I've struggled to understand people who subscribe to conspiracy theories, and the best I can come up with is that they are smart enough to connect a bunch of facts and organize them into a grand conspiracy theory, but not self-aware enough to understand what they are doing. I remember back in the early 1970s, when I was very young, I listened to an hour long radio show that had as its premise that Paul McCartney was dead and it was being covered up. At the end of that show, I was entirely convinced that Paul was actually dead. In the subsequent days and weeks, I came to understand what had happened, and I learned a lesson from it. But it seems like there are a lot of people out there who never come to an understanding about how they are misleading themselves. I chalk it up to a person having a lot of brains, but a total lack of self awareness.

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