Perhaps: philosophy is a particularly nebulous concept that in the public sphere has broad associations with 1) radical, or to-the-root, thinking and skepticism that opens the door to unpopular ideas and, by extension, conspiracy theories and 2) spiritual/personal improvement.
These associations are not totally unfounded.
But in the context of social media they are easily weaponized by 1) people disguising insane conspiracies as products of an "open-minded philosophy" and 2) grifters disguising New Age/self-help products as the "one true philosophy."
But in the context of social media they are easily weaponized by 1) people disguising insane conspiracies as products of an "open-minded philosophy" and 2) grifters disguising New Age/self-help products as the "one true philosophy."
The result: people who are at first genuinely interested in a philosophical way of thinking, but don't know how to best utilize mechanisms of knowledge/discourse, get led astray and swept up in the Big Promises offered by the likes of Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, David Icke, etc.
A key factor in this phenomenon is healthy skepticism of elites gone wrong, leading to greatly underrating the knowledge-preserving properties of (albeit flawed) peer review systems and greatly overrating the knowledge-generating properties of "outsiders" & "radical thinkers."
According to this "philosophy" radical contrarianism reigns supreme, epistemically privileging the very thinkers and theories that refuse to ever engage with the cumulative literature on a subject specifically because that literature is "mainstream."
Cherry-picked references gives appearance of airtight systematization when in fact the opposite has occurred. Mainstream, dissenting sources get dismissed for *their* apparent dogma in service of supposedly conspicuously designed narratives.
A fatal blind spot to this approach is in ignoring the spontaneous nature to society's knowledge-preserving mechanisms. Narratives, even systematically incorrect ones, are formed too organically to be "conspicuously designed" by some agenda-having parties.
There *are* agenda-having parties, but they are all competing for the same narrativizing populace. Any explanation for the dominance of particular narratives that doesn't involve some story of bottom-up discourse is going to be insufficient.
