Conspiracy Theories and Pseudo-science – How-to

There is big business in creating and maintaining conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, and similar things, but it isn’t hard to start such things off. The first thing is a single item that is factual or generally regarded as fact. If you decide to use something traditional, then there need not be as much of a relationship with the real world. From that item you spin a yarn. Make it bigger and bigger; the more that you include the better. Don’t tell penny lies when you can tell thousand dollar lies. When you have some people believing in your idea let them spread it far and wide. As with any work of fiction, there has to be a “hook”, something to initially catch and hold attention. If you look at a list of conspiracy theories you probably will notice many that you never heard of or thought they were something else. You never heard of most, because they are supremely uninteresting. The Illuminati are interesting, because they control the world, but the conspiracy to make people drink bottled water is boring, and many people think that they really should drink 64 ounces of water a day. That was a good one, and most people don’t realize that it is a real conspiracy by bottled water companies. Some people have written and sold books about the Illuminati, but that’s pretty much the only way that any money was made from it, and the Illuminati are an issue in some conversations. There probably are people who think that they are a real threat. But the bottle water companies have a larger and more reliable stream of income.

The Illuminati became a conspiracy theory quite a while ago, and it has developed further through ignorance and a steady diet of lies. There really was an organization named the Illuminati, several in fact, but none of those sought world power. The origin al group was set up in the late 18th century in Bavaria, and it espoused Enlightenment views: freedom of thought, speech, and so on. That group was dissolved a few years later, but people kept claiming that it was still in business. And others blamed it for a variety of things that it couldn’t have done, because it didn’t exist anymore. That process continued up to the present time, and some of the organizations that have been alleged to be operated by the Illuminati include Skull and Bones, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Conference, Council on International Relations, and others. Some people assert that the Illuminati are associated with the Masons or with some religious organization. Sometimes the Catholic group Opus Dei is mentioned and some people put the Opus Dei as a separate conspiracy to control the world. All of these developments have been done without a single report from the Illuminati, and there have been no organized investigations; the conspiracy just snowballed. This might be the best way to make a conspiracy theory, because there is no body of facts that can to falsified, and the believers wouldn’t it believe it, if they were shown to be wrong. At this point it appears that one can say anything they want to about the Illuminati and someone will believe it. Perhaps the most farfetched extension of the theory involves the Reptilians, and David Icke is making a decent living from that.

A closely related matter involves dreaming up pseudo-science and claiming that it is true. The process is almost identical. One starts with an actual fact and spins a yarn about it. There can be nothing at all to the year, but it is built from something that people might know, so they are willing to accept that it is true. One such thing is the matter of Ancient Aliens. Those start from any of several things. One of the most common is the collection of ideas about the Egyptian pyramids.

The Pyramids are large, and they were built a long time ago. Those are facts, but from there some people go on to say that humans couldn’t possibly have built them, even though there are contemporary accounts of the construction. The Egyptians slid the blocks on mud or used cradles to easily move blocks of stone that weigh tons.


There is more than enough information about conspiracies. This site has the 25 most popular:
http://list25.com/top-25-most-popula...racy-theories/
Aee which one you want to madden sane people by following.
The truly important thing is to select something that will catch the attention of people, and then spin an interesting yarn. But there has to be a kernel of truth to it, but more than the smallest kernel will just give people more to attack. An excellent of the small kernel of truth was the matter of some people being more tolerant of heat and cold than are other people that I mentioned in a blog post a few weeks ago. That is something that can easily be confirmed in the real world; it doesn’t even require playing with video images, as Mr. Icke does with his Reptilians. I took that and expanded to some people being endotherms and others being ectotherms; (In fact, humans are mammals, and all mammals are endothermic.) From the matter of some humans being ectothermic it is a small leap to the ectothermic humans being reptiles, because reptiles are ectothermic. David Icke made a similar conclusion from a different starting point, and he is making money from it by selling books, videos, and making speeches, but there is no more validity to Mr. Icke’s assertions about the New World Order being led by Reptinians than there is to my false conclusion that I made above. Mr. Icke has simply made assertions that have only been backed up with faked evidence and assertions. His greatest skill seems to be able to tell so many lies with a completely straight face. He certainly is smiling when he looks at his bank statement, and I congratulate him for his success.

Mr. Icke’s success is one of the best examples of profiting from lies that has occurred since L. Ron Hubbard started Scientology. There is more to come, so stay tuned.