The Confusion Around Conspiracies:
Why conspiracy theories are so attractive and what we can learn from them.
First Contact
As a long-term hitchhiker I meet countless people that open their cars and houses to me. These moments of connecting with a stranger, gaining their trust and sharing time with them have been immensely valuable. I had bountiful opportunities to talk about everything under the sun, and these conversations offered glimpses into the experiences people had and the way they perceive this marvelous world.
While I was in Malaysia I met a lovely Argentinian fella in his early 60s that told me how much he had learned during the past half year of traveling.
He asked me: “Why don’t we learn those things in school? They are so basic, so important, why are they trying to hide this?”
I was delighted to hear that he was still making big new discoveries at his age.
Well, until he told me how the earth is flat, gravity is a lie and the moonlight is cold enough to freeze things if you focus it through a magnifying glass. Let’s not forget the Reptilians, the Jews and the Illuminati! And obviously the straightforward 9/11 and global warning hoaxes… He had subscribed to the full package and apparently he had just picked up on the flat earth after being introduced to it by a friend he had made in Australia.
A flat earth doesn’t only implicate a social conspiracy. It conveys that the physical earth is so much different from what you have been taught your whole life. To bet your horses on such a radically different perception of your environment, this new theory needs to explain everything in a more logical and concise way than the theories that are accepted by the majority of the scientific community. Quite a hurdle one would think… But apparently not.
Attraction
So what makes conspiracy theories so attractive?
My personal fascination stems especially from the detailed alternative narratives they put forward. There is a lot of creative thinking involved, which makes them entertaining to say the least. Many seem to share that fascination. But the number of people who actually believe in them seems to be rising rapidly. It might just be that the influence of social media and the ability to easily share your beliefs and connect with each other has helped to spread ideas and inflate their visibility. These self-referential structures amplify what would otherwise widely go unheard. But I think that is only a part of what’s happening.
There are complex social and psychological processes that lie behind this explosion and I want to explore some of them here. I will not dwell in the effort of trying to disprove or prove anything. In the end nothing can be proven with absolute certainty, especially not by writing about it online…
Rather, I want to focus on why some people prefer to believe in simplified answers to difficult questions and why this trend is a real danger to human progress and maybe even the survival of our societies.
I’ve met quite a few people in my life that were susceptible to believing everything BUT the mainstream narrative, and one thing they all had in common was a deep mistrust towards the economic and political elites.
So how come so many people mistrust the crooked government narratives and the educational institutions that teach nothing but lies, and instead trust some random people on the internet or TV that think they have everything figured out?
Well, it’s easy. Governmental institutions are not perfect! Some might even say they are a crime against the freedom of the human spirit. Politicians as well as collective institutions make mistakes, lie, break promises, act shortsighted and in their own interests, etc.
Additionally, many conspiracy theories benefit from the social reflexes of group membership — especially in the social (media) bubbles many of us live in today.
By creating a narrative that outlines the picture of a common adversary, they create a boogeyman that is responsible for basically anything that goes wrong — may it be the Illuminati, the Reptilians, the Jewish high finance or simply the infamous swamp in Washington — us versus them.
So IF you want to find reasons not to trust them there are plenty:
Was 9/11 an inside job? Who could be sure with all those warmongers in the Bush administration? I don’t really believe it but the official narratives can’t be trusted either, as the many Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction clarified. In the end it comes all down to beliefs and you will usually stick with what seems more likely, fits smoothly in existing narratives and sticks with your peers and family — and all that without really knowing anything.
Causation
As might be expected, you will find more adherents of conspiracies on the radical ends of the political spectrum — on the right as well as the left. This is not really surprising, but it is remarkable that those people often share a common view of the problems our current system faces. Both sides criticize globalization as a process that has disrupted the balance of post-war capitalism. The labor market for so-called ‘unskilled labor’ has deteriorated. A process that has created a growing minority of people that feel left behind without a perspective for a better future. Many of them can’t fulfill the demands that society confronts them with — demands to adapt to a changed economic structure and cultural environment. Others simply lost their ability to accept the complex causalities that influence their lives. Struggling coal or steel workers don’t care about explanations regarding international trade movements, the financial industry or environmental regulations. What they want is a job and the support of their governments like in the decades before, when they worked hard, were paid well and were at the center of their communities.
Many of them seem to lack simple lines of identification like nation, class, race, job and family. Those factors used to structure our perception of the world but have become increasingly irrelevant or even frowned upon nowadays. Some are concerned about a state that cares more about the environment than the people. Others are concerned with governments that serve corporations instead of the people.
The economic glue that used to hold together these kinds of communities has moved to China and beyond. And social institutions increasingly lack the ability to keep a balanced access to the wealth of their nations.
At the same time, both sides incorporate people that despise governments for what they are — may it be Libertarians or Anarchists. They believe if the state only left everyone alone they could live exactly the way they wanted to.
A part of the fight of the ‘simple folks’ against the elite ties together with a growing anti-intellectualism — may it be in the spiritually enlightened or the Christian heartlands. A need for the simple truths seems to be the cause behind the aversion against complex explanations. There is a need for experiencing truth and not only thinking about it.
The problem of science is that it usually draws an over-complex picture of the world that has little contact with daily life and leaves little space for certainty. That’s where religious and political dogmatism can give support and reassurance — but also conspiracy theories. The attraction of conspiracy theories lies in their ability to give simple answers and exploit intuitive and experiential logic. A logic that is more suitable for smaller and simpler societies. A logic that ignores the deeper, not-completely understood, causalities that govern our social and physical world.
Resolution
Sure, there are powerful people that make deals behind closed curtains, deceive the public and exploit their power, but they don’t secretly spray chemtrails or teach everybody a false theory of a round earth.
And that’s where a simple question is sometimes already enough:
WHY? Why in the world would the whole scientific community, all governments — even those opposed to one another — go through all the trouble to make you believe in a globe instead of a disk?
The answer will often be along the lines of power and mind control. “They want to confuse us! They want to make us feel tiny and insignificant.”
The Flat Earther puts the earth, and with it us humans, back in the center of the Universe to conciliate their view of the reality with their belief in human supremacy or even god.
It is something I cannot accept as a truth but I can feel empathy for it. We live in a society and universe so infinitely complex and confusing that it is all too easy to feel lost. An emotional need for certainty and truth seems to be part of the human condition.
So let me tell you: I do NOT know the truth regarding any of those topics and even if some of my beliefs are pretty damn solidified I always try to keep a certain plasticity to even the most basic scientific ‘truths’ I believe in. Don’t forget, after all, we all believe in stories and narratives but state them every so often as facts that we have never tested or even questioned until someone comes around and does exactly that. And there is value in that! It is part of the noble scientific endeavor to seek an ultimate truth where none can be found. But critique and questioning should not be used to simply replace one narrative with another. What we need is to embrace uncertainty. To acknowledge that we don’t know and that it’s OK.
Conspiracy theories are just extreme versions that are easy to laugh at, but in the end we are all felons of the same crime. May it be the only true religion we believe in, the correct economic theory or the right political view that the opposition should finally get around to accepting as well.
It is a temptation we have to resist, the belief to have a patent on the truth and the right to make others believe in it as well. I am not saying we should forfeit our beliefs, but during this time of fragmentation of politics and radicalization of discourse, the beauty of the compromise seems to have lost its appeal and still, it seems to be the only way forward…
If anyone made it until here: Thanks for reading!
I probably missed out on a lot of things that are important here. There is only so much I can encompass in a short essay. So let me know what other factors might play a role here. Share your thoughts!
Fred
