many conspiratorial worldviews seem to be based on a sort of inverse Hanlon's razor, which is itself a perverted Just Universe fallacy; it would be painful to accept that the universe does not have an order, so it's better to posit that there are bad people in charge causing evil
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RT @AntiVaxSexPest
the vax mandate isn’t just a way of selecting for compliance and purging the disobedient - it’s a way of purging those who are able …
https://twitter.com/AntiVaxSexPest/status/1464119531887026178
the standard Just Universe drives people to attribute unfortunate outcomes to individual misconduct: if you got cancer, well, it's probably bc you deserved it somehow; the universe/god wouldn't let bad things happen to good people!
a pernicious metaphysical error; few are immune
this variant, however, cannot be attributed to individual misconduct, as it deals w/ governance & policy; clearly the badness is flowing down from on high. but how is it generated? it would be Unjust were it simply benign incompetence, so instead it must be malicious conniving.
if one were to accept that the chaotic & ineffective governance was a function of error rather than planning, well, that would mean that our societal coordination systems are deeply flawed
there's few problems more terrifying than that of decentralized coordination failure
how does go about dealing w/ a dysfunction fractally pervade every layer of society? how to ensure good outcomes when there is no one in charge?
accepting this requires accepting that there is no sure-fire way for Good to defeat Evil; that there is no one battlefield, even
whats even more terrifying, for many, is that there might not even really BE any Good or Evil, that the world is but shades of gray; that mostly everyone does what they think is good for them and theirs, that there is no grand conspiracy of Evildoers
better to deny such a world
this is the tragedy of the conspiratorially-minded; they so deeply need the universe to be fundamental Good, filled w/ intrinsic meaning & order, that it drives them to perceive agentic phantoms, w/ tendrils pervading every sphere
better an all-powerful enemy than none at all
clearly the universe is Just, so it cannot be that incompetents end up in position of power; there must be something more, some order to the chaos. no, its that they're not incompetent at all, but rather lying to us about their goals!
much easier to deal with a concrete enemy