Unpacking the Great Reset & 15 minute tin foil tropes

[LDC]

I guess class can come into it - it would be really interesting to see a study on this. E.g. I know people who work in pharmaceutical companies and understand that, while in many ways it is a racket, you wouldn't be able to keep secret (on a global scale) something like a vaccine that does more harm than good. If you're someone who has never even met someone who works for a pharma company it's easier to develop unrealistic ideas about what they might be able to achieve. And many people think that the professional classes in general are suspicious, probably out to get them in some way (and they aren't entirely wrong).

That does seem to make some kind of sense but I recall a recent study that showed the prevelance among 'well educated' middle aged women was highest statistically though? (Might not be remembering this correctly though.)

I (wildly and likely inaccurately...) guess they'll be differences depending on which flavour of conspiracy theory you look at too, like the QAnon stuff with it's fixation on 'saving the children' and the Covid vaccincation stuff I'd guess would attract certain people (women?) more than the car driving 15 minute cities thing?

There's been some research into all this anyway.

Gender Differences in COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory Beliefs

In this article, we evaluate gender differences in COVID-19 conspiracy theory beliefs. We find that women are significantly less likely than men to endorse COVID-19 conspiracy theories and that this gender difference cuts across party lines. Our analysis ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[ska invita]

I struggle with the line between people with some of these wacked out views and then where it possibly tips into being a mental health issue. I mean does this change how we deal with it and talk to people?

yes i think it does
i liked this post from another thread - seems relevant

 

[LDC]

I mean if they have some diagnosis or it's in a setting like the one you mention then that's clear, but obviously most of these people will not have one (or one that you know about) or be in that setting.

 

[ska invita]

I mean if they have some diagnosis or it's in a setting like the one you mention then that's clear, but obviously most of these people will not have one (or one that you know about) or be in that setting.

yeah sure...
ive got an example close to home...a close relative had a serious breakdown in his 60s after going bankrupt - he got his life together but he now believes so many false narratives - a complete 180 from his previous politics. he doesn't seem like someone who has "mental health problems", but there's a direct link to his mental health experiences and his belief in nonsense, and also a pivot towards cultural orthodoxy
i think for many there's definitely a strong psychological connection behind susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and thats a spectrum with extreme mental health problems on one end and 'milder' psychological issues on the other. which is not to pathologise all this behaviour, but I do think it is a factor worth being aware of

 

[LDC]

I mean I find them easier to deal with if I remember that they're often vulnerable and/or a bit unstable. Thinking of it like a cult too explains some of why people end up with these views.

 

[ska invita]

Thinking of it like a cult too explains some of why people end up with these views.

in the US the overlap with christian fundamentalism and conspiranoia is an overlap that touches on a few dynamics

 

[Spandex]

I think you need to be careful going too far down the path of linking mental health and conspiracy thinking. Obviously there are people who have mental health issues that then seize on conspiracy narratives, but there's plenty more who don't. It's edging towards explaining away conspiracism with ill health.

Conspiracy theories have been around across history and cultures. Romans blamed Nero for deliberately starting the great fire of Rome. Amazonian tribes have accused neighbouring tribes of using sorcery when there is an unexplained death. In medieval France Jews were accused of poisoning wells when there was a disease outbreak. In southern Africa there were percieved conspiracies around AIDS. The list goes on and on. It's a bigger phenomenon than a few isolated people with MH difficulties.

Conspiracies seem to thrive when people are uncertain and feel powerless; when there are big, rapid social changes; when there are major catastrophes like plague or conflict; when the are problems between different groups of people.

With an ongoing economic crisis for the last 15 years; with a (well deserved) collapse in trust in authority; with the climate crisis and Covid; with the culture wars started by the right (who have deliberately abandoned facts); with the end of seeing progress as positive process that will make the world a better place; with social media meaning any old shit can go around the world in minutes; these all create ideal conditions for conspiracies to flourish. Which they have.

 

[LDC]

Yes, of course it's something that's happened for many, many years and I don't think anyone is saying they're overlapping issues, just that there's some commonality. I do think there's a difference in the way that they propagate now that gets certain people that wouldn't have been the prime suspects in some other times in the past.

 

[Rob Ray]

There's probably not much point debating the specifics of the fifteen minute city conspiracy for example as they're gone by then ... you probably need to move beyond a good Vs bad viewpoint though. Like it's not defending Boris Johnson to point out that his motivations aren't those of a film baddy iyswim.

I dunno, I think quick responses highlighting this stuff might sometimes head people off before they get into sunk cost fallacies sometimes. Pointless for the true believers though I agree.

I always say to these types that rather than a conspiracy being conducted against us, the world isn't as bad as it seems. On the contrary, it's far, far worse, in part because it's random, and people who, by and large, know little more than the rest of us are in charge and are winging it.

Yeah I often go with similar, like with 9/11 I always used to be "and? How does exposing this change the material conditions we're living in?" Some of this stuff does provide a "well if we confront 15 minute cities/the Neo-Marxist agenda then it might stop further lockdowns." narrative though.

They fully understand the Jewish conspiracy stuff, but reject all suggestions those they listen to now have anything to do with pushing it through the back door, and are blind to some of their 'allies' attitude to gay rights and so on.

Yeah it's a difficulty with how amorphous it is all, encourages people to be pick and mix.

I'm not confident that this stuff can be reasoned with.

I think there's a spectrum, but yes beyond a certain point it goes in one ear and out the other, and it often subsides for a bit before making a reappearance as though nothing's been said in the first place.

But one angle to this is latching on to a grab bag of obscure “facts” that you can bedazzle or confuse people with.

Yeah, it's one of the things I'm sort of looking for is an outlet which isn't "capitalism's good, actually" that allows for quick debunking of this stuff - the more quickly slurry gets struck down the more difficult it is to build it into a broader conspira-narrative.

 

[LDC]

Had a quick look at Winter Oak hitmouse and saw he'd spoken at a 3 day event in Italy, where the snappily titled group 'International Feminist Network Against all Artificial Reproduction, Gender Ideology and Transhumanism' also spoke. I bet there's some predictable loony gems on their site English – FINAARGIT

They seem to have abbreviated their group to FINAARGIT without a hint of self awareness too.

 

[ouirdeaux]

I bet there's some predictable loony gems on their site

The recent years of techno-sanitary propaganda, now flanked by new warmongering mystifications, have shown how the military-industrial and political complex has further refined and strengthened mass mental conditioning techniques: with strategies borrowed from psychiatry and depth psychology, perfected in an era of infodemic and electromagnetic control, have shown that they know how to mould public opinion with unprecedented effectiveness and precision, reaching new frontiers of neurophysiological and social domestication.

 

[hitmouse]

Had a quick look at Winter Oak hitmouse and saw he'd spoken at a 3 day event in Italy, where the snappily titled group 'International Feminist Network Against all Artificial Reproduction, Gender Ideology and Transhumanism' also spoke. I bet there's some predictable loony gems on their site English – FINAARGIT

They seem to have abbreviated their group to FINAARGIT without a hint of self awareness too.

Yeah, Oak/Cudenec and the Stirrer are both listed as contributors to a collective project called Nevermore Media (won't link but easy enough to google), along with that Cory Morningstar person and someone I'd not encountered before called Crow Qu'appelle, who "is a part of a growing tendency of anarchists which argues that the political labels of “leftism” and “right-wing” have become meaningless, and that all people who earnestly desire freedom should unite against the totalitarian coup currently being rolled out in the name of biosecurity."

 

[LDC]

Yeah, Oak/Cudenec and the Stirrer are both listed as contributors to a collective project called Nevermore Media (won't link but easy enough to google), along with that Cory Morningstar person and someone I'd not encountered before called Crow Qu'appelle, who "is a part of a growing tendency of anarchists which argues that the political labels of “leftism” and “right-wing” have become meaningless, and that all people who earnestly desire freedom should unite against the totalitarian coup currently being rolled out in the name of biosecurity."

Fucking hell that project needs kicking to death, what a total bunch of dodgy loon cunts.

 

[LDC]

The recent years of techno-sanitary propaganda, now flanked by new warmongering mystifications, have shown how the military-industrial and political complex has further refined and strengthened mass mental conditioning techniques: with strategies borrowed from psychiatry and depth psychology, perfected in an era of infodemic and electromagnetic control, have shown that they know how to mould public opinion with unprecedented effectiveness and precision, reaching new frontiers of neurophysiological and social domestication.

Parklife.

 

[redsquirrel]

I saw good people go bad during the Occupy protests, the St Paul's camp was awash with conspiracism and few dared to challenge it because that just created hostility and too many people were more concerned with numbers. A lot of decent people left, and the conspiracist tendency gained ground that way IMO. It's been all downhill since then.

Covid was obviously a key point when a lot of this stuff came really out into the open but I agree with you that Occupy was a big factor. You had prats (including posters on here) arguing that left wingers needed to engage with conspiracy theorists as they had an alignment of interests. That such crap was not more robustly challenged opened the door significantly.

And while 15 minute/great reset stuff generally gets short shrift there is more than a bit of conspiracy crap that is given a pass as its purveyors are (supposedly) left wing - a lot of the 'disaster capitalism' stuff falls into this category, and IMO needs to be taken apart more strongly.

 

[LDC]

Yeah, some of this on the left pre-Occupy can be traced back to the anti-summit events against the WTO and other similar insititutions in the 1990s and early 2000s. Seeing them as all-powerful and controlling it then isn't a big step to the more recent conspiracy stuff.

 

[Brainaddict]

The list goes on and on. It's a bigger phenomenon than a few isolated people with MH difficulties.

Obviously people have had propensities to believe batshit things since humans evolved, but (a) with the rise of widespread education and secularisation I think that tendency reduced a bit for a while, and (b) we now have to answer the question, why the rise in importance of conspiracy theories in recent years?

There is a bit more to it than mental health problems perhaps, but I think you are understating the mental health problems in our society. It's not a 'few', and that's partly because it's not a few who are isolated, its millions. We've basically created a societal machine for producing mental health problems, and then embarked on an austerity drive to remove any support from isolated people and people with MH problems, and then we had an isolating, frightening pandemic which, in my opinion, pushed at the very least hundreds of thousands, probably millions more people over the edge into poor mental health.

 

[Larry O'Hara]

Just because it (and many related phenomena) seems to be continuing to gain in scale and we've not had much of a dedicated thread here yet. It escalated for obvious reasons during the pandemic but seems to be still be growing at the moment, usually with a recognisable far-right tinge (New World Order, George Soros type dogwhistles).

Are there many good in-depth critiques of it from the left? QAnon and the US anti-dem ecosystem have had a fair chunk of work thrown at them by big centrist outlets (eg. the long-running BBC podcast), alongside occasional individual targeting (Monbiot) which mostly revolves around a rubbernecking "look at these weirdos" approach. But work actually addressing and tearing down the assumptions behind it I've not seen much of, other than swipes taken by rambly Breadtube types.

Like it should be obvious from the get-go that "15-minute cities as a method of creating permanent lockdown" makes no sense in economic terms and distracts from very real attacks on our rights to protest, form unions etc, but is it actually being taken down methodically anywhere? And if not, what would need to be addressed in such work? What's actually being said by the conspiracy brigade?

(Edit: Forgot that the World Forum has a "no conspiracy threads unless it's bringing something new" policy - in which case is this one alright FridgeMagnet ? If not then fair, I'm mostly looking for tools towards debunking and countering given the trend of this stuff to drag people into far-right mumbling about "neo-Marxist agendas" but recognise that might also degenerate.)

Is this the same BBC that spread lies about WMD and Jeremy Corbyn? Yes it is

And I have dealt with Monbiot vs Brand on another thread

As for Soros, he is a big time interfering capitalist and tax evader who does interfere in politics and nearly bankrupted the UK. It is his actions I have a problem with not his ethnicity beefore u ask

 

[lazythursday]

Since this all really erupted during covid I guess I've come to understand that there is a fairly large subset of the population who don't really interpret the world rationally. I tend to foreground logic in how I make sense of things but a lot of people work on emotion and gut feeling and various forms of magical thinking. I think there's a lot in common with forms of religious belief, especially given how everyone vaguely spiritual/new age went wholesale down the rabbit hole.

 

[ouirdeaux]

there is a fairly large subset of the population who don't really interpret the world rationally

This was clear at the latest by Brexit and the election of Trump in 2016. Covid was merely the icing on the cake.

 

[Spandex]

Obviously people have had propensities to believe batshit things since humans evolved, but (a) with the rise of widespread education and secularisation I think that tendency reduced a bit for a while, and (b) we now have to answer the question, why the rise in importance of conspiracy theories in recent years?

There is a bit more to it than mental health problems perhaps, but I think you are understating the mental health problems in our society. It's not a 'few', and that's partly because it's not a few who are isolated, its millions. We've basically created a societal machine for producing mental health problems, and then embarked on an austerity drive to remove any support from isolated people and people with MH problems, and then we had an isolating, frightening pandemic which, in my opinion, pushed at the very least hundreds of thousands, probably millions more people over the edge into poor mental health.

It feels like you're pathologising social issues; focusing on the impacts on individuals of an increasingly uncertain world full material problems as the cause of the rise of conspiracy thinking. Seeing the anxiety caused by social and economic forces, political unstability and various crisis such as the pandemic, the climate crisis and their impacts, as the reason for people falling down conspiracist rabbit holes, rather than the issues that cause that anxiety.

It's one way of looking at it. I guess we're getting towards a semantic debate about what we mean by mental health. Believing in illogical nonsense, devoting time to "researching" evidence to support an emotional feeling that this is true while rejecting evidence to the contrary, spending your life telling anyone who'll listen about it, is not a sign of mental wellbeing; it can become a form of behavioural addiction. But it's not delusional. I suspect the majority of conspiracy theorists are not mentally ill, but they are not mentally healthy either.

 

[redsquirrel]

Since this all really erupted during covid I guess I've come to understand that there is a fairly large subset of the population who don't really interpret the world rationally. I tend to foreground logic in how I make sense of things but a lot of people work on emotion and gut feeling and various forms of magical thinking.

I think we need to draw a clear divide between conspiracy theories and people not '[interpreting] the world rationally'.
Otherwise we end up at the point below with the nice 'rational' progressives vs the horrible irrational, deluded populists. Such a position is not just nonsense, it is a political dead end.

This was clear at the latest by Brexit and the election of Trump in 2016. Covid was merely the icing on the cake.

All humans behave and act irrationally on occasion, and we should not try to divorce that from our (class) politics. In 2017 and 2019 I went out and voted Labour, not because it was a rational act. I didn't think it would be either particularly useful (in both cased I was in a safe Labour seat) nor was it in rational agreement with my anarchist politics. It was a largely emotional act in pleased surprise of a manifesto that was social democratic and a vain attempt to fuck off the awful Labour right.
Or to take the Brexit example proposed, where does rationality situation ones politics there? Are the economists with their "predictions" rational?
How many people start down the road of class politics not because they are convinced of the rationality of the philosophy of class struggle but because of feelings of unfairness, sympathy with others etc?
It's good to think critically and rationally analysis politics (both others and one's own) but we are human beings with all kinds of assumptions, relationships and biases. The prefect rational, 'data driven, what works' politics not only has its own irrational assumptions (e.g. the formulation of politics and economics as sciences.), but more often than not is the sort of hideous liberal shite that class politics is in opposition to.

Conspiracist thinking is not just irrational, there is more to it than that.

 

[Brainaddict]

It feels like you're pathologising social issues; focusing on the impacts on individuals of an increasingly uncertain world full material problems as the cause of the rise of conspiracy thinking. Seeing the anxiety caused by social and economic forces, political unstability and various crisis such as the pandemic, the climate crisis and their impacts, as the reason for people falling down conspiracist rabbit holes, rather than the issues that cause that anxiety.

It's one way of looking at it. I guess we're getting towards a semantic debate about what we mean by mental health. Believing in illogical nonsense, devoting time to "researching" evidence to support an emotional feeling that this is true while rejecting evidence to the contrary, spending your life telling anyone who'll listen about it, is not a sign of mental wellbeing; it can become a form of behavioural addiction. But it's not delusional. I suspect the majority of conspiracy theorists are not mentally ill, but they are not mentally healthy either.

I feel like I'm just talking about the way social effects converge in an individual's brain, which isn't dismissing the social nature of it at all. But in the case of conspiracy theories I think how it feels to the individual is important. For example it's clear a lot of people get a sense of superiority from believing 'the truth' that other people can't handle. I think this is very much a response in the individual brain to the feeling of inferiority that a large scale, competitive, hierarchical society often forces on people, but that they are protected from if they feel well loved, supported, secure etc. If you remove those protections in the individual and they are exposed to the full force of neoliberal capitalism and feel like a nobody, then it becomes more likely their brain will reach for some crazy way of asserting their superiority.

 

[LDC]

It's not a great surprise that some anarchists have fallen for this with some of them having such a poor analysis of capitalism and giving 'personal freedom', privacy and 'control' such an over-important place in the world.

Also, fuck the wellness health 'industry' and all its organic smallscale fetish bullshit, fuck them all.

 

[Flavour]

italian loons are particularly flowery with the language tho, gotta give 'em that. something almost noble about it.

 

[Magnus McGinty]

Just because it (and many related phenomena) seems to be continuing to gain in scale and we've not had much of a dedicated thread here yet. It escalated for obvious reasons during the pandemic but seems to be still be growing at the moment, usually with a recognisable far-right tinge (New World Order, George Soros type dogwhistles).

Are there many good in-depth critiques of it from the left? QAnon and the US anti-dem ecosystem have had a fair chunk of work thrown at them by big centrist outlets (eg. the long-running BBC podcast), alongside occasional individual targeting (Monbiot) which mostly revolves around a rubbernecking "look at these weirdos" approach. But work actually addressing and tearing down the assumptions behind it I've not seen much of, other than swipes taken by rambly Breadtube types.

Like it should be obvious from the get-go that "15-minute cities as a method of creating permanent lockdown" makes no sense in economic terms and distracts from very real attacks on our rights to protest, form unions etc, but is it actually being taken down methodically anywhere? And if not, what would need to be addressed in such work? What's actually being said by the conspiracy brigade?

(Edit: Forgot that the World Forum has a "no conspiracy threads unless it's bringing something new" policy - in which case is this one alright FridgeMagnet ? If not then fair, I'm mostly looking for tools towards debunking and countering given the trend of this stuff to drag people into far-right mumbling about "neo-Marxist agendas" but recognise that might also degenerate.)

That rule is from days of yore when we had truthers on the board. I think it’s ok to discuss conspiracy theories; the rule was really about promoting them.

 

[Rob Ray]

It's not a great surprise that some anarchists have fallen for this with some of them having such a poor analysis of capitalism and giving 'personal freedom', privacy and 'control' such an over-important place in the world.

The thing I found concerning about The Stirrer and Winter Oak I think was that they didn't fall into the poor analysis camp really, at least not initially. They do have a class analysis and I used to keep an eye on them for interesting takes on localising perspectives and the broader green protest scene respectively. The degeneration into siloed conspiracy thinking was sort of predictable in the latter case, less so in the former. This kind of speaks to some of the talk above about how much is meantl health-related etc, but there's a range of reasons why people go down the rabbit hole I think.

In The Stirrer's case what actually started it seems to have been a break with their sense of being part of the "in crowd," in their case because they insisted (unwisely) on constantly broadcasting sometimes iffy musings on the trans debate, which got them into a lot of online aggro and saw many of their old comrades distancing themselves. I suspect that's the case for a lot of people, where feeling excluded leads to a renouncing of old certainties and thus more vulnerability to whackadoodles whose whole shtick is "ah see we were right all along, welcome." In the latter I don't know Cudenec but get the impression he's previously been sort of prone and just got a whole lot worse when he got onto the Great Reset stuff and was told off about it online. Which is a phenomenon which has become depressingly common on social media - someone says something stupid, gets rinsed, rejects former affiliations and dives into a safer space where saying stupid shit is actively encouraged.

 

[LDC]

Is The Stirrer what used to be the Essex/Heckler lot?

I think there's something about the bit of anarchist politics that centres technology and is quite deep green that makes it an easier step into stuff like this. I mean that whole wild thing about 'transhumanism' comes from some fears and concerns from the often quite reactionary bit of green politics doesn't it? It's all quite fear based as well I think, it's less about 'a better world' and more about 'look how bad this is getting'. There's often some quite gleeful undertones in the way they communicate about how the world's going to shit as well which is quite odd.

It's often middle aged blokes that have no collective or group as well, and exist politically mostly online, to state the obvious as well.

Yeah, I've seen something similar with a good friend who had some reasonable positions on trans stuff, but then was distanced from their wider group, and that shook their political confidence and sense of belonging to a movement with shared ideas, and it's ended up with them having some much more politically disagreeable positions as they suddenly looked about for people that agreed with them on the trans stuff.

 

[8ball]

That rule is from days of yore when we had truthers on the board. I think it’s ok to discuss conspiracy theories; the rule was really about promoting them.

Promoting unapproved conspiracy theories.

 

[Magnus McGinty]

Promoting unapproved conspiracy theories.

Let’s be honest it was mostly to temper Jazzz’s output which iirc was consistently bonkers.