Conspiracy Theories

Most people, when faced with someone who talks about conspiracy theories, dismiss them out of hand as a paranoid nut job. I do it myself when I hear people to start talking about the government covering up information about aliens and UFO's. But there's more to it, I think, because paranoia is a type of fear, and to entertain conspiracy theories is kind of scary. Or it can be, if you dig too deep too fast. And so rather than face the possibility of experiencing this kind of fear, it's easier to just say the one speaking is crazy so they can be dismissed and you can get on with your day.
At the same time, some of the issue is about familiarity with the narrative. Since many conspiracy theories aren't widely known, we can just laugh them off because they sound so outlandish to our ears. We laugh off those theories while we go back to munching on popcorn and believing what the nightly news tells us to believe. Because those stories are familiar. We are used to the propaganda that Big media pushes. And through constant repetition we have come to believe those stories ourselves.
But what if everything is not okay? What if something really is wrong with the way the world works? What if, for example, we are accustomed to listening to the news from a particular source and we are accustomed to that set of delusions, so when confronted with someone who is used to being indoctrinated by a competing set of delusions, we don't quite know what they are even talking about. We end up getting into a big tiff, arguing past each other mostly, defending our own delusions in order to attack theirs. This is not a healthy situation, and it just so happens to be the situation in which we find ourselves currently, at least so far as I can tell.
So is what I just said an irrational fear? What makes a fear either rational or irrational? Maybe we should start by looking if there is an actual valid threat, and if the way we have voiced our concerns captures the essence of that threat. For me, the biggest threat we face is a divided culture. The people are turning against each other because of what the boob tube has told them about their opposition.
And for what? Big Media may have its masters and some dark plot to control the minds of the masses. Maybe there's either an additional or alternative reason for this, namely that people tune in to the show that makes them feel justified in whatever forms of bitterness and resentment they already have towards the world, so networks find themselves catering to specific crowds with specific sorts of gripes, and they find that by being sensationalistic in the way they tell their stories it will attract more views, which translates into advertiser dollars. So maybe that's it, just a simple result of economic self-interest.
Maybe the Illuminati is pulling their strings. Who knows? It very well could be that some organization somewhere has figured out how to control us by directing our anger against each other, thereby safeguarding them from the attention we might give them if we had the attention to spare them. But the more we fear each other, the more we ask the government to step in to save us from those awful voters with the opposite political orientation.
Just one more thing I'd like to mention now. While it may be uncomfortable and scary to look at the possibility of conspiracies, you have to think there is at least the possibility of something bad that is actually happening. Unless you look into at least a little bit, how will you know that they are false? But at the same time, we cannot live inside that feeling of fear exclusively, so I do think we should keep such theories at arm's length, until which time they can be verified either true or false.