Secret-identity fears, not medicine itself, drove suspicions of medical murder

Evidence

Over and over, I found that the people involved in conspiracy communities weren’t necessarily some mysterious “other.” We’re all prone to believing half-truths, forming connections where there are none to be found, finding importance in political and social events that may not have much significance at all. That’s part of how human beings work, how we make meaning, particularly in the United States today, now, at the start of a strange and unlikely century. … Still: we are the suspicious and the conspiracists are us, and there are more of us all the time. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 32 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Richard Hofstadter was inclined to pathologize conspiracy thinking: he talked about the “paranoid style” as a fundamental sickness of the mind. It was distinguished from the paranoia of individuals—“a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one’s own greatness”—but only by degree. The spokesman for the paranoid style, he wrote, sees not himself as under attack, “but a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.” — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 148 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A forged letter exchange forged the medical-murder conspiracy myth — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 384; Medical-murder conspiracy theories targeted crypto-Jews but not crypto-Muslims; Self-interest and reputation would make systematic medical murder self-defeating (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Conspiracy belief stems from universal human meaning-making rather than outsider pathology #complicates (0.75) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 32
• Pathologizing models treat collective conspiracy belief as a scaled-up mental disorder #complicates (0.72) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 148