Talk:Motivation and emotion/Book/2024

Comments and suggestions

Continuing from Talk:Motivation and emotion/Book/2023/Community resilience# Grammatical comments, at your invitation. I've referenced Orwell's short essay "Politics and the English Language" many times on Wikiversity and I recommend that you give it a look. Much of the material on Wikiversity in general is written using precisely the same type of language and style that Orwell cautioned against. You've mentioned that topics are revisited each year until they're fully developed. I have some thoughts about other chapters from 2023, but the only specific comment I have at the moment is that Motivation and emotion/Book/2023/Conspiracy theory motivation should probably be added to the list of topics for 2024. Suppose you had asked What motivates women to accuse people of rape? I doubt you'd accept 1) As grounds for civil litigation or for child custody. 2) For defamation motivated by jealousy. 3) Female hysteria. as the outline for an answer. I'll quote a piece from Christopher Hitchens' essay On the imagination of conspiracy, which despite the title is not particularly fanciful: "It is the white noise which moves in to fill the vacuity of the official version. To blame the theorists is therefore to look at only half the story, and sometimes even less. To take an obvious example: nobody refers to Keith Kyle as a 'collusion theorist' because he explodes the claim that Britain, France and Israel were not acting in concert in 1956. The term 'organized crime', which suggests permanent conspiracy is necessary both to understand and to prosecute a certain culture of wrongdoing. And you may have noticed that whose who are too quick to shout 'conspiracy theorist' are equally swift, when consequences for authority and consensus impend, to look serious and say 'It's more complicated than that.' These have become standard damage-control reflexes." The resource predisposes the reader to impute accusations of conspiracy to mental illness or personal inadequacy. The popular trope of the "crazy conspiracy theorist" is perpetuated by mass media, but I don't think academia should follow suit. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 20:54, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

@Jtneill: I suppose it's only fair that I offer a better idea if I'm going to criticize, so here it is. I think there are essentially two motives behind those who advance 'conspiracy theories'. 1) Theories put forward in good faith, often as alternate explanations for some event or condition and which often contradict the diegesis of America's mass media. 2) Theories put forward to preempt or undermine the credibility of the former category, or to maintain the trope in general. For instance, just as Jeffrey Epstein was starting to get into serious legal trouble, the "QAnon" conspiracy appeared and seemed to receive a lot of promotion. Consider the possibility that so many of his clients, seeing the writing on the wall, consulted a PR firm who then came up with and spread this conspiracy, which is highly partisan, esoteric and outlandish, (rather than satanists and cannibals and mystics they're likely just your run-of-the-mill scuzz) which acted more or less as a smokescreen to preempt the emergence of a credible scandal in the public consciousness. I wrote about this in my essay-in-progress Socialism/Bipartisan fraud. Flat earth theory seems to exist for no other reason than to impress upon the public a sense of incredulity toward conspiracy theories and those who advance them in general. I would bet a lot of money that cognitive biases, personality disorders and other psychological conditions do not factor very largely. One might say there's no evidence of any of this, but of course there is. Or rather, it's the common sense thing to do. It's an obvious public relations strategy that would occur to anyone needing to undermine dissent in a nation with freedom of expression, where dissidents can't simply be thrown in the gulag. Incidentally, I suspect this likely does not truly undermine the credulity of dissidents in the eyes of a single member of the public, but rather it convinces him or her that the rest of the public is incredulous toward conspiracy theories and those who advance them, rather than those likely benefit from such a perception. In other words, it's superficial. People tend not to buck consensus if they think it's a social liability, but they aren't actually convinced that government is particularly honest. The stronger the apparent social liability, the greater the chilling effect, and this is perhaps the motivation behind another likely PR stunt, "cancel culture", but I digress. Hitchens pointed out during an interview that despite so many well-paid, well-informed and well-connected journalists in Washington, news of the iran-contra affair did not even break in America, it was published in some Lebanese newspaper. I could go on but you get the point. I think that the 2023 resource is far too charitable toward mass media and government. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 20:02, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

I suppose I'll work the above into an essay. I had been thinking about this for some time, along with other rhetoric that's frequently used to unduly discredit certain viewpoints. I'll link it here when I'm done with it and you can cite it if you so choose. In mass media there's a strong emphasis on "evidence", "fact-checking" and so forth, yet things like collusion and corruption can be as simple as a gentleman's agreement. It could be practically impossible for someone to find material evidence (let alone "extraordinary evidence", as such banal and misleading adages like 'the sagan standard' demand) that supports e.g. the hypothesis that some conspiracy theories are promoted to discredit others. It's almost certainly true nonetheless, just by common sense. One can come to such a conclusion a-priori, and one can also make certain reductio ad absurdum arguments that require little additional evidence. So much propaganda seems to lead people away from this line of reasoning. AP295 (discuss • contribs) 08:37, 12 November 2023 (UTC)