Paranoia is a survival trait dating back to our ape ancestors.
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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Honestly I think that this isn't in inherent to the modern world, in earlier ages it "they" was probably attributed to gods and what not. "Why does lightning spark fires in the fields": "They (the Gods) are probably angry at our insolence". Fast forward to the present where religion and the supernatural have less hold on human thinking and that type of idea is shifted to a nameless, faceless "they", orchestrating and manipulating events in secret.
For a fun look at this occurrence, read James Tynion's fantastic Department of Truth comic that deals with the truth and popular American conspiracy theories.
When did academic journals just start publishing nonsense? When did conspiracy theories like a shadow cabal of evil people that record the rich and powerful abusing children become obvious reality? When did literally hundreds of government officials state UFOs are real, they're not human, and there's a good chance they're not natural phenomena?
Science only has trust if you can trust those with the means to verify the work, do actually verify the work. The reproducibility crisis in all scientific fields was at a peak before LLMs were on every single phone; now there no such thing as trustworthy peer reviewed research that can be reproduced, even if the money was there to test everything that was published.
Tl;Dr the entire scientific world lost credibility and a whole lot of conspiracies were proven real as more CIA docs got declassified. Anything might be true at this point.
I think it's always been this way, but social media has for sure exacerbated it. People really want to believe there's some big order, some grand control, somebody in charge that all makes sense somewhere somehow.
"They" don't want you to know because its all about power and control is weirdly a lot more palatable than "shit just happens".