Remusings

Our shared disillusionment with the leadership class has been a persistent narrative within the zeitgeist for decades. The archetypical representation of a modern politician is commonly associated with a number of troubling traits - untrustworthy, selfish, greedy, power-hungry, corrupt, deceitful and more. Put simply, the  majority of people around the world do not trust their politicians . Meanwhile politics itself, in the words of George Orwell,  "is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia". As such, we have come to accept the sad truth that all our leaders come with a price tag, for those who can afford it. And that, in the big picture, you and I are left not only powerless, but also utterly hopeless.  Meanwhile, even our sense of hopelessness is not spared from manipulation either. The rise of the "right wing bros club" (the likes of Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi among others) was fueled by this very same hopelessness and mistrust of the political eli...

What is a conspiracy theory? Political Psychologists define it as "attempts to explain the ultimate causes of significant social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two or more powerful actors". There are a few important elements that form part of this definition. Firstly, conspiracy theories seek to provide an explanation for political and social events. Secondly, they rest on the belief that shadowy powerful actors are executing secret plots to manipulate socio-political dynamics. Thirdly, they are generally based on a number of deductive errors in reasoning on the part of their proponents, whereby singular events or data points, that have no rational causal relationship, are linked together to form a narrative. In essence, conspiracy theories are based on connecting information nodes (which may or may not have an observable correlation, i.e. tendency to occur together) without any empirical evidence that proves a causal relationship betwee...