Conspiracism persists as a moral revolt against impersonal causal explanation

Evidence

For Hofstadter, conspiracism arises from the tension between the belief that individuals shape history and the contemporary social-scientific view that large, impersonal forces shape history. As we saw in chapter 1, American revolutionaries saw events as entirely a reflection of the intentions of powerful individual actors. There was a moral coherence to their understanding of cause and effect in that they attributed desirable effects to good intentions and evil to bad intentions. The modern or social-scientific framework of explanation has shifted to impersonal forces and the aggregate actions of large numbers of people in politics, the economy, and society. The link between individual intention and consequence has been loosened. From the standpoint of contemporary assumptions about causality, conspiracists may appear, as they did to Hofstadter, as a retrograde minority in their insistence on the decisive force of agents with malignant intent. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 112

Categorization

• XREF: Distinctly parallels the author’s own material on moral panic theory and on the shift from moral to scientific registers of explanation across the corpus. — connects to: Conspiracism attacks shared modes of explanation, not just specific targets — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 24; Reducing conspiracism requires curing underlying social unfairness — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 992; Conspiracist thinking denies an independent world recalcitrant to desire — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 160
• DEEPTHINKING: Frames conspiracism as a refusal of the epistemic disenchantment of modern causality — the conspiracy theory as moral re-enchantment.

Broader Connections

• Reducing conspiracism requires curing underlying social unfairness #corroborates (0.75) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 992