What Does It Mean to Believe a Conspiracy Theory?

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

i'm working my next big book is on conspiracy theories. And i've been thinking about what it means to believe a conspiracy theory. Daniel loxton, who does my junior sceptic, calls winking a belief. Like his example of ice landers saying that they believe in fairies. They don't really believe in fairies - just sort of a cultural tradition. So when people like ted cruz say there's something to this, i think maybe th they're signalling their tribal loyalty. I have some sympathy with an gende critical feminists who keep getting tho platformed at the moment. Some of the most extreme and radical feminists from that branch will insist that we live in a rape

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn’t practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society?

In this wide-ranging conversation Helen Pluckrose recounts the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous.