Meet the 31% of survey respondents who believe that a secret cabal controls world events

 

Headline:  The Garden of Forking Paths, 4/2/2024

Tinfoil factories must be operating on overdrive, because everywhere you look these days, conspiracy theories abound. From QAnon to vaccine lunacy, and shadowy deep state plots to Kate Middleton being cloned, millions of people make sense of a rapidly changing modern world through weird, wild, and wacky theories that yield a bogus “hidden truth.”  

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Such deranged, conspiratorial thinking is warping modern society. It’s not just confined to online discourse, either. Conspiracy theories sway our politics, incite violence, and alter the way that millions upon millions of people try to grapple with the bewildering nature of our complex modern societies. 

The notion that “everything happens for a reason” isn’t just a false mantra of comfort that we stitch on flowery pillows; it’s also a delusion that imagines a world of perfect, top-down control, in which random accidents never happen and everything has significant, hidden meaning—if you only dare to look close enough.