How to deal with them, i.e the conspiracy theories and their theorists (sometimes terrorrists) ? How to act in front of all the mess they stirr up ?
Here’s a story, an historical legend : in Gordion, Minor Asia (today’s Turkey) during Antiquity, was an intricated knot which joins the yoke to the pole of a Phrygian war wagon. The knot has been made by king Midas. His prophecy decreed that whoever could loosen the knot was destined to become the ruler of Asia. In 333 BCE Alexander the Great cut the Gordian knot with his sword and conquers all the territories, from Greece to Indus river.
For every effect, there is a cause. And human brain is trying to find cause-effect relationships. In order to analyses them and understands the world around. We are all trying to unfasten the knot of reality with our brain.
But reality of the world is so much complex, the brain has so many simultaneous informations – partly because we’ve got the world WIDE web – to analyse that it’s impossible to embrace all of them. It’s sometimes impossible to find some clear relationshisps between them. Our mind gets lost in irrelevant details and we loose our target : TRUTH.
Better, a partial truth on reality. Because a very small part of reality will stay unreachable. Long time before the WWW, we call it : God’s will. This partial truth is not THE truth because only God gets this one in complete. And we have to deal with it.
What we all have to do, is cutting our Gordian knot like Alexander the Great did. We have to accept not embracing all informations and relationships between them. Open our mind to arguments of others with tolerance. Discuss them. Re-evaluate them. Abandon our numerous preconceptions, our credulity and our lacks of objectivity.
Above all : stop to try to analyse all informations we’ve got, by unplugging our brain from the shit of so-called social media. It means : cut the online influence of mentally ill people of all kinds, marketing and advertising (bragging is a mental illness itself) or malicious Russian/Chinese secret services.
Then we will be able to discriminate between an ideological point of view and a rational one; and make prevail the latter. Then we won’t be surprised by reality, when reality takes its revenge on our lies to ourselves. For example: prices are rising at the same time as tariffs increase; climate changes because the globe is warming up; deporting workers will empoverish the whole economy.
Conspiracy theorists shift the burden of proof onto their interlocutor : Prove me wrong. This interrupts any conversation because, most often, one cannot prove the non-existence of something. This means that everyone leaves the debate with their preconceptions of reality.
Cut the knot by cuting the shit !