ConspiracyIndividualismAndHolism

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NaomChomsky thinks TheLeftWing shouldn't get involved with ConspiracyThinking. (http://www.zmag.org/parecon/conspiracy.htm))

For him it's MethodologicalIndividualism when you need InstitutionalAnalysis.

KarlPopper agrees in "The Conspiracy Theory of Society". Conspiracy Theories are the result of naivity, not understanding that macroscopic social behaviour can be an emergent or unintended consequence of an institution or collective, rather than always controlled by one agent.

Counter: AllClocksAreClouds

Transcluded from Illuminati

Quora Answer : What is the Illuminati, and who are they?

May 13, 2014

The fun thing about the Illuminati is that they show us how humans struggle to explain and reason about the world.

So before there was the Illuminati there was God. And when stuff happened in the world it was because God planned it or decreed it.

Then, as people started moving away from assuming God was the explanation, we got a new thing : Science. And science said that things happened because of the outcome of mechanistic natural processes that followed simple laws.

And that was great because it seemed lots of things DID come out of those simple laws and mechanistic processes.

But not everything was amenable to that kind of explanation. Particularly big social / economic / historical events. Computers and maths help us understand these a bit, but most of the models of society and economies and history are pretty weak. There are way too many variables to be handled. And the models we do have don't predict (or explain very well) wars or economic crashes or other striking events.

So people have supplemented science with a different kind of explanation. That of "great men". Individuals who steer history through their will-power, charisma and clever strategising.

That was fine when you could clearly identify who those people were. Eg. Napoleon, Washington, Steve Jobs etc. But there isn't always someone that's so easy to point at. That's where the Illuminati come in : they're a place-holder, a variable name like x, which represents the people who are making this stuff happen, even though you can't actually put a concrete name to them. We need them for this kind of conspiracy / social-network shaped explanation.