure in common anyway I remember one Futurama especially yes he gets reelected as robot Nixon so anyway something about Nixon but do you remember that was said there was a fashion brand also that was just called next there was a brand of yeah I remember saying embassy ads for their designer watches they just called Nixon I was looking at wondering who really wants a watch that says Nixon on it in 2017 don't know anyway Nixon has become immortalized who knows why well other political figures haven't forgotten but he made a pact with Mao Zedong the leader of China and then that began a period of a strategic alliance what was called the strategic triangle of China in the United States against the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union's LS so for that reason China in the United States were jointly supporting the most notorious the most violent communists in the history of the world the Khmer Rouge the Pol Pot faction of the Cambodian communists and they were fighting against the relatively reasonable communists who were supported by Moscow by the Soviets however my point is here if I talk about that political history with people who know nothing about it with people who grew up in the Ronald Reagan era believing that youth the United States fought against communism over the world well guess what during Ronald Reagan's term of office the United States in this theater of war was supporting communists and that's not a crazy conspiracy theory that's a really basic you know historical political fact so you know I can be in that situation when talking about political history I can be in that situation where I'm talking about Buddhism well I I know things with the Buddhist religion other people don't know where people stop and look at you like you're you're crazy or you're sharing some kind of conspiracy theory type stuff people think that about me because of my interest in veganism oh yeah yeah they think that the factory farm conditions that I talk about conspiracy theories that it's really not as bad as I say it is or really not as bad as these uh videos these undercover videos are yeah that's it I thought you were to say something more like they think that the milk causes cancer is a conspiracy you know yeah yeah that too I think I think some people in my family just recently when I was visiting them they you know I was talking about the connection between a vegan diet and Alzheimer's and they they didn't believe it at all so it's funny but that that's specific thing about the the animal rights issue like are the conditions of the factor that bad nobody's ever taken it that way like but you know you know what that reminds me of is because you know part of my family is Jewish I live my life for Jewish people when you met Jewish people and when atrocities in the israel-palestine conflict came up when their answer would be oh it's not that bad you you should go you should visit you should go to Israel you'll see it's not that bad you're saying that you're like I've just read you the details of like 37 people being massacred when a airport was bombed by the Israelis or something or when you know a small like a children's school in the Gaza Strip was bombs something specific you've just read like oh you'll see it's not that bad it's like what does that even mean it's like well well people are being slaughtered but it's not right you know if I took a vacation I'd see it your way what you don't even like what does that mean but whichever slaughterous conditions what do you mean it's not that bad like what anyway they think the undercover footage is right particularly bad right most places are not that bad like these are the exceptions to the rules but no the rules are really that bad yeah but yeah and also the environmental issues I've had people that's I actually had email from somebody in a United Nations agency pardon me pointing out that there was in effect a conspiracy to try to make the numbers more flattering to the media mystery which is very understandable but they went through it they sent this me this email saying look if you compare this report from 1992 and this report from 1997 the support from 2002 obviously these are made updates it was something like that he said you'll see that actually this guy who was the senior editor he was revising the numbers did more flattering yeah yeah I was in her but this was somebody was involved in the process and knew the contributing authors and knew though but they said look you know if you actually look at the footnotes and look at the math you can actually tell that so that's that's conspiracy of a very different kind anyway I could I could give some examples from Laos and Cambodia fact that kind of researchers bias creeping into what you're doing but not not what we're talking with with the conspiracy thing look I think you know for me so so one criterion you're one aspect of the conspiracy mindset is just when people see something jarring and unfamiliar and they don't know how to evaluate it and they think it's a conspiracy theory like if you're totally if you feel totally out of your depth you don't know what's going on when you're looking at Middle Eastern politics or September 11th 2001 or who killed jasmine or who killed JFK which is now an event in history you and I both know a lot about before we got together you didn't but doesn't happened we we got is one of many topics we've kind of done a little bit of research on together just for our own entertainment um you know so there's more to it than just feeling out of your depth or clutching for rational explanations of things that seem irrational for me what's really striking is that people who have the conspiracy theory mentality what they're doing is never analytical it's never a problem solving and it's never trying to help someone you know this is what I mean like you know if you actually don't understand the mechanics of how the buildings collapsed on September 11th 2001 which why would it be easy but why would that be simple have you have you been to architecture college lately no I mean like you know again my own family part of their work is in architecture I D grow up in in front of architecture steel structure okay your family also get into it you grew up with a fate with relatives who were in the the steel and construction business and so on so both of us actually problem we first learned about severally uh yeah that that's familiar from other things I know about architectural specifications and safety and what happens when steel reaches a melting point and so on yeah like it's not it's not that surprising to us but obviously beyond a certain level of detail you know I can't make this stuff up I've used this example before on the channel you know I can't explain to you the the chemical ideology for why huffing glue destroys brain cells like that's that's really quite complex again deal I know it believe it I've looked into it you know I'm confident that that's true and I'm confident enough to refuse to Huff glue I mean and to urge you also to refuse that glue but no if you want me to break it down for you in that that level you know what I mean I can't do it I can't get into the brain chemistry I can't get into these kinds of details but you know the the people who whether they're looking at the moon landing you know as a conspirator there are people who believe this is fake or whether they're looking at collapse of the towers I'm super xi the conspiracy so step one kinds the first thing we mentioned sense of bewilderment being out of your depth something that's unfamiliar and so on but I think step to another criterion number two there's another really interesting criterion says they sit down and look at all these facts and factors and they're not actually trying to do what analysis really means they're not trying to explain or understand or explicate explicate what happened you know what you can do you can get into the structural engineering questions for why did a certain amount of time elapse before the towers collapsed on Stemper xi why not more time why not less time it's interesting its way if what you're doing is is truly analytical what I see instead is they they take complicated facts they present them as if they're insoluble problems and then use that presumed fact of their insolubility use the fact of their own bafflement to justify some kind of political agenda or some kind of wild speculation now I assure you one of the most extreme I don't know if you'd really remember this do you remember the occupy occupy wallstreet period so did you did you pay attention to the rhetoric at that time I know maybe something else okay yeah you know I just say like yeah I think you had to follow it by YouTube you know what I mean I don't think any of their medium probably some probably some left-wing newspaper is really fun of my friends her older sister was in New York doing so one of those one of the one of the crucial political elements of their platform one of the few things that they had in common across the movement was really this mode of conspiracy thinking even though it's not something salacious as September bombing or an idea which was that they would argue exactly this way they first present you with some confusing facts about how economics works the world economy and then they would suggest that the way fiat currency works is incompressible so fiat currency just means modern standard currency the same kind of currency we have in Canada in the United States and most of the countries in Western Europe it's the meaning of fiat currency I mean fiat currency literally is currency that exists by the command of the state but the command of a national government you know that's how and why it exists with some minor variations in England you might not notice but actually they have different currencies issued by different banks there were some variations out there but and then they would they would present this as if it's this great mystery nobody can understand not something that's covered in every account economics 101 textbook that every universe student even high school students to economics do you understand the present this is incomprehensible and then the next step was for them to present their argument that that the Western world should go back to the gold standard to having currency that's based on gold and you know they did also of course different people would package this in with hysterical conspiracy thinking about the banks and who really controls the world and a secret you know secret conspiracy or what-have-you and you know against me one of the one of the criterias there isn't a sincere interest and understanding it's not analytical they're not giving you an analysis of how currency systems work the American currency works or the Canadian currency works or why governments have overwhelmingly adopted fiat currency over gold standard currency you can really easily that would be high school level economics you make up a checklist the advantages and disadvantages of gold standard currency versus fiat currency versus other types of currency you know like really that's not college level research you could do that you could engage there they're not trying to understand it it's sort of they're using the guise of an expose when really what they're trying to do is give to you a sense of their own bafflement and then say this is inexplicable and that's going to justify my political position you know what have you yeah so I know I didn't get I cannot economics education and so you know I write and I assume most of the people in the Occupy Wall Street movement we're not econ Shores sure so it seemed like a complicated you know like that was one of the most difficult majors at least at my university surely getting into econ was why would it be simple just like architecture before why would like the way world markets were why would it be simple yeah yeah so I can see people saying it's so complicated there has to be some some other explanation well and both both in the left and the right I think there's always been a tendency to want to present the status quo as something that's about to implode you know I mean so left left wingers want to make it out that capitalism is so fragile and so unsustainable it's supposed to implode well we just went through that in 2008 in some ways it's fragile in some ways not it like after World War one people were carrying money around in wheelbarrows you know I mean people were starving if you were begging for food nothing like that happened the United States right in Greece and Spain closer you know Reese's fan I think they did have some starvation I think they did a much more extreme but you know anyway sure I understand economics is baffling but also so on the Left there are reasons to try to depict economics is something much more fragile and it's about to collapse on the right also you find people who whether it's there or they're obsessed with Peak Oil Theory the scarcity of oil prices or the scarcity of oil and volatility prices there are people on the right wing also who latch onto some group of factoids and then want to make out a doomsday scenario I would guess that's just indirectly influenced by Christianity or anything you know the idea that the end is coming and you've got to prepare for it the whole rugged individualists thing you know that's that's a powerful train of thought in you know American and and Western culture you know get ready get ready for the apocalypse there are a lot of right-wingers who literally have a bunker in their backyard you know they have food and you know bow-and-arrow ready to go you know if if they got to go back to medieval survived ok because I mean you can edit this out but just because of Tara and kori McCarthy you know like sure they have this conspiracy theory that there's a white genocide going out like why do you think that right but this this new thing about their paranoia so Tara and kori McCarthy you can watch you just search for the name McCarthy on my chain if you want to know who were talking about I'm not gonna give us an abscess here but you know what's interesting about that is what you were seeing on their website he wasn't claiming that this ethnic change was happening spontaneously in an unplanned way it's not like just though through migration and economics you know like the world's the demographics that will change you know it actually was conspiratorial that they imagined there were people in charge using mind control as a direct quote mind control to you know to to to bring about these things so I mean that's that's really my next point I want to cover too you can really do analysis in political science of who made particular decisions historically and often the answer is secret so we were just looking at a documentary on the American occupation of Iraq if you want to figure out who made the decision to disband the Iraqi army it's it's not a conspiracy but it's also not out in the open you know so like you know as a hypothesis you might say oh well I I assumed or I hypothesize that George W Bush made that decision it turns out it wasn't yeah it turns out the decision was made by Paul Bremer and a very small number of people with Paul Bremer you might also hypothesize you might assume oh I assumed the American house of Congress debated that like that was debated Congress know it wasn't oh so no actually this this one guy Paul Bremer and a very small number of his of his colleagues made made a crucial decision in the history of the American Colonization right but that's real analysis that's real political science is figuring out who made particular decisions now another one that I did research on who decided that the United States should support should support Pol Pot in the Communists in Cambodia and I talked to other Cambodians was none of them knew the answer none of them knew when the decision was made some of them thought it was the decision was made under Ronald Reagan and you know I did the research and I proved no it actually was made by by Nixon and as soon as you know that if you have a feeling for Nixon spirit oh yeah that's the that's the kind of thing Nixon what do you know yeah that's more like Nixon that's something so you know it's funny but I mean conspiracy theories they again what even with the question of who is in charge you know who is in charge of a particular thing or political decision or organization you know there were you know it's hard to know sometimes it sort of who is making the decision give you an example okay while that wasn't Laos there was a major reform of the lotion education system Laos is not a democracy Laos is a communist dictatorship and just from looking at the materials and interviewing a few people face to face I figured out that their new curriculum was to some extent negotiated between the lotion government and the Australian government the asturian government was donating money to pay for it and the Chinese government also got involved you know it's not a conspiracy but it's not out in the open if you look at the textbooks it doesn't say you know we had a committee of people sit down and debate what we should teach the children of this country about their own history and politics but that's the truth you know there was a committee and you can find out who was on that committee and the answer not some mystery has to ultimately with money who's donating money to physically print the books and it was the government of Australia that was donating the most money so so they had the most say now again already what's the difference between this and a conspiracy theory maybe some people if they if they summarize the students oh this guy this bald white guy is crazy he thinks the Australian government was negotiating you know what was in the high school curriculum and primary school curriculum for for this third world country Laos well one of the reasons why this is not a crazy conspiracy theory is that I'm actually just trying to explicate the situation it's analytical it's it's an explanation I'm not trying to do what conspiracy theorists so often try to do obfuscate the facts make them seem incomprehensible and then appeal to invisible powers or something you know it invisible and mysterious powers behind the curtain you know so the the email I got from a patreon supporter it included you know mention of the name David eka I assume his name is pronounced eka some people said David Ikki the David Icke I don't know but he though this is the most extreme extreme kind of uh conspiracy theory where he actually thinks there's some kind of aliens some kind of supernatural you know lizard people disguised as humans so it's like what does this explicate how is this a useful analysis like nobody looks at the history of the Vietnam War and says wow there's stuff here I can't understand let's you know like we can fill in the gaps by appealing to the fact that aliens were involved you know what I mean so it's funny again not to hate on these people but I would wonder if you have this impulse in you if you want to understand the mysterious things in this world why aren't you reading foreign policy magazine why aren't you reading The Economist why aren't you reading and indeed criticizing you know government sources CIA sources but elite the best sources of information available to you and when you read those there will be gaps in your understanding there'll be things you don't understand you know a lot to do with this trust like yes expecting that those are all full of lies like what they're hiding things okay so okay so alright so this I have mentioned on YouTube before but ages ago and I think this is something that vegans have in common with people at the conspiracy theory mindset and there's no doubt there were people who were so shocked by the assassination of JFK or for that matter of the assassination of our case these are JFK was president of the state's Kennedy and his brother was yeah he was running for president of assassination RFK both of their assassinations are very obvious problems in the government's official story there are some people who had that experience even in the 1990s I remember that in the 1990s there were people who found out about it because there was this popular movie about it there are people and then after that they just said they're not gonna trust anything the government ever tell us them about anything and they go into a kind of very strange phony cynicism about their sources of information so to some extent I can sympathize and something like I can't that's a response to a real you know a jarring experience another one I mentioned before is the I was gonna say the Bay of Pigs an incident but actually the Gulf of Tonkin incident the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie from the United States government that had to do with making excuse for starting work I guess you'd have to say expanding the the Vietnam War the US military issue in Vietnam there are people who had that experience as well the American government kalaiy about this they can lie about anything and they went into a kind of total but I mean likewise I think there are vegans I've definitely spoken to vegans like this so definitely there are vegans who look at public health information you look at information about eggs and dairy and they know this is a liar they know this is negotiated between the United States government and for-profit corporations and then they decide forget it if the government can lie and say that eggs are healthy when they're not healthy or this kind of thing then they're not going to trust anything the government has to say this is true can only trust dr. Greger you can only trust someone with a medical degree who had takes more than 30,000 steps a day on his on a Stairmaster yeah you know but I mean ultimately that is also a cop-out right I mean the government doesn't control the Economist magazine the government doesn't control foreign policy magazine the government doesn't control the wealth of sources we have on the ground information for all this stuff you know I remember a real conspiracy that just amused me so this is actually the autobiography of one of my professors one of my professors or an autobiography I couldn't mention you he's actually he's actually vegan I'm not gonna mention him but this guy wrote he was a former professor at University wanto and later became a crazy vegan activist unlike myself anyway Hilux Thunder guy but I remember it is out of our he he mentioned openly he was Jewish and his Jewish grandfather was part of a conspiracy to manipulate prices in a gemstone market in Kazakhstan thinking see that's an example of a real conspiracy it probably was six guys six guys who are trading gemstones in Kazakhstan and they sit down and say look we got to do something about this gemstone market we got we got to get we got it unionize we got a we got a control prices here at this gemstone market in Kazakhstan you know that's that's that's plausible to me you know but I mean on the one hand people who are looking at history sincerely even if you don't trust government sources any any you know complex involuted situation you won't understand what happened okay in the American bombing of Laos the United States dropped more bombs on Laos a tiny country that at that time definitely had fewer than 5 million people maybe only 3 million people in Laos they dropped more bombs on Laos than they dropped on all of Germany in World War two it seems crazy why now you know if you don't trust government sources you can read things from journalists who were there you can read all kinds of first-person perspective accounts there's sort of a wealth of information and you know with some of that some of the decisions you may get the feeling that there is a a conspiracy in the sense that there were other people involved in these decisions you don't know about and you can probably do research on that and figure it out you know sometimes they put it this way there were other people sitting around the roundtable there were other interests at the table that were part of making these decisions that that's what a real part of history you know what I mean and a lot of those people also write on the biographies you know you know those people 20 years later it's not secret anymore they're the ones out of it but of course the other factor is the other factor is chaos you know I think people who believe in conspiracy theories they want to believe that everything's under control they would rather believe there are secret and evil forces controlling things than admit to themselves the extent to which a lot of this stuff is out of control yeah you know like to some extent what the US did it's highly improvised and not well thought through and didn't have a grand plan didn't have a master scheme you know says this crazy racist theory from Tara Tara McCarthy Enquirer McCarthy they're looking at world politics as if all these things are planned I mean you know I think one of the if you're if you're really a critic of immigration policy in a lot of that there is no plan well of time nobody in government is giving careful forethought to the future you don't I mean I wasn't was there a careful plan to destroy Medicare and in America I don't know you guys made a mess of it but you know it may be it may be spontaneous and unplanned yeah sorry there's a free-flowing conversation for 25 minutes at this point but yeah I think you know first and foremost people were into conspiracy theories are people probably want to on some level make the world a better place or want to at least understand the world but they feel out of their depth they feel baffled when confronted with genuinely complex and difficult understand things that may be September 11th that may be how the stock market works are the bank international banking system works how fiat currency works all these examples we've had maybe why certain things happened or didn't happen in the Vietnam War also involuted complex difficult to understand but not impossible to understand really not really you could you can do the work you can you can do the original research you can feel empowered and enlightened by doing honest research but then the problem is they respond to this this feeling of being baffled by not engaging in a sincere analysis and seeking out other sources on the internet that don't engage in a sincere analysis seeking out sources that really just take this sense of bafflement and exaggerate it make it seem that these things are incomprehensible and therefore must be concealing something and now this is the trick this is bringing your audience and people who promote conspiracy theories they often do this some some sense of flair and showmanship Lucia but here's the key here's the golden key here's the secret I'm gonna give you I'm gonna tell you something that the people with PhDs don't know I'm gonna tell you something all the experts don't know we hear that so much with health scams as well as political scams and economic slam doctors won't tell you Yeah right there was this whole stupid it's it's finally collapsed but there was this whole stupid movement of the zeitgeist movement and it was based on 100% economics but really a lot of it was from the position of like drawing in the audience saying oh but here's the real truth about how the banking system works here's what nobody else understands here's what all the people in the ivory tower over there patients understand and it's like dude like if you're just using a normal dictionary not even a dictionary of economic terms you could tell most of our economic analysis didn't make sense anyway sorry but that was a complete complete movement so drawing people in exaggerating this sense of bafflement instead of engaging in some kind of some kind of sincere analysis or explication it would have you and then again I think maybe my third or fourth point maybe I'm skipping one was to talk about you know an impulse of wanting to believe the world is under control that these complex situations down to their minutia they'd rather believe that there's a conspiracy that rather believed even that there's an evil conspiracy controlling these things than to admit the extent to which they may be improvised uncontrolled they may reflect like government incompetence as opposed to a government conspiracy and and I think we already said maybe was point three nine point four there's also a lack of any sincere engagement with answering the question of who makes decisions yeah whether you're looking at the decisions made in the in the Iraq war say in the emergency response ten eleven another great example you know there were conspiracy theories about the u.s. response to Hurricane Katrina the hurricane that wiped out New Orleans you know it's easy to generate conspiracy there's a lot of it was incompetence it's shocking incompetence it may even be criminal incompetence but you know people were told this is a secret planned you know wiped out this in that population or to you know take land away from these there were all these crazy conspiracy theories but again if you're doing sincere analysis you can look at who is in charge who's making decisions and again it doesn't mean they're angels I'm not exculpating these people who's making decisions how are they made that's really classical political science and you will find that information in a lot of reputable sources it takes some thinking it takes some work but there's there's no reason even and again the other factor we met we mentioned this this list even if you feel burnt that in the past you were lied to you were lied to about who shot JFK you relied to about who shot RFK you were lied to about milk and eggs being healthy when they're not okay get your heart broken pick yourself up by the bootstraps and get ready to have your heart broken again you know you never been lied to before homie yeah should life's rough that way your employer is gonna lie to you your best friend is gonna lie to you some girl you met in a bar is gonna lie to you you don't I mean like in life you get lied to and you get light too often but people who don't have a motive nearly as strong as the people who murdered JFK and RFK okay like they had reasons to lie to you you know but sure you know you use that's why I don't want kids to think that there is a Santa Claus that's the first thing or the Tooth Fairy right well or you know the the Noah's Ark thing why why do they want children to believe in this in this story you know there's a difference there's a fundamental difference between wanting to believe and wanting to understand I think it's the difference between immaturity and maturity you know what I mean maybe when you were a kid you wanted to feel you could trust people that's why you feel so burned that you were lied to about JFK or that milk is healthy and this kind of thing you know but you know what part of being an adult is not wanting to believe again I identify as a nihilist because nihilism is fundamentally a critique and rejection of belief and wanting to understand and if you as a mature adult want to understand these things you're gonna get lied to again and again the analysis of texts that you know to be flawed that you know to be lying to you is a crucial aspect of research you want to know what happened in the Civil War read six different opinions from six different angles and maybe all of them are lying half of the time and you figure out you know look you figure out what can be verified as the truth and what things remain unknown or simply require more research a bonus Yin [Music] ba Lu Ciel