• TheFriar
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    3 months ago

    Have you ever seen the “gangstalking” people? Those people are mentally ill. Being stupid and gullible and falling for magical thinking isn’t a mental illness. Sure, I guarantee some of the people who love sovcit nonsense have some deficiencies, but I would imagine less than 5% are genuinely mentally ill.

    Social media and the echo chambers and selective information bubbles are a powerful force that I don’t think we’ve fully comprehended the scale of quite yet. Maybe after the world dies a heat death and a new evolutionary step in humanity will figure out a way to plug in all the old laptops and boot up the internet and they’ll be the ones that eventually understand it.

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      Also don’t forget, there are a LOT of humans, and that means there are a lot of people in the bottom 0.01% of intelligence

    • DABDA@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I hate coming across gangstalking people and groups online because it’s just sad to see as an outsider and invokes strong feelings of wanting to be helpful but being unable to. Like you said, they reinforce each other in their bubbles so there’s no way to get a message through that their problem isn’t really what they think it is and they need professional help. And short of somehow magically only allowing helpful people to interact with those thinking they’re being gangstalked (technical and logistical impossibility) it becomes another chance for trolls or other sufferers to just encourage more conspiratorial and paranoid thinking.

    • Bennettiquette@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      i’d wager individuals who suffered a TBI mid-late in life are an over-represented demographic in the sovcit community.

    • WarmSoda
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      3 months ago

      I’m afraid to look up gangstalking, I don’t want all my feeds to suddenly go batshit insane.

      Tldr?

      • TheFriar
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        3 months ago

        It’s basically a delusion that is being spread via the internet to other conspiracy-minded, most likely mentally ill people. These people are convinced that there is an entire group of people that they see every single day that are “stalking” them—basically they think it’s a psyop to get the “victim” to kill themselves or alienate themselves from their loved ones. They think the UPS man, every delivery truck, every car that drives by (why are there so many black cars?!?!), their neighbors, every helicopter that flies by…basically everyone they encounter is just pretending to be normal doing normal stuff, but it’s all a cover to hide that they’re targeting the individual being “gang stalked.”

        It’s a huge delusion that ultimately ends up becoming some kind of self fulfilling prophecy. The people around them come to realize they’re crazy, so they start yelling at them when the “victim” starts filming everything and everyone, screaming in the street that “I know what youre doing!” and stuff like that. They, like sovcits, have secret words they think ends the gangstalking or sends a signal to the “team” to lay off…it’s sad.

        I mean, it’s worth a watch of some of the gangstalking folks’ videos. Search “gangstalking proof” and you’ll see in just a few minutes how deep the delusion is. I mean, it must be debilitating. And horrifying. Like most mental illnesses. But it’s definitely…morbidly entertaining. It’s horrible. But a truly modern phenomenon that should be seen.

        A long time ago, maybe it was from VOX media, I saw a video that traced the origin of most modern conspiracy theories to a major film release. Like, alien encounters to the release of the first major film to focus on it (I want to say close encounters, but that may be a bit later than the one cited in the video), the “masked Illuminati” gatherings to eyes wide shut, and I’d attribute this phenomenon to The Truman Show. It’s interesting, but like I said, morbidly so.

        • WarmSoda
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          3 months ago

          Sounds like legit mental issues. I could see how some idiots looking for “anything better” could latch on to that irregardless of thier mental issues. And then having it spread to other conspiracy theory people.

          That’s too bad.

          • TheFriar
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            3 months ago

            It truly is almost certainly due to mental illness. It’s just super intense paranoia. This all obviously leads inevitably to more standard paranoid delusions like listening devices in your home, someone just out of sight made a noise and disappearing when they turn around, etc.

            The weird part is that this might be the first internet-spread, technically “contagious” mental illness. Because someone ends up watching these videos where these deluded people explain the reason they think what they think, they get scared it’s true, start looking out for it themselves, start, inevitably “noticing” similar occurrences, go down the same path, make videos themselves, and the cycle continues. I mean, it’s gotta be tied somewhat with our internet/social media age where “main character” syndrome tends to ensnare a lot of people. This just takes it down one of the darkest possible paths.

            I’ve had conversations with some of these people, back on Reddit. This person always used to post gangstalking videos “exposing” the programs, and I’ve tried to explain, like, for gangstalking to be real, it would be the most massive undertaking in history. A team of hundreds for one individual, made up of ordinary people getting paid (yes, they think the people are being paid) for this “job.” I said, yknow, if this were the case, everyone would know someone getting paid for gangstalking. We would see ads for positions, we would hear about it from participants as an easy way to make money, etc.

            But, then again, I brought logic to a crazy fight.