AMMO Kid said:
I used to love conspiracy theories, but over the summer I was around a guy who obviously liked to eat, breath, and sleep conspiracy theories. The overexposure just led me to hate them with a passion. Seriously, there was no rational thinking behind it. Something would happen and it would automatically be a huge conspiracy in his head. Now I wish I hadn't typed this out cause I'm annoyed just thinking about it.
One thing that he used to always rail on, however, was how the Catholic Church is supposedly run by the head of the freemasons/illuminati who was also the pope. Weird.
I have mixed opinions of most conspiricy theories. To be honest I think a lot of people who claim that they have been "easily debunked" are worse than the people who believe them fanatically, because most of them haven't been, the basic nature of a conspiricy theory makes it impossible to debunk through anything a normal, or even moderatly informed, person could figure out.
In many cases conspiricy theories are simply true, or at least extremely likely, but it comes down to the basic issue that your typical person can't really do anything about it. A solution by definition requiring the kind of mass uprising that is impossible for humanity, or a lot of people to fundementally alter their lifestyles and point of view. The thing about conspiricies is that most of them come down to maintaining a status quo people are happy with and don't want to disturb. Basically even if there are shadowy puppet masters who are better off and controlling everything, does your average person in the first world really care enough given his comfortable lifestyle?
It's food for thought, especially if you know anything about the history of disinformation, yesterday's conspiricy theories that turned out to be true, and were outed when they outlived their usefulness and weren't really relevent anymore.
I decided to respond to your post (if you read this far) because you mentioned The Pope, and that's a good place to sort of make a point. Pretty much you start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Pope
Most people aren't aware that there has been a lot of turmoil over the office of Pope and who rightfully holds the job. There have been cases where more than one Pope has existed simultaneously. Rome pretty much declaring anyone not on their seat, and ruling the "real" Catholic church, to be an anti-pope. For various reasons your have other men, claiming to be The *real* pope in exile due to some division that lead to a pretender taking over Rome, for political reasons, connection to another religion, or something similar, leading to the corruption of the entire insitution. Depending on where specific breaks happened (and where an "alternative" pope broke off) the details can be quite differant.
To put it bluntly some of the antics of popes and massive changes in church policy are fairly interesting. You look at the excesses of the Borgias (which have lead to a lot of fiction), accusations of satanism, and the symbols of other orders and faiths showing up hidden in Catholic artwork and arcetecture it causes one to wonder. After all a lot of that "hidden symbolism" isn't exactly hidden to anyone who knows much about artwork, and the guys comissioning that stuff DID know art which is one of the reasons why it's quality is so timeless.
The point here being that with all of the internal catholic squabbling, transitions of power, political alligiences, etc.. not to mention the sheer age of the organization, that "theory" isn't especially improbable, since you've more or less had multiple people wearing the big hat who were there because of money and political connections, it's not hard to accept that someone holding the office at some point might have been a freemason, and one of the rivals broke off, was declared an anti-pope, and started an alternate succession, with a degree of legitimate claim given the politics of whenever that happened. Of course saying that the office has remained in the hands of any one alterate group permanantly (Satanists, Freemasons, etc...) is pushing it a bit, because in theory anyone whose family gets into the church for a few generations and keeps their "Catholic Stamp" could wind up with the big hat, and it all comes down to the money and backing.
The point here is that in that theory there is more truth to it than not if you know much about the church. It's also silly to assume that the guy running the biggest and most powerful religious organization in the world isn't going to do anything with the office, and major action usually happens fairly quietly, behind the scenes, especially when your dealing with power derived from an office. To say that The Pope doesn't do anything with his power is more insane than debunking things allegedly done from the office, because frankly if the power was never used, it wouldn't be such a big deal. "The Pope" is respected globally and recognized as a major seat of power for a reason.
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In general my favorite conspiricy theory of the moment is the general idea that "found footage" horror movies and all of these "ghost hunter" shows have gotten moving for reasons of disinformation. Basically in a world where nearly everyone has a camera, it's impossible to keep wierd phenomena under the table, but by making "fake footage" a popular genere of entertainment, to the point where you have kids everywhere trying to make their own versions of "Blair Witch", it means that anything someone really DID find wouldn't be taken seriously. A bunch of kids get killed by a ghost or something for real and footage is found on camera, this form of entertainment means that it's easier for people to just accept that they ran away, and the footage is signs that they were trouble teens who "made their own horror movies".
By that theory, it isn't a case where every movie is concocted by the gubberment or whatever, it's one where the idea was started by the goverment subtly, and then took off on it's own.
Connected to this is the idea that the best way to ensure nobody takes something seriously is to put it on the internet. If a real incident/thing showed up on say the Chans, posted anonymously, everyone would dismiss it as fake saying "oh yeah, look I can find how that creepypasta started, here's the original post archived on 4-chan".
Is that theory real? Probably not for obvious reasons. However if you know much about disinformation, that's pretty much how real goverments would do it, as opposed to having "Men In Black" running around intimidating and disappearing people. The Internet is a perfect tool today because by putting the truth there (especially if it's something wild) means nobody will take it seriously. A classic disinformation technique is to ensure nobody recognizes the truth, recognizing when total honest will cover something better than a lie is the mark of a disinformation expert.
