| Because if the earth is flat or aliens are in Area 51, then there is a power structure dedicated to perpetuating a global lie. In fact, these conspiracies spring up backwards, from the desired outcome: * white supremacists need a scapegoat to justify their own power aims. They choose Jews. * to convince others, they invent wild conspiracy theories about Jews having a secret Zionist global power structure, controlling banks, markets, governments, media, etc. * they realize they can bind this group to even benign but wild and fanciful fantasies for 12 year olds like "the earth is flat" and "aliens exist" So it doesn't matter what the actual "big if true" fantasy is - just that the rest of the world has already accepted it's not true, so if it is true, someone is hiding it from you, and what else are they hiding? The same "open" mind that comes to "accept" the earth is flat - or even just lowers their "dogmatic" trait as a result - becomes more "open" to the idea someone is controlling the narrative. It's extremely unscientific, because it is not based in objectivity, but purely power dynamics of the narrative. 2 + 2 can be made to equal 5. |
Neither the conspiracy theorists nor the scientific dogmatists are scientific.
Science is based on doubt. It's based on not accepting anything as true until you are convinced. To call questioning what you are being told unscientific is just bizarre. It's the most scientific thing you can do. The basic posture of science is skepticism, not conviction. You don't know until you're convinced.
If anything, the conspiracy crackpots are gaining a foothold because science is reduced to mere dogma. They may be wrong, but it's a mistake to think they are idiots.
Both the scientific dogmatists and the conspiracy theorists essentially make the same mistake. They're skeptics with regards to other peoples' convictions but refuse to consider challenges to their own beliefs.
A big reason why for example the covid conspiracies got such traction was that the official narrative was inconsistent and self-contradictory. It was presented as much more certain than it could have been. Good science takes a long time to produce. Preliminary results may take several quarters, good confidence comes after a couple of years. What we had in 2020 was mostly educated guesswork.
The most scientific thing would have been to stand in front of the press and say "honestly, dunno, come back in six months or so and we may have some workable data for you". But that's not what happened. Instead, their confidence was overstated (by governments, media), and official messages kept changing.
Countries all over the world were all confidently sticking to their strategy, claiming it to be scientific, yet at the same time they were opting for contradictory strategies with regard to high-visibility interventions like mask mandates and lockdowns.
It's also somewhat questionable how scientific this could have been, given scientific confidence typically comes after the data, and this was the first time such strategies has been implemented at a societal scale.
The most damning of all is that politically inconvenient hypotheses were confidently dismissed as fake news and crazy conspiracy ramblings without proper investigation, some of them later turned out to actually have credibility (such as the lab leak hypothesis[1][2][3] which was considered in the same tier as flat-earth at some point). Again, the scientific thing would be to say "I don't know if this is true, let's go and investigate".
All this looked bad specifically because a lot of things that weren't scientific at all were constantly paraded around under the banner of scientific certainty, which in turn fanned the flames of all manner of conspiracy theories because the doctrine was visibly self-contradictory and kept changing.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3 [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656 [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-lab-leak-hypo...