Populism and Conspiracy Theories explained?

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/new-research-suggests-populism-and-conspiracy-mentality-are-both-rooted-in-a-fundamental-disposition-of-distrust/ar-AA192jFT?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=9939070d861b4d1093121e43be268e92&ei=9

Unlike those deranged populists and conspiracy theorists, good and healthy people trust their governments implicitly and know in their hearts and minds that our wealthy overlords do only what is best for us.

No, I would say that what's "good and healthy" is neither the extreme of trusting governments implicitly and believing "that our wealthy overlords do only what is best for us" nor the extreme of being prone to belief in conspiracy theories.

Personally I suspect that a proneness to belief in conspiracy theories stems from a lack of awareness of how large organizations work and the various ways they all-too-often fail to work.

To anyone who has ever worked for even a medium-sized corporation, it should be obvious that things can go wrong for many different kinds of reasons other than just malignant conspiracies. So, while malignant conspiracies do happen, they usually shouldn't be the first conclusion one jumps to as an explanation of why things are going wrong.

Additionally I think it's important to distinguish two different kinds of "conspiracy theories":

1) Specific accusations of wrongdoing by the government or by other powerful entities. These are sometimes true. The question is whether a specific accusation is realistic or has sufficient evidence for it. Unrealistic accusations may reflect ignorance of how things actually work (or fail to work).

2) Grand conspiracy ideology: Belief in a centuries-old or millennia-old hidden elite religious cult that has shaped all or most major world events for its own longterm malignant purposes and regularly practices secret traditional rituals involving human sacrifice, child sex abuse, child torture, etc. The alleged cult is often, though not always, identified with unpopular religious minorities such as Jews, neo-Pagans, occultists, and Satanists.

Trusting the government:
Trusting the random crackpots and scammers that make up the conspiracy theory community:

It can mostly be explained by people trying to assert control over something they have no influence over. Add the internet being only one generational cohort old, the only recently ended Cold War and voila, educated, relatively informed populations have more than a few delusional beliefs.