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There is a vaguely leftist idea that power brokers (political and financial) cunningly manipulate us through mass media and now social media, imposing a simplified reality that enables them to deceive and control us, and the world is incomprehensible without this knowledge.
On the one hand, duh, that people with power attempt to manipulate society is a banal and obvious observation, which has unfortunately been elevated to the level of Illuminati-esque conspiracy theory and almost "Matrix" level magical woo by confusing reality with the Internet.
The world is a complex and sometimes overwhelming place, and people instinctively withdraw from nuance to cope with the confusion and anxiety it produces, especially when forced to process information they don't like, and political manipulators like to take advantage of that.
But it's the level of conspiracy theory I object to on the grounds that a) power brokers have no secret knowledge and are pretty crap at manipulating people and b) people's motivations are actually quite simple, concrete, and usually banal if you simply bother to investigate.
The tendency of the left and the right to invent world-spanning conspiracies and to ascribe almost magical powers to them is really quite exhausting.
Everything happening in the United States, for example, is entirely comprehensible in the context of its own history; it's just that most of us aren't properly educated about that history, and many don't want to be because they'd rather cling to white supremacist mythology.
