There is always a bull market in conspiracies.Some of the popular investment blogs are active peddlers of conspiracy theories. In fact if you want to quickly become popular in trading blogosphere you should peddle conspiracies.
The conspiracy theories are well known:
- Govt manipulates data
- Govt creates bubble
- Goldman Sachs rules the market
- Plunge Protection Team manipulates the market
- Gold is artificially kept down
If you are one of the conspiracy theorist, your objective anyway is not to trade profitably. You are in the market for getting great satisfaction out of peddling a good conspiracy theories. The emotional satisfaction you get out of that and the nutcase followers you gain is a reward in itself and your primary motivation.
But if you are not interested in conspiracy theory and in profiting from the market then you should understand the dynamics behind conspiracy culture. The Spiked has a interesting article on this culture of conspiracy.
Conspiratorial culture communicates the idea that nothing just happens by accident: somebody is at fault. Fantasies about international terrorist networks, paedophile rings, corporate conspiracies to fool people about an impending environmental disaster and neo-conservative cabals compete with one another to gain public attention. Virtually every misdeed, it seems, is the outcome of a carefully worked-out plot. Conspiratorial culture helps fuel suspicion and mistrust towards public life. It displaces critical engagement with society in favour of a destructive search for the hidden agenda. It distracts from any clarification of genuine differences and helps turn public life into a continuous crusade to unmask the perpetrators of malevolent deeds. The media fuel this attitude by frequently arguing that what is important is not what public figures say but what theirreal agenda is. The media incite the public to look for hidden motives; that normalisation of suspicion and mistrust is the key accomplishment of today’s conspiratorial culture.The rise of conspiratorial thinking expresses the loss of causality and meaning in the contemporary world. History demonstrates that nothing is more frightening than when a community lacks a system of meaning through which it can understand the problems it confronts. In such circumstances, people feel powerless and confused and are sometimes drawn towards a simplistic version of events where everything is black and white or good and evil. What is truly disturbing about the contemporary era is that it is not only the frightened and dispossessed who have internalised this cultural narrative, but also significant sections of mainstream society. Who needs The Protocols or other elaborate conspiracy theories when contemporary culture continually incites people to fear invisible forces? What is needed is not so much the debunking of these fantasies, but the elaboration of positive, future-oriented ideals that help people to understand things and take control of their lives. It is all too easy to condemn the simplistic meanderings of marginalised sects; it is far more difficult to question mainstream prejudices about hidden agendas and to overcome our own predilection to gain meaning through blaming.Related Post
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