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Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories [1]

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Date: 2022-12-26

Flax in the snow

For years I've been trying to puzzle out how we got here: How can so many people believe conspiracy theories that hold that Hillary Clinton runs a child trafficking ring from the non-existent basement of an everyday pizza parlor, that Bill Gates is injecting us with mind control chips, that Joe Biden is an alien lizard in disguise? How are there so many voters who are certain that Democrats are satanic pedophiles, and that it's better to elect an uneducated crackpot than anyone with a “D” by their name to run our country?

I see several forces coming together in coincidental fashion. 1) Some basic features of human psychology. 2) Some good scary movies. 3) Social media. 4) The embers of the civil war still glowing inside American culture.

First, psychology. I see two possible psychological motivations at the root of the conspiracy movement. First, a sort of boredom. Many Americans lead dull, average lives. They hunger to be somebody even though they don't realistically see how they could be. On the other hand, many Americans feel insecure about themselves in everyday life. Adults feel like they're not real grownups but kids playing the role. Men sometimes feel like they haven't really achieved the manliness that they ought. People who graduated school with big dreams find years later that they're only average. In either case there's an underlying dissatisfaction with their position in life.

The second factor is dystopian movies and other fiction. Dystopian fiction holds a particular attraction to the would-be hero in us all. In a dystopian plot, an overpowering evil force sets about to ruin the world as we know it and to kill or enslave us all. Some plain, average person who lacks political power, wealth, education, and the technical capabilities of the evil force has one thing: the plebeian street smarts to see through their hidden plot. The everyday hero takes on a nearly impossible battle, unmasks the evil force, and saves the day, enlightening the sheep-like masses who had gone along with the plot all unawares. We'd like to think that, hey, that could be me! I'm an average Joe with hero tendencies!

But movies aren't real. So add a third factor to the situation: social media. Suppose the downtrodden movie fan talks to a neighbor about how it's not completely, totally impossible that a science fiction-level evil controls our world so well that we don't even know it. The neighbor says, “Y'know, I saw that movie too! Could be!” Multiply the neighbor by hundreds and thousands in social media. Someone says, “What if it was really true that Hillary Clinton...Bill Gates...Joe Biden...” and it echoes through messages like a kids' game of telephone. “Hey someone thinks maybe Clinton..” “I heard that Bill Gates...” “Did you know there’s this guy who says there's proof that Joe Biden...?” And so people who have always felt that they're nobodies can enjoy the glow of feeling like they're the ones with the street smarts to see the secret truth. They've got smart friends, too, and that feels even better.

How anyone could possibly deny the evidence of climate change is a question that pales in the face of how anyone could possibly believe that covid vaccine is really mind-control chips. The whole power of that belief hinges on a key plot feature of good dystopian fiction: nearly all of the innocent people in the world are cooperating with the force of evil because they've been duped. Only the hero sees the hidden horror unfolding. What if there really were lizards from a hugely advanced culture on another planet? They could make flawless Joe Biden masks, couldn't they? (Of course they could. Raise your hand if you were captivated by the dystopian miniseries “V” when you were a kid!) If you didn't know much about technology, you couldn’t be absolutely sure that Bill Gates hadn't funded the invention of a mind control chip so small that it fit through a vaccine syringe. Unlikely as that seems, it begins to look true when not just one person but “everybody” in social media is saying that it's actually so. No wonder that “Everybody says” is the authority that Trump himself refers to most often. Conspiracy theorists love him.

But conspiracy theorism today is more than crackpot stories; it's a dangerous political force. It seems to have tapped into the simmering belligerence left over from the civil war. Parts of our culture have long cherished a belief that there’s some sort of threat posed by Black Americans. The Civil War tales haven't been enough to keep that fire burning so the idea of the threat has been expanded to include Muslims, immigrants, feminists, LGBTQ+, teachers, librarians, Antifa... a whole crowd of potential enemies whose amorphous threat makes it necessary always to keep one's powder dry. Politically, the idea has focused on Democrats who either support those groups or are largely supported by them. The average Democrat is said to be better educated than the average Republican and they tend to take the science side in science-vs-religion debates. So it’s not a big step to imagine that Democrats might well have the know-how to hide how they, for example, secretly suck life-extending juices out of children.

In reality Democrats in the halls of Congress are actually unlikely to be significantly better educated on the whole than their Republican counterparts, or at least, they were not until the conspiracy-backed election of folks like Boebert and Greene. But Republicans play down the elitism of their own power players to win the conservative base's votes. Painting Democrats as immoral Harvard elites who can't understand hard working, patriotic, Christian Americans, while Republicans are really their kind of folks, became easy with the Trump presidency. While he's as financially elite as can be, he's mentally lazy. He speaks in the same pseudo-heroic, belligerent tone as his base. He poses as a sort of underdog held back by the elites. He uses “everybody says” to prove his points, pleasing the base so much as to make himself useful to the more thoughtful members of the party.

So there you have it: frustrated average Joes supplied with fantasy plots that help them imagine that they're heroes, helped along by social media to imagine that the fantasies are true. They find themselves part of a friendly brotherhood of like minded would-be heroes, many of whom are fired up to answer the call and prove that they really are heroes. Add the second amendment, some military-type costuming from Amazon, and a word from Trump and some of these heroes-in-their-own-minds plan to kidnap the governor of Michigan, fight a heroic battle on the capitol steps, chase innocent people suspected of being Antifa, and the like. A few are awakened from this fever dream by a judge but some carry their conspiracy theories even into the courtroom. Less energetic supporters stay home spreading the word and voting their fantasy driven consciences in such numbers that a talented and principled man like Reverend Warnock can only barely edge out a Herschel Walker.

There’s still a question that bothers me, though, and I would ask it of anyone who has read this far. How can reason be injected into this situation? People in DKos often say, “How can they look at the facts and still believe this nonsense?” But if powerfully devious evil can hide all the evidence of its existence, then the very absence of any evidence is what conspiracists can use to “prove” their point. (Just ask Mike Lindell.) The left can quote verifiable facts until the cows come home and it only proves that they’re in cahoots with the evil elite.

How then can reasoning people communicate with the conspiracy-minded?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/26/2143933/-Why-People-Believe-Conspiracy-Theories

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