new contrapoints just dropped
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Ohhh yeah! And another mammoth runtime.
Egg me spent many
happyconfused hours watching her channel. What, this? No no no, it’s not trans content, it’s philosophy! I’m certainly not interested it in that way. No, not me!I have an interest in philosophy separately, so contra was one of my favorite channels for years, even before she transitioned. Ironically her transition and her trans content did not help me understand myself or contribute to my egg-cracking at all 😆
Anyone who’s watched it wanna tell us what it’s about? Don’t know when I’ll have 2h40m to spare
hard to summarize, but here’s my attempt, a lot of this is paraphrased directly from the video:
Conspiracy theory thinking is nothing new (e.g. the great fire of Rome in 64 CE was a false flag operation ordered by Emperor Nero), and constitutes a way of thinking. It is popular because it is fun, gives you as sense of special identity, and gives you a sense of control and power in a chaotic and often disempowering world. Being able to feel like you are personally connecting the dots is psychologically compelling, like a good detective story.
Contra names this way of thinking “Conspiracism”, and it includes:
- intentionalism: nothing happens by accident, big events imply intentional conspiracy, e.g. major climate disasters are manufactured by a secret cabal of scientists and the elites
- dualism: everything is a fight between good and evil, which are inherent, e.g. the elite are all Satanists who epitomize evil and are motivated by their pure evil
- symbolism: everything has meaning, nothing is a coincidence, e.g. the monster energy drink looks a little like the Hebrew character for the numeral 6 repeated three times, so it must mean monster energy drinks are connected to the secret cabal of satanists conspiring against us
Further more conspiracists seem to be obsessed with rituals. Rituals usually coordinate social relations and establish status, e.g. weddings, coronations, readings of judicial verdicts, which authorize relationships of power. The assumption is that secret conspirators also have secret rituals.
A lot of the imagination about the secret evil rituals of conspirators start to seem a lot like “pornography for Puritans” - essentially false and imaginative reports are conjured up about all the evil rituals happening behind closed doors, like the Satanic Panic of the 90s, and conspiracists are able to justify their perverse obsession and interest in sexually lurid and taboo accounts by claiming to be righteously invested in saving children from those ritual abuses and so on. This also relates to the way witch hunts involved disrobing women and carefully inspecting their bodies in public for witch marks, the stated motivations are to identify witches, but it implies a repressed sexual desire that is fulfilled with righteous justifications.
From here Contra argues that we shouldn’t take seriously the claims that conspiracists are genuinely invested in children, and that many of them are basically just perverts hiding their obsessive sexual fantasies and forbidden desires behind righteous and moral justifications. (She shares the clip from It’s Always Sunny where he asks “No way, someone uploaded naked pics online, that’s disgusting! Where did he post those?”)
A lot of times conspiracism also takes the form of revenge porn, like To Catch a Predator which never involves child victims and focuses not at all on victims but instead running sting operations that allow televising the entrapment and punishment of would-be predators.
Will come back to finish, there’s a lot more 😅
Part 6
In Contra’s final chapter, she admits conspiracists will complain that she didn’t actually prove anything they claim is wrong, i.e. she didn’t spend any time debunking conspiracy theories.
She introduces Brand’s law: the energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than the energy required to produce bullshit. Essentially debunking is not efficient, and even when something is debunked, a conspiracist will just propose a new conspiracy about why the evidence did not support their conspiracy theory.
Contra concludes that conspiracists cannot be reasoned with. This unfortunately does not bode well, since she says communication is necessary to avoid political violence.
Not only does conspiracism seem bad for democracy, it can be devastating to families, similar to the way families can lose people to addictions, people lose their family members to QAnon conspiracy theories. Contra recommends The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family by Jesselyn Cook on this topic. People get sucked into conspiracism, and it takes over their whole lives. Contra is at a loss about how to “blue pill” people once they go down the conspiracism rabbit hole, just like you can’t force an addict to not be an addict, it’s not clear you can cure a conspiracist of their thinking.
So Contra wonders why people get addicted to conspiracy thinking in the first place, and suggests it fulfills emotional needs:
- relief from fear: conspiracism promises that everything in the world has meaning (a bit like how religion says God has some secret plan for everything and it is reassuring to some when bad things happen)
- inflated self-esteem: feeling like you are one of the special few who knows about the conspiracy can be a way to feel good about yourself, and even promotes a kind of persecution / martyrdom complex - conspiracists believe they are heroically fighting on the side of good against evil
- revenged humiliation: public humiliation seems to come before a lot of conversion experiences into conspiracism, and conspiracism shows a mindset of longing for vindication
- denial of privilege: conspiracism provides a simple narrative that we are all at the bottom of the social hierarchy, which not only validates victimhood, but conveniently obviates shame or guilt about your role in oppressive social power dynamics, such as racism, patriarchy, hegemony, etc.
In the end, Contra insists that elites are no different than anyone else - they don’t have a special or different psychology, they are just like everyone else. Dehumanizing the elites conceals our own capacities to become oppressors. She says we should pay more attention to normal moral failings in ourselves and others, and notice how they interact with power, as well.
Rather than secret conspiracies and epic battles between good and evil, Contra thinks there are just people and power.
She ends with this:
Who really controls the world? No one. There are no adults, it’s just us. There is no plan, unless we make one.
:O
congratulations on finishing this!
i’ll hold off on posting my thoughts until i get around to actually watching the thing. (i wonder if you’ll ever see my reply 2 years from now…)
I leave a lot out - like the revenged humiliation section has three really good examples of conspiracists who became conspiracy theorists right after a particularly publicly humiliating experience - two examples of which I particularly appreciated:
Naomi Wolf was a famous liberal feminist who, during an interview, had the thesis that formed the basis of an entire book she wrote exposed as a basic misunderstanding of a legal concept. After that experience, she really lost her mind and now she is a conspiracist who posts anti-vaccine content and co-hosts a show with Steve Bannon.
Likewise, Candace Owens originally was an anti-racist activist after she experienced racist harassment in school, and she didn’t become a conservative until she launched a website that essentially aimed to doxx anyone who made racist statements, which was responded to not only by universal condemnation, but also the internet doxxing her. That experience caused her to become “a conservative overnight”, and now she’s so anti-Semitic even the right-wing Daily Wire had to boot her from the organization.
There’s so much I didn’t capture or didn’t represent well, so I highly recommend watching the video. It’s not as long as it seems, lol. It also helps if you just watch a chapter at a time - you probably watch 10 - 20 minute videos all the time, this is just a bunch of 10 - 20 minute videos chapterized into one longer video.
