Anyone who even vaguely follows current events should know that the public trust in government is declining. For good reason, too; with more and more revelations like NSA wiretapping, the Panama Papers, police misconduct, and misinformation about the war in Iraq coming to light, people are completely justified in being skeptical.

There’s an even more worrying trend that’s been happening at the same time though: the dismissal of these very same skeptics as nut job “conspiracy theorists." Despite the changing political climate, we’ve still somehow doubled down on the assumption that anyone who takes issue with the official narrative is a basket case.

When you imagine someone under the conspiracy theorist label, you might think of a jaded societal outcast, hunching over pictures and government documents in some stuffy basement. The walls might be covered with bulletins criss-crossed with webs of red string--the kind of setup that would be right at home in a CSI episode. Chances are, though, that you yourself fit the label. The only requirement is believing that somewhere, in the upper levels of business and government. there are plots, hidden from the public, to create personal gain in violation of morality and the law. If you don’t at least believe that, you probably haven’t been paying much attention.

Like almost any group, the conspiracy theorist collective has had to take responsibility for their crazies. Someone with an evidenced, well-researched theory about institutional foul play is going to be compared to the guy next to him who thinks that the moon landing was staged, or that secret weather machines orchestrate natural disasters. But using extreme examples about the beliefs of a paranoid few ignores the bigger picture, that whistleblowers and Freedom of Information requests continue to prove conspiracy theories true all the time.

Ten years ago, if you had said that there was a concentrated effort to watch you and store of a comprehensive profile of your personality in a government database, you would have been asked if you had just escaped from the mental hospital. If you say it now, the reaction probably won’t be much more than apathy. Government surveillance doesn’t even near the top of insane conspiracies that we know to be fact today, from chemical tests on American citizens to false flag attacks meant to aggravate a public desire for war with certain countries. A quick google on declassified CIA operations, if you haven’t already done it, will be mind blowing.

It’s very hard to go against the grain of society and get away with it, though, which deters many from even trying to vocalize their feelings that something is wrong. You may have been on the receiving end of someone blowing off your opinion as a conspiracy theory, whether or not it even was one. You may have been the one making the accusation. Either way, the shutdown of legitimate discourse will never leave anyone better off, and can even pose a direct threat to democracy itself.

Never be afraid to question authority, even if the ones making you feel afraid are friends or peers. All of the most famous and successful people in history weren’t afraid to subvert the conventional understanding of the world, and almost all of them faced backlash for it. You’ll never get anywhere from either blindly ignoring or accepting new perspectives, but rather, from carefully considering them for yourself.