this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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I recall someone I knew that worked higher up in the US government scoffed at the idea of many of the "Government" conspiracies as not plausible due to the sheer incompetence of most government.
Getting them to tie their shoes in unison was difficult enough versus keeping some big secret from the public over the generations.
With the amount of stupid people in the general public as it is I just view it as incompetence as at fault most of the time versus big cover ups.
I always laugh at people who simultaneously think that the government is completely incompetent and couldn't run a bath successfully, and that they're all involved in giant conspiracies going back decades that they've managed to keep secret.
Like, do you not see the contradiction there?
I always laugh at people who oversimplify conspiracies so that it becomes an "us vs them" straw man. It is more complicated than that. A few people want something, device a strategy, and then try to convince others how the goal they're trying to reach would benefit them while whitewashing the idea into something very legitimate.
This is such an everyday approach to handling things that people would never call it a conspiracy, the label is only applied when something is so outrageous that we struggle with coming to terms with it, and then we turn it into a caricature so that we can simply discard the idea.
It is never "the government". But in the 90's, a cabal of neocons drew up a plan to tighten their military grip on the world, and when 9/11 came along, they had an excuse to execute it and start waging wars in a bunch of countries while convincing everyone and the government that we were battling terrorism. That is how a conspiracy works.
To give you another example, over the course of decades, the UK sprayed millions of it's citizens in secret chemical warfare tests that resemble the popular "chemtrail" theory. A testimony to how compartmentalization is perfectly able to keep secrets when needed. And even now that's in the open, very few people know about it.
But in reality, there's often no need to keep conspiracies secret when you were able to convince the majority of people that conspiracies don't exist. All that's required then, is to call something a conspiracy, and people will turn out it droves to mock anyone who dares to suggest its legitimacy.
The more people that must participate in a conspiracy for it to work, the less likely it is to be true.
Can 3 people keep a secret? Sure. Can 1000 people keep a secret? Hell no!
Sounds like something someone hiding a conspiracy would say .... we're on to you (adjusts and tightens up their tin foil hat)
After all these, you want to end up in hell?
People also vastly overestimate how many people need to be in the known to participate in a conspiracy.
The chemical companies who dumped pfas into the environment fully aware of their problems had thousands of employees, how many of them do you think were part of the plan to keep it under wraps?
It's very easy to come up with excuses and string people along, you don't need to sit them around a table and explain your evil plot.
And then there are real conspiracies, like the federalist society, that blatantly operate in the open. But they can't be bothered with them because it's not as juicy as the idea of nano bot vaccines or pizza gate.
There's a conspiracy not because there are smart people orchestrating it
There's a conspiracy because there are dumb people doing things because they think they are smart but in reality they don't know what they are doing