Conspiracist thinking denies an independent world recalcitrant to desire

Evidence

Trump’s conspiracism says a lot about him, personally: his cruelty and inclination to insult and cause pain, his recklessness, his impulsiveness, and his heedless failure to anticipate the consequences of his fabrications. It also speaks to the character of the new conspiracism, for Trump’s mind-set fits with a way of thinking that does not admit the existence of an independent world recalcitrant to our desires and wishes. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 160

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that conspiracism’s core is the denial of ‘an independent world recalcitrant to our desires’ — a compact, paradigm-level characterization of the epistemology at issue.
• XREF: connects to: Conspiracism offers greater coherence than reality by excluding chance and ambiguity — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 117; Conspiracism persists as a moral revolt against impersonal causal explanation — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 112; Desire is non-reflective and cannot posit its own suppression as end (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Conspiracism offers greater coherence than reality by excluding chance and ambiguity #expands (0.85) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 117
• Conspiracy beliefs can hold contradictory premises together without resolution #corroborates (0.82) — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 333
• Desire is non-reflective and cannot posit its own suppression as end #expands (0.80)
• Desire is consciousness troubled by its own inapprehensible facticity #expands (0.80)
• Conspiracism persists as a moral revolt against impersonal causal explanation #complicates (0.75) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 112
• Conspiracists falsely portray themselves as skeptical critical thinkers #complicates (0.72) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 265