Alternate realities.

Like I said Trump didn't start it it's been around as long as people have been probably. Trump is a high profile public figure that has recently tapped into it.

You can argue Obama did the same in a slightly more subtle way with his hope slogans.

That's because there IS a conspiracy of remainers trying to drag us back into the EU - and they're almost certainly encouraged and funded by the EU. Why do you think it so long to leave the EU and the remainers actually hijacked the govt's agenda and passed the Surrender Law (the Benn act) making it illegal to leave the EU without their permission FFS.


As for the scientists they're not lying. Some believe that climate change is happening and is caused by CO2and some believe that climate change is happening but it's not caused by CO2 but by other factors. There are many different views - scientists often don't all agree. The liars are the politicians and media who claim the science is settled. It's not.

Stating your conspiracy theory to be a fact  without evidence does not make it so. It is just a doubling down on your alternate reality.

And 97% of climate scientists following the science, attempt the almost certain reality that man made global warming is happening. That is about as settled as  science ever gets. But you dont want to believe it so it cannot be true, and is presumably explicable only by a conspiracy theory?

There have always been big differences of opinion between left and right and any other imaginable way of differentiating sets of opinions. But it used to be broadly true that everyone knew what the basic facts were but just differed in what to do about them or in how to change them. Whatever our opinions, we were all generally grounded in reality.

But in recent years, and indeed the problem has been developing for decades, people have started to believe in different supposed facts and alternate realities. This has not just been happening here but elsewhere too. We saw it in spades in the USA with the coming of Trump to the political scene. This disconnect from reality and belief in an alternate reality born of paranoid conspiracy theorising appears to be particularly marked on the right, though the left is not entirely immune either, always ready to see the dark hand of the deep state if something does not go well for us.

But for years now the right have been nurturing the concept of a big bad EU that is dominating us and see it as a malignant force, and got into the habit of blaming it for all our ills. They also began to increasingly reject any science which did not sit well with their own lifelong ideologies. 

Many of them have come to believe in a conspiracy of Remainers, in cahoots with the EU, to drag us back in at any cost, with any failure of Brexit supposedly the fault of Remainers sabotaging their own country. That scientists offering evidence of man-made global warming are all somehow for some reason lying to us as part of some sort of conspiracy, and that because expressing phobic opinions is less tolerated by the majority than it used to be, freedom of speech is under dire threat as well.

In this country many of them have convinced themselves of a paranoid conspiracy theory that intermeshes all these strands, by which the deep state is conspiring to subvert the will of the people by dragging us back into the EU, and if Brexit isnt working, this can only be explicable to them as sabotage by a bunch of Remainer fifth columnists working to undermine it. And all this seems to them to be part and parcel of a wider plot involving most of the world's scientists  - presumably working for dark forces - to use what they assume to be fake science to gain control over us and destroy our freedoms. All of which is reinforced in their own minds by increased levels of public censure for phobic views.

We see them on this forum all the time, calling the EU the EUSSR, saying that we are on the road to a Soviet dictatorship, that anyone saying unwelcome things will be put in gulags, that freedom of speech is dying if not dead. Even as they say these things with total freedom and failing to recognise the irony in that fact.

It is difficult to debate sensibly with people believing in fake realities that exist only in their own heads, so we will often end up ridiculing instead. Yet so convinced are they by their fake realities that they genuinely see those of us who believe in reality, the real thing,  as delusional for failing to see it their way.

This is making sensible debate very difficult, even in the mind zone. And I thought it worthwhile possibly to have a debate about this problem itself.

No doubt a few of them will show up soon to tell me how deluded I am, or that I am being wilfully dishonest, as they double down on their conspiracy theories. With links to "evidence" of varying degrees of dubiousness, often the outpourings of their fellow conspiracy theorists, sometimes quoting dodgy science. And recently one of their heroic truth tellers, because she is telling them what they want to hear, is - of all people - Mad Nad, Nadine Dorries - who is also herself seemingly detached from reality and a rather intellectually challenged conspiracy theorist. She too cannot believe that everything she ever believed in is turning out to be a crock of shit without invoking conspiracy theories to explain it

When facts change and assumptions based on them turn out to be wrong, sensible people change their opinions.

Less sensible ones invoke conspiracy theories in order to carry on thinking that they were right all along, and in order to somehow explain all that has gone wrong.

There seems to be a lot of this happening on the right today.

I expect some of them will be along soon to call me an idiot, delusional, someone who is part of their chosen conspiracy against them and the country, an extremist, far this or far that.

But the greatest threat to democracy is people voting on the basis of fake conspiracy theories that have little to do with reality at all. 

This argument might carry more weight if you gave us examples. Then I can acknowledge or refute them, in any case debate them. But it is impossible either to refute or acknowledge your assertion without hard examples.

I did in my OP acknowledge that the left is not immune to conspiracy theorist thinking, citing the example of our suspicion of the deep state and readiness to believe it is behind much which undermines our cause.

However, it seems to me that not just here but elsewhere too, too many on the right are conspiracy theorising themselves into an increasingly obvious disconnect from reality. The need to challenge any perceived failures in the causes they have believed in for decades, rather than have to rethink a lifelong set of ideological assumptions, is fuelling a desire to seek out or think up explanations, which in turn is driving them further from reality.

We saw this in spades under Truss, with her plethora of uncosted tax cuts, mostly targeted at the already better off, which right wingers here greeted with intense enthusiasm and just what the doctor ordered and which was necessary for our economic success. But when the markets reacted badly, the economy tanked, inflation took off and interest rates soared, they could not accept that this proved them wrong. So suddenly they envisaged an unlikely alliance of stock market traders, banks, Remainers, the EU, and a mythical left wing establishment all working together to sabotage what would otherwise have worked wonderfully. Because assumptions that they have emotionally invested in for decades cannot possibly be wrong. Acknowleding that would be the intellectually and morally brave thing to do but most people find that too difficult. So instead they invent conspiracies to explain what went wrong, invoking powerful malignant forces.

This is a well known phenomenon in the field of psychology. The longer we have believed in something, the more strongly we have believed in it, the more emotional investment we have placed in it, the more difficult we find it to accept that we are wrong. To avoid having to accept that something we are so deeply invested in psychologically can be wrong, which would be psychologically painful to us and liable to undermine our self confidence, our brains tend to seek other people and things to blame for what went wrong, in order to avoid having to deconstruct a cherished belief. So we assume the belief is still right and any failure of it when applied must be the fault of bad actors sabotaging it. 

Inventing conspiracy theories in defence of cherished beliefs if they appear to be found wanting is a tendency innate to the human psyche. 

It is therefore a tendency we are all potentially prone to, including we on the left. As someone who has studied psychology and is psychologically aware, I try as much as possible to guard against this in myself, but with how much success is open to dispute.

However it does seem to me that in recent years, the right seems to be experiencing the greatest threats to long cherished beliefs, over climate science, Trussonomics, Brexit, and so on. And an increasing descent away from reality into conspiracy theorising seems to be the outcome. Which is pretty obvious to most of us outside their bubble, but not obvious at all to those of them in it.

The left believe diversity is good.
The left believe that Multiculturalsim is working just fine.
The left struggle to define racism yet are determined it should be eradicated.
The left believe that no one should be offended but are quite prepared to offend, insult belittle denigrate and ignore political opponents.
The left have sold their souls to Islam and believe that will work out well.
 

That's a fringe issue, Trump was coming out with bonkers nonsense like injecting bleach into people whilst he was in the White House.