Do you think the recession was engineered? (157)

Let me try to help you with an analogy that is actually appropriate. If you have been reading your witch hunt thread, that would be helpful.

Conspiracy theories are like witch hunts. People were accused of witchcraft because something happened that people didn't understand, didn't understand how or why it happened. The cultures of that time (and some present day ones apparently) believing in the devil, people being naturally prone to paranoia and fear, and believing that witches existed as cohorts of the devil, when something happened people didn't understand, something bad and possibly frightening, witchcraft was seen as the culprit. It would be the explanation for occurences that were otherwise unexplainable. So people were accused of witchcraft and of engineering the bad, frightening event.

People who were accused of witchcraft could not prove they weren't witches. There was no way to prove they weren't witches because you cannot prove a negative. They couldn't prove they weren't practicing witchcraft; they were guilty until proven innocent and could not prove their innocence because there wasn't any way to prove it. Witches don't exist, we know now, but then they were believed to be real; but how can you prove you are not something that doesn't even exist if people want to believe it exists? So thousands of people were executed for being something we now know never existed.

In a conspiracy theory situation, something happens that people don't understand, something bad, harmful, and frightening. For example, people cannot understand how three buildings collapsed as they did during the 9/11 event. If you look at any conspiracy, it is a situation where people cannot understnd how it could have happened unless there was some sort of covert activity causing it to happen. People do not understand how this world wide recession could have happened,so, as people did ascribing bad events to witchcraft, people today ascribe this type of thing to a conspiracy of individuals with evil intentions. There is no way to prove there is no conspiracy because you cannot prove a negative. However, the people who choose to believe it was a conspiracy don't need proof to believe in the conspiracy because, simply, they believe in conspiracies in the same way people believed in witchcraft: if something bad happens that we don't understand,and we feel helpless in the face of these events and like victims, it must be a conspiracy by some bad, evil entity.

Sure, there were probably old women and even men who were unsavory, back in the days of witchcraft, and maybe they did harmful things to others, but they weren't performing witchcraft. And there weren't covens of witches conspiring against all the good and decent people.

Sure there are people today who conspire to do certain things, but small potatoes in reality. The problem is that people who believe in conspiracy theories today believe in large, complex organizations putting together a conspiracy that is wide ranging and includes many people, and yet all of these people never let on about the conspiracy and there is never any tangible, empirical proof found. It's all spectulation and pointing fingers, just as it was during the witch hunts in the old times.