Capitalist Ideology as Socio-Cultural Trauma

How our individualistic culture makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories

Brief disclaimer

This is a bit of a side-quest from my usual writing. I originally wrote this as a paper for a University rhetoric course.

I have broken it into two parts and made efforts to edit it to make it easier to read, but have left the page numbers from my references for those who might be interested in reading further.

Capitalism, isolation, and loneliness (part one)

Living in a capitalist society sets off a series of related consequences, including social isolation, leading increasingly vulnerable people to become susceptible to disinformation, harmful ideology, and conspiracy theories.

Our necessary separation brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted some of the risks isolation poses to our physical and psychological health, however this has been a growing social issue since the mid-1700s.

As Hannah Arendt concluded more than seventy years ago,

“uprootedness and superfluousness have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution” (p. 475).