Are we all victims of a conspiracy to mess up the world by spreading conspiracy theories? Can you have a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories? Whatever about arguing about whether anyone actually went to the moon, conspiracy theories have spread like wildfire over various aspects of the Covid pandemic, lgbt+, immigration, race, climate, politics - especially Trump, and, I think, the Sovereign Citizen/Freeman movements are largely based on conspiracy theory type ideas. These are conspiracies that do damage, baselessly finding nonsense theories to wind up gullible people and create social unrest where it is not justified. There are lots of social issues worthy of debate and protest without inventing stuff.
Its not a new phenomenon, two major conspiracy theories were the endlessly evil role of Jews in society, which still goes on to some extent, and the searching out of mostly harmless old women and declaring them witches, in both cases based on warped and vicious ideas largely in the name of religion. Religion provided the ultimate conspiracy theory of controlling the masses and it worked for centuries, but now most of us are getting over it, are the CTs just filling a vacuum?
One CT now emerging concerns the '15 minute cities' idea. Its hard to know how much of this is media hype - are there really so many objections to the idea or is it a slow news day? I have seen a couple of articles about this but, while there are always two sides to a discussion, its hard to see how people can so quickly turn to conspiracy. I seem to recall at the start of Covid the restrictions were to be permanent and it was all a world conspiracy. One of the most telling phrases in the link below is that when it was proposed for Oxford a lot of the objections came from outside the UK, presumably from professional conspiracy theorists looking for something to stir up.
The idea of every neighbourhood having basic amenities, and some vehicle traffic being re-routed to open up town and city centres a bit seems like a good idea - and I say that as someone who is not as mobile as I was and would find it difficult to have to walk long distances to my car, especially if I had bags to carry. This has already happened to some extent in a good few cities that I can think of, London has had a congestion charge since 2006 which might have annoyed some residents but did not lead to claims that people were being trapped in post-apocalypse-type districts. Certainly there is discussion to be had locally about the proposals, but the argument that it is a world plot to confine people seems irrational.
I debated whether this should go into CT but that tends to be more focussed on specific conspiracies, I don't want to get side-tracked into the individual conspiracies, I am more thinking of the overall effect of conspiracy theories and possibly social media promoted ideas generally.
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