I think the problem is dumb conspiracies are always outlandish and real conspiracies tend to be banal. Secret government plot to brainwash millions? False flag attacks? Exciting! Ordinary people trying to avoid responsibility for their actions? Normal. It's way easier to just steal money or cook the books than get the shapeshifting lizards to help you win the election. Even in the case of 9/11, sure, there was a group to profit off of it but in reality it was just the excuse to start a war and make a boat load of cash. The link between Iraq and 9/11 was extremely tenuous at best - it would make sense to hop at any excuse to try and remove Saddam. The real scary thing about government and/or societal institutions isn't that there's a secret force controlling everything. It's that we're just kind of organizing ourselves. Part of it is authority but a lot of it is just a desire to participate.I begin to suspect, all those dumb-conspiracies we make fun of on Reddit and fb, are a ploy to hide the real conspiracy, and teach us to always side with the "official truth"
In fact, there is documented evidence that the CIA will always hide the banal under the outlandish. When Bell was testing the US' first jet fighter, their pilots wore gorilla masks so that any observers not within the circle of trust would have to not only overcome the "I saw a plane flying faster than possible" hurdle, but also the "and it was being flown by a gorilla" hurdle. Project Mogul really was weather balloons with instrumentation to observe Soviet nuclear tests but within two days of one coming down in Roswell, it was little green men. There was a time when more than half of the board members of UFO organizations in the United States were CIA operatives. And once you remove all the previously-classified-but-now-documented U2 and A12 flights from Project Blue Book, all 12,618 "ufos" go away.I think the problem is dumb conspiracies are always outlandish and real conspiracies tend to be banal.