[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.