“The society’s goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life and abuses of state power”.
They seemed like good people.
Just a few lines below your quote on Wikipedia there is a possible answer:
During subsequent years, the group was generally vilified by conservative and religious critics who claimed that the Illuminati continued underground and were responsible for the French Revolution.
Elites being afraid of change that would threaten their power. So they make up propaganda to discredit their enemies.
I remember that some discordianists were experimenting with ways to kill off conspiracy theories. What they did was choose some obscure underground organization from the 18th century, create an intentionally silly conspiracy theory about it and sprinkle it randomly into Playboy magazines as well as novels and plays. It had quite unintended consequences as we can observe.
They had to do something after the blatant assassination of a particular president and the assassination of his brother not a year later. Not to mention all the questionable assinations of black civil rights leaders that you’d have to be willfully blind not to tie back to certain political, extra-judicial institutions.
Shortly after was the time people started talking about the illuminate and lizard people. "You don’t believe what you’re told? What do you think the illuminate was in on it? ". Certainly enough idiots out there to buy the hogwash and give the strawman a guise of credibility.
Sounds similar to how the modern flat earth conspiracy theory came to be
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the illuminati of modern pop culture really has nothing to do with the actual group. any hatred people bare towards them is because of urban legends and modern conspiracy theories.
I’ve never met anyone who had opinions about 18th century clubs.
At least informed opinions. In places like Poland the carricatural stereotypes of mason conspiracies are alive and well. This is what you get when your dominant church never left the counterreformation period.
The same reason people hate socialists, communists, social justice advocates, landback/decolonisation proponents, vegans, radical environmentalists, etc etc etc. Propaganda, ignorance, and fear of change no matter how bad the status quo is.
They were capitalist conspirators preparing the way for the capitalist revolutions over the monarchies. Modern society came from such revolutions such as the French and American revolutions. A lot of horror is whitewashed away as well. This culminated with the Paris Commune where the people rightly felt that the above promises of modernity were betrayed by the bourgeoisie, that the proletariat was given the very short end of the stick. Karl Marx was involved with the Paris Commune. His master work Das Capital, a Critique on Capital, spends a great deal of it’s time accounting the horror imposed on the people as they were proletarianized. The volumes are terrifyingly relevant today.
Understand that what you’re referring to above are historically relating to those things with regard to monarchy. Monarchy is a great evil. Understand also that the bourgeoisie who wrote these things along with the declaration of indepence and so on were not altruists and had no intention of living up to their rhetoric. With one side of their mouth they would lambast the abuses of the monarchy, all true; while with the other side of their mouth they would impose their own particular mechanisms of state violence on the working masses to keep them in their place.
