Do you believe in illuminati or qanon?

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I mean, do you believe in those conspiracy theories, that the world is managed by Illuminati, or that there's some deep state, reset, or things like that?

I believe that there are really rich and powerful sick people out there, but not entirely sure, that they run everything. The thing I don't like it, that lot of dictators and psychopats are on the rise and people vote for them :/

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Based on 18 votes (4 yes)
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Comments ( 14 )
  • Boojum
    3 years ago

    The Illuminati was a real secret society. It appeared in Bavaria in 1776, and was founded by men whose philosophical and political views had much in common with those of the Founding Fathers of the USA. They were opposed to the abuse of power by the state (which meant monarchs back then), and they believed that religion and other superstitious, irrational beliefs shouldn't have any influence over people and society. This makes it profoundly ironic that wingnuts now believe that the Illuminati is an invisible force that's responsible for screwing up their lives.

    QAnon is a bunch of irrational nutjobs who started out somewhat detached from reality and then, by a process where delusional, non-disprovable beliefs spread through the online community, it spiralled down into utter insanity.

    Conspiracies do indeed happen, but like olderdude says, this is always on a local level. Rich and powerful people do have a lot of influence over the laws that are passed at a national level, and it can't be denied that a few tech billionaires have had a huge impact on the society we now live in. But it's ridiculous to believe that wealthy and politically powerful people are all following some hidden master plan. Virtually all of those people rate high on the psychopathy scale, and psychopaths just don't play nice with each other. They use each other whenever they can, and drop anyone who isn't useful in helping them reach whatever goals they personally have. It's all about them personally in the here and now and the near future, not some generation-spanning game plan that will come to fruition at some point in the distant future.

    A nasty thing about conspiracy thinking is that it's very appealing to believe that all the problems in your life exist because of hidden, powerful forces that control the world. Believing that all the things you don't like about your life and the world you live in are due to Satan, George Soros or the Illuminati is much easier than accepting that the world is a confusing place where sometimes shit just happens, and sometimes we're just not equipped to deal with the crap that life dumps on us.

    The other nasty thing about conspiracy thinking is that it's impossible to prove a negative. Nobody can prove that George Soros was NOT behind the recent assault on the Capitol. It's impossible to prove that the Rothschild family does NOT lead a Satanic cult. You can't prove that every school massacre in the USA is NOT a false flag operation that's aimed at making gun ownership illegal.

    But it's very easy to believe that the absence of any evidence supporting those beliefs just means that the conspirators are very good at covering up their tracks.

    One of the founding myths of QAnon became known as Pizzagate. The claim was that there is a basement under Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in DC where Democratic politicians torture and abuse kidnapped children. The fact is that the building has no basement, but even if someone were to systematically dismantle the building without finding an entrance to a hidden basement, believers could claim that the entrance had been walled off after the story became public knowledge. If you were to excavate the site and found no basement, believers could claim that there once had been a basement, but it had been skilfully removed from beneath the building and what appears to be natural ground strata restored by our our shape-shifting alien Reptilian overlords who have the technology to make such things trivial. Or, if their personal set of delusional beliefs doesn't (yet) include Reptilians, they might decide that just as "pizza" was code for a fresh victim for Hilary Clinton to abuse, "Comet Ping Pong" was code for some other place that hasn't yet been found.

    Once someone has invested in a belief that has no grounding in provable fact or logic - be that the existence of God, the flat Earth or the existence of those pesky shape-shifting Reptilians overlords - they will do everything in their power to explain away all evidence that's in conflict with their belief.

    As of right now, the QAnon whackjobs are having problems understanding why Trump has vanished from the White House before he and the US military instigated a huge purge of Democratic paedophiles from all levels of US government and their imprisonment in concentration camps. It's a fundamental tenet of QAnon thatTrump was covertly working towards doing that ever since he came down that gold-plated escalator, but instead, he just told them to have a good life and flew away.

    A few of those who guzzled the QAnon Koolaid will deal with their cognitive dissonance by waking up, smelling the coffee and accepting that it was all a crock of crap. But the history of how cults respond to failed prophecies suggests that a lot of them will find some way to rationalise and explain away the failure of this prediction (just as they have with all the previous Q predictions that failed to occur). As far as the true Q whackadoodles are concerned, they're part of a select community that's on the side of Good, and they're confronting a powerful, all-pervasive, invisible Evil, so I suspect the cult will hang around and mutate into something that's even more detached from reality and probably more dangerous.

    It's not a huge leap from the QAnon fantasy world into the swamp of neo-Nazism and white supremacism. Already, there's a social media movement called Freedom for the Children which started in the QAnon bubble. It deliberately exploits the fears of people - particularly mothers - about child abduction and paedophilia, and acts as a gateway into the insane world of QAnon.

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    • SmokeEverything
      3 years ago

      Qanon was always a crock of crap. The entire basis of a "deep state" is fake elections. There's no way if an actual deep state was actually entrenched that any candidate threatening the established order would ever be put on the news as a viable presedential candidate.

      Any of that David Icke crap about satanic lizard people is also bs, "conspiracy theorists" given a real mainstream platform are all disinformation shills for the CIA.

      On the other hand, it's openly availible information that the CIA controls the media, it's openly availible that they've userd COINTELPRO operatives to turn actual civil rights movements into terrorist organizations, it's openly availible that the government has done illegal medical experimentation on people, so these things aren't "conspiracy theory"

      There's only one conspiracy that's existed since the beginning of time, and that's subjugation of the population by a small elite group. If we're going to think rationally, how far would this group go to maintain the established order from the masses who could easily strip them of their power and wealth?

      Royal families ruled the world a couple hundred years ago, they didn't all get along. If one of them could've taken over the entire world they would have. Instead they sent their subjects to fight and die to settle rich men's arguments. This was a couple hundred years ago, and that's according to the official account. You can rewrite history every 100 years, nobodys around to question it.

      Most of these "ancient aliens" bs conspiracies are put out on purpose to make anyone who questions the official narrative look like a crackpot. The truth is usually somewhere in the middle. There is absolutely a movement to dumb down and decieve people going on, and it's working.

      Look at what's going on in the world right now with all the nanny state restrictions and censorship "For our own good." The entire spectrum is freedom vs. safety. Mad Max Vs. Orwellian dystopia. People from the society in 1984 were way "safer" than they would be in some Mad Max style anarchy, at the cost of having the state dictate on every level what they are and aren't allowed to do. That's what we're moving towards, on a gradual basis. Kids born after 9/11 think we always lived in a surveilance state. Kids who are 3 or 4 now can't remember any time before standing close to another person was "dangerous."

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    • radar
      3 years ago

      I feel like more and more people are falling prey to this and it scares the shit out of me. I don't know if it's even possible to get out once you've fallen down this kind of rabbit hole. Maybe it's just the people I know and the things that I run across, but I feel like it's almost every other person nowadays and I wonder all the time if I'm next. Or if I've already fallen in somehow, in regards to some things, and can't see it.

      So many people are living out that part in The Social Dilemma about the girl's little brother thinking "hmm I'm curious about such & such, let me look it up" and then ending up involved in that riot. It does make me question how the things that I see may be affecting my political views.

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      • Boojum
        3 years ago

        Conspiracy-thinking can be very seductive for a few reasons.

        While conspiracy theories tend to be very convoluted, they offer an explanation for things we have difficulty understanding and accepting.

        I mentioned the "false flag" conspiracy theory about school shootings in my previous. If you have huge problems believing that anyone could be so fucked up that they'd slaughter a bunch of six-year-old kids, and you previously believed that your fascination with guns made you a persecuted minority, there's a twisted sort of logic in linking the two.

        If you've been told from when you were a kid that working hard and sticking to the rules will always lead to success, but your life is difficult and you just can't seem to get ahead, it's very tempting to believe that you're being held back by some malign, invisible conspiracy that keeps people like you down. Accepting that what you've always been told is a lie because there are serious flaws in the economic structure of the country you identify with to the point of idolising it is difficult. Accepting that some of the problem might lie in yourself is even more challenging. It's far easier to blame The Other, and that might be the Jews, Black people, the Illuminati or evil radical liberals.

        Belief in a conspiracy theory also allows you to feel special and different from the blind, ignorant sheeple you have to live with. From what I've read, one of the things that came up often in online discussions between QAnon believers was anticipation of the glee they'd feel when Q's prophecies all came true, and their non-believing friends and families would be forced to admit that they'd been right all along. This is typical of those who believe in conspiracy theories.

        Conspiracy theories also allow you to feel you have some degree of control over your life. You obviously can't singlehandedly overcome the power of the Deep State, the Illuminati or the Reptilians that control the world, but being aware of the conspiracy allows you to resist and expose it.

        There are conspiracy-thinkers in all countries, but I believe that Americans are particularly susceptible to falling down one of these rabbit holes because of the importance of religion in the USA. Religion offers simple explanations for the confusing world we live in, it allows you to believe that you have a special insight into why things happen, it provides a feeling of belonging to a special group, and it gives you a sense of having some power over what happens in your life as well as what comes after it. And just as with conspiracy theories, religions don't require any sort of hard proof; all you need to do is believe that something is true and join in the group-think.

        If you grow up in a society where believing in God and belonging to some religious group is considered perfectly normal, it's very likely you'll end up with a mindset that allows you to believe other things that aren't supported by hard evidence. I don't think it's just a coincidence that conspiracy theories are rife in countries where almost everyone is Muslim, and that a lot of Americans who believe in conspiracies also identify as fundamentalist Christians.

        With regard to your feelings of discomfort when dealing with conspiracy-believers, I don't find this surprising. As I've said, conspiracy thinking is seductive. Those who believe in conspiracies can be just as fervent as any born-again Christian fundamentalist, and they can be just as desperate to convince others that they should believe as they do. We're social animals, so when others accept that our beliefs are true, that's confirmation that our beliefs are correct. This is why religions and conspiracy theorists usually actively seek converts.

        Evidence-based, critical thinking is much harder than simply accepting some convoluted theory that explains something you don't understand, but Occam's Razor is a very useful tool: if something can be explained by two competing theories, the simplest one is most likely true.

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        • radar
          3 years ago

          You make good points. Maybe the increase in this lately just speaks to an increasing lack of mental health in the world, and dealing with our own mental health on a personal level is the best defense. When people become too invested in these things, they almost invariably seem to be filling a hole in their life.

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  • olderdude-xx
    3 years ago

    While it is true that the upper 0.025% of the wealthy have a significant impact on how the world works... as they have actual influence on how money, products, and services flow around the world... I do not believe there are any other groups that have more than insignificant control at a more local or regional (at best) area.

    In the later groups I believe that they are made up by about the same number of criminal and authoritative leaders and a similar sized opposite group of people supporting development and freedoms for the people.

    Different groups dominate the local area depending where you are in the world.

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  • [Old Memory]
    3 years ago

    Someone told me about a book written in the early 1900s I think that went into how the world has developed so far and how it would likely continue based on trends and psychology, and from the source it was all pretty accurate as time played out

    I could totally see, for example, someone like Rockefeller, while not actually knowing his story, could look at the world around him and see cars being manufactured and how he could garnish power by supplying those cars with oil

    Then his descendents start to take the reigns and it becomes an empire

    Maybe Wal-Mart would have been a better example

    But yeah, I think it's like 6 companies that more or less control how the world operates, and knowing me, if I were them, at some point I'd probably get some big minds in psychology to help me secure my position and get the wheel turning just how I want

    I do think there is a form of balance, but part of me suspects it's someone negative who sits at the top behind closed doors

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    • olderdude-xx
      3 years ago

      Rockefeller made his oil wealth largely by supplying "standard" lamp oil before electric lights. He had his chemist of the day come up with a relatively safe and standardized oil product to replace whale oil in lamps, and certain other applications.

      He also figured out how to create a monopoly of the oil refineries.

      Yes, they produced other product. But his main wealth was based on "Standard" lamp oil.

      That's where the name "Standard Oil" came from as well.

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  • Somenormie
    3 years ago

    They are a sham and they're all in your head.

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  • Imafriendyrock
    3 years ago

    I dont really believe in the illuminati. I think people confuse it with free masonry. The pyramid and all seeing eye is a masonic symbol. Anyone can be a mason.

    I do believe in the "deep state" or whatever you want to call it.

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    • Imafriendyrock
      3 years ago

      Its hard to deny the politicians cover for eachother. I could refer you to the fast and furious scandal where the DEA under Obama was arming drug cartels and allowing safe entry into the USA so the cartels would work with the government to get rid of other cartels the USA did not like. Something similar happened under the reagan administration with the CIA allowing cocaine to be brought in to fund a war in South America.

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      • Imafriendyrock
        3 years ago

        The point is multiple government organizations were involved in this

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  • Tommythecaty
    3 years ago

    Nope, but there’s plenty equivalent. It doesn’t matter what side of the coin someone believes in there. They don’t know what they’re talking about regardless.

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  • donteatstuffoffthesidewalk
    3 years ago

    id love to believe that a powerful cabal runs shit

    but the world is a chaotic grabastic clusterfuck with fuckheads and hordes of various fuckheads makin plays for power monthly

    some successful others become media subjects

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