The first constant I want to talk about is family education. Independently from theactual way of family organization, an important characteristic of familyeducation is the tendency – thus not necessarily the fulfilment – of parents(or greater family) to educate their children with a certain effort for justice. We want to be good parents and, in our view, thisusually means to be consequent, thatis, to reward good action and to condemn injustice.
Good parents, this is auniversal phenomenon of civilized society, want to keep their children awayfrom the evils of this world. Thereby, in a process of conditioning and usuallycompletely unintended and unnoticed, we inflict on our children a false beliefabout this world, the so called JustWorld Belief. While psychologists like Lerner (1980) emphasize thestabilizing nature of the Just World Belief for the individual, I am of theopinion that it is related to early development psychology, more precisely tothe above mentioned universal tendency which becomes more prevalent in moreindustrialized societies.
The Just World Belief leads to a conflict as humansapproach the period of adolescence, because very apparently, there is a lot ofinjustice in this world. The greater influence of mass media whose primary task it is to report the unusual, rather than the ordinary, reinforces that impression.The result is a faith crisis.Believers in a just world need therefore models to reconcile their own viewwith reality. So we can either postpone justice, as many religions do (referring,for example, to a Judgment Day), we can attribute injustice to ourselves(taboos regarding sexuality fulfil that purpose) – or we create conspiracy theories about one certaingroup of beings that are not only extremely evil, but equally have a very greatpower. While in earlier times this could be the devil and his demons, this termseems increasingly irrational to modern man though secularization, and so he finds other groups, such as Freemasons orJews. Conspiracy theory, in this context, is a coping strategy against theconflict between the belief in the just world and the suffering we see aroundus.
A second constantof modern human civilization is capitalism.Instead of reflecting on what the capitalis – which was elaborated before by people who are much more competent in thefield of economics than me – I want to emphasize the process by whichcapitalist thought is imprinted into our minds by socialization. In modernsociety, we have no chance of interacting with society, except though working,earning and consuming. The constant repetition of the whole process conditions us, not less than the realityof parental education described above.
It results in faith in the equivalenceof money, labour and goods and also in identitythrough social class. Both can, however, be radically questioned in times of financial crisis. The resulting faithand identity crisis is another fundamental motivator for people to seek refugein conspiracy theory.
