[motohagiography]

Should one interpret from this article that a healthier mind believes, a) it is unimportant and it is not a part of a group that is important, b) doubts its legitimacy, and c) should be a passive particpant in the narratives around it?

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that some ideas are specifically designed to be pacifying and neutralizing, and concern about conspiracy theories seems to be one of them. Delegitimizing opposition is a standard propaganda tool.

If were to accuse you as a reader of being a propagandized zombie incapable of reason, divorced from reality, operating as an ideological automaton in a bubble of insidiously manufactured stimuli - I would suspect your response would be dismissive. Yet this is exactly what we accuse people of when we say they believe in conspiracy theories.

All ideologies are conspiracy theories, and the only thing that makes one more meaningful than another is their falsifiability and predictive power about reality - and not its post-hoc explanatory power. As a thinking person with intellectual and moral agency, you are capable of ascertaining whether one or more of your beliefs is the artifact of this one fallacy: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_... , and I'd argue that calling people conspiracy theorists is the most reliable indicator that someone has been fully atomized.

I can't defend all assertions of conspiracy, but to me the urge to articulate them at all is an indicator a person is not actuated by the much greater social danger of banal nihilism.

[notacoward]

> Should one interpret from this article that a healthier mind believes...

No. That's a huge stretch, if not an outright strawman. There's equal textual support for the more charitable interpretation that many people aren't getting enough of these positive feelings in less Manichaean or conflict-inducing ways. Even as they accept the importance and legitimacy of climate change (for example) they don't get excited by participating in activism on that issue. Conspiracy theories are a way to jump-start those feelings, and often the discomfiture of others is part of the appeal. It enhances the rush. A healthier mind seeks out meaningful engagement without turning it into combat.

> All ideologies are conspiracy theories > ... > the only thing that makes one more meaningful than another is their falsifiability and predictive power

Perhaps you're unaware of the fact that, according to people who actually study these things, non-falsifiability is one of the defining characteristics of a conspiracy theory. So no, not all beliefs are conspiracy theories. "If you disagree you must be part of the conspiracy" is a well known trope, even among comedians. Which brings us to...

> I'd argue that calling people conspiracy theorists is the most reliable indicator that someone has been fully atomized.

[motohagiography]

Someone who studied those things would understand that an ideology and a belief are separate things, where one is, literally, artifacts of the iterated logic of an idea and possible conclusions, whereas a belief is an underlying premise or axiom.

Not all beliefs are ideological, and not all ideologies are beliefs, especially when they are just conclusions. Category errors are funny, but clearly not everyone is in on the joke.

[notacoward]

I knew someone would focus on that irrelevant bit. If you think the distinction matters, note that OP was about ideas, not ideologies, and you were the one who conflated the two. The category error, if any, is not mine.

[motohagiography]

Hence what makes the views so irreconcilable. If words don't mean anything, nothing does. I can see the appeal of ruling out reality as irrelevant, but it's not consistent. My beef is with a common anti-belief, which is there is no truth, as it's the founding idea in a pernicious ideology that has produced this anti-conspiracy hysteria, which is the explicit effect of iterating affirmative conclusions from this negative premise.

The OP's entire problematization of conspiracy theories is insincere. Without a mutual understanding that originates from a belief in the possibility of both truth and meaning, we're just animals without humanity to one another. I acknowledge these distinctions because those stakes are too high to be so intellectually careless as to ignore them.