Reply #92: underlying most conspiracy theory is the assumption that one's opponents are motivated by conscious, [View All]

[Douglas Carpenter]

and intentional evil. This is a deeply misguided way of interpreting the world. With the exception of "The Joker" from Batman,
"Mr. Burns" from The Simpson's and "Dick Cheney" from the Bush Administration, very, very, very few people actually think like that.

The vast majority of people from the very left-wing of the Democratic Party to the very right-wing of the Republican Party sincerely believe in their hearts and minds that they are doing the morally right and proper thing. Even Stalinist-Communist and Hitlerian-Nazis believed themselves to be doing the morally right and proper thing.

The trend I notice is that whenever a political movement, whether left or right, is defeated, there is always a natural attempt to explain the defeat. Those who presume that their opponents are intentionally plotting evil and destruction are most vulnerable to this kind of demagoguery.

The Bush Administration is the most incompetent, corrupt and ideologically driven administration at least in the modern history of the United States of America. It a mistake that inevitably leads to a misreading and misinterpretation of events and policy to assign conscious and intentional evil to actions and policies that can quite rationally be explained by the more mundane qualities of incompetence, corruption and ideological rigidity and blindness. Conspiracy theory, whether based in secular or religious notions is essentially a fundamentalist way of thinking.