5 Ways Every Conspiracy Theory Makes the World Worse

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Right after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, about 52 percent of people thought there was some kind of conspiracy at play, according to polls at the time. Of course, this was the dark ages of the 1960s, before you could just tap your iPhone and instantly find thorough debunkings of the conspiracy theories and dead simple explanations of things like the "magic bullet."

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See, conspiracy buffs have a very specific method -- they'll pore through the available data until they find something that confirms their belief, like an odd shadow in a single moon landing photo that somehow proves the whole thing was the most expensive and pointless hoax of all time (seriously, if they were going to fake it, couldn't they have thrown in some aliens or something to make it interesting?). They ignore all of the other evidence, so the sheer volume of available data actually makes their job easier.

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But when, in 1998, medical journal The Lancet published a single solitary study that showed a possible link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism, it created a worldwide panic that's still raging 16 years later.

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The article was almost immediately discredited as fraud, retracted with an apology, and the author banned from practicing medicine, which is about as hard as you can possibly tell a scientist to go frick himself while jumping down a well.

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However, none can hold a candle to the money generated by professional talk radio hucksters like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck. Through their individual media empires (which cover the media of print, radio, TV, the Internet, and penis-powering vitality serum), Jones and Beck alone rake in up to $10 million and $45 million a year, respectively.

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On the even more batshit end of the spectrum, Jones is hocking his own brand of health supplements to reverse the damage that's being done to your body by the fluoride that the government is pumping into your water supply to murder you, and by the chemicals being sprayed on you by aircraft, which the government has the audacity to call vapor trails.

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Studies have found that people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to be much more cynical about life, feel more powerless, and have almost no self-esteem. This all amounts to a much more pissed-off population, and conspiracy theorists aren't shy about unleashing their anger on those who don't share their views.

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ask Charlie Veitch, a former prominent 9/11 conspiracy theorist who later changed his mind. After going on YouTube to admit that he no longer thought 9/11 was an inside job, he had to go into hiding as thousands of conspiracy theorists from around the world set upon him with death threats. Someone contacted his mother to tell her that Veitch was a pedophile, and Alex Jones went on record to call him a sociopath.

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Yet, surveys of the participant's emotions after they'd finished watching the movie showed that most left with feelings of anger and hopelessness, as well as a general unwillingness to accept the official story. They reported afterward that they felt more disillusioned with politics and less enthusiastic about voting (after all, what does it matter when you're voting for the Zionist NWO Illuminati Freemasons either way?) In another study, people who heard conspiracy theories about global warming were less interested in lowering their carbon footprint. In both cases, the theory gave them the excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway: give up.

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So conspiracy theories end up being a bait-and-switch move where the fictional version of the problem soaks up whatever energy could be spent actually improving things.

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