I am going to argue that conspiracy theories are inherently unstable.
I have to acknowledge a bias: I need to believe this. I need to believe it because I can’t argue with ALL the idiots – they’re a minority, but even so there are just too many of them.
And they are, in any event, impossible to reason with. With some, there aren’t even any agreed facts; historian Jill Lepore (check out her great podcast The Last Archive) says that the concept of common knowledge has been degraded: people used to argue about the meaning or interpretation of certain facts or events, but that’s no longer possible if they can’t even agree on the facts.
This might have been inevitable. We have achieved so much as a species that no individual can hope to understand it all. That means that even the most intelligent and the most highly educated of us have to hope that people in other fields know what they’re doing. If you’re an aircraft engineer, you hope your cardiac surgeon knows what they are doing, and vice versa.
Nancy L Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, authors of A Lot Of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, go a step further:
‘What we’re seeing today is something different: conspiracy without the theory. Its proponents dispense with evidence and explanation. Their charges take the form of bare assertion: “The election is rigged!” Yet the accusation does not point to any evidence of fraud.’
(As it happens, I think the November 2020 US Presidential election probably WAS rigged. It was rigged in Trump’s favour (or rather in favour of the Republicans) by naked, shameless voter suppression. The Congressional elections were rigged by a combination of voter suppression and decades of largely Republican gerrymandering. And yet Trump still lost. Losing a rigged election must have pissed him off even more than if the fight had been fair.)
So I would love to think that, even if I fail to make any headway at all when presenting a counter-argument to the latest bafflingly moronic piece of nonsense, I could at least be hopeful that the nonsense had a limited life span and would disappear eventually.
I do think so. To be clear: this is not because I think Right Said Fred and David Icke are likely to convert to the Way of Logic. It’s because conspiracy theories have always been with us; some die out quickly; some are more tenacious, but die out slowly; and a very few (like Watergate, like the Iran/Contra scandal) turn out to be true. I’m even going to suggest reasons for this. (I have some caveats too.)
First, a few examples.
In the year 64 CE, the great fire of Rome laid waste to the city. It burned for a week, killing many and leaving many others homeless. Nero was not in Rome when it happened; and though he returned when word of it came to him, conspiracy theories had already sprung up, saying that he had planned the fire, so that he could rebuild Rome according to his own vision.
(Nero’s response was to accuse the Christians, both for the fire and for the rumours, and many were crucified or burned alive.)
Fast forward to the 17th century, and tilt the camera up to focus on England. The Reformation began a couple of centuries of anti-Catholic prejudice, into which conspiracy theories wove themselves. The Gunpowder Plot didn’t help (a real conspiracy perhaps partly inspired by false ones, and serving to give credence to them – aha, you see, the Catholics ARE planning to restore their rule in England!) but most of the theories were malicious nonsense.
The height of conspiratorial hysteria came in 1678 with the Popish Plot – the fanatical, though wonderfully named, Baptists Titus Oates and Israel Tonge fabricated a Jesuit plot to assassinate Charles II. The chaos that developed led to accusations, counter-accusations, murders and executions. Others who had been accused died in prison. At one stage suspicion fell on a Frenchman who had a store of gunpowder; he turned out to be the King’s firework maker. Later, anyone suspected of being a Catholic was ordered to move a minimum of ten miles from London.
Oates’s accusations grew wilder, including a story that assassins intended to shoot the King with a silver bullet, so that the wound would not heal. But the conspiracy theory had grown well beyond Oates. People generated their own stories, of hearing digging near the House of Commons, or rumours of a French invasion in Dorset.
And then the hysteria faded. By 1681 Oates was in prison, convicted of sedition. Legal restrictions placed on Catholics remained until 1829 and the Roman Catholic Relief Act; anti-Catholic public sentiment took longer to fade.
Ask a QAnon proponent what they think of Nero burning Rome, or of the Catholic conspiracy to seize the English crown, and you will be met with a blank look. (It may be hard to distinguish from their usual look.)
Ask what they think of the lesser conspiracy theories of the last century. Did Project Cumulus cause the 1952 Lynmouth flood? Was Marilyn Monroe murdered? Did the MKUltra program actually yield any results, or did the US Army just get a bunch of soldiers high and then give up? Were the Mafia involved in the theft of Shergar? What about the phantom time hypothesis, or its cousin the New Chronology – the idea that history is shorter than we think, and much of it has been made up? (Kasparov is a famous adherent of this view – and he’s a Grand Master, so there must be something in it – right?)
None of these ideas have serious effects on most people’s thinking. Even people who believed them at the time don’t believe them any more.
Even some of the larger conspiracy theories are fading. Who really killed JFK? (Spoiler alert: it was Oswald.) More interestingly, who now obsesses over the theory that sweaty little men in the US government conspired in the assassination? Not many people.
Part of the allure of these fictions to conspiracy theorists is the thrill of secret, even forbidden, knowledge. That’s why they rarely give Watergate a prominent place in their constructions, even though Watergate definitely happened. Indeed, it is because Watergate definitely happened. There’s no secret about it. Where’s the fun in knowing something that everyone knows?
But the secret also has to feel important. Nero, Oates, Shergar – none of them can convincingly bear on life in 2021.
Gradually, even the conspiracy theories of the 21st century will lose their urgency. Does it matter, now, whether Obama was really born in the US? (He was.) Even those who still think it matters will turn their focus to something else in time. They are already finding new things to pretend to know.
Theories that are still relevant include – of course – Covid conspiracies. Was the virus created in a lab? But wait – who remembers people saying that about HIV? Do they still believe it of HIV? You don’t hear people saying it much any more.
Nor is vaccine hesitancy new: doses of the polio vaccine, not properly inactivated, caused thousands of polio infections in 1955. People who had welcomed the prospect of protection from polio began to suspect the vaccine. (There was no conspiracy. The infections were born of a combination of haste, incompetence and greed.)
These examples illustrate, I think, that conspiracy theories lose their hold when their supposed importance is overtaken by events.
Fear is also said to be key – insecure people are more likely to reach for anything that seems to offer security, or sense in senseless times. Conspiracy theories flourish in times of crisis. (And one effect of rolling news, and social media algorithms, is that they make the world appear to be in continuous crisis. You need to keep yourself informed. But you don’t need hourly updates. Turn them off.)
It also struck me that conspiracies share some characteristics with totalitarian regimes, as dissected by Hannah Arendt.
Totalitarian regimes seek to dominate all aspects of existence, like vast cults. They might not start out that way, but that is what they become, by a kind of recursive reinforcement of inward-looking extremism.
Similarly, some (not all) people drawn to conspiracy theories find themselves falling deeper and deeper into what I refuse to call the rabbit hole. (Alice is a classic; and more importantly Lewis Carroll was using absurdity to illustrate logical problems. What people call the rabbit hole is really a labyrinth of infinite depth, in which your logical faculties are stripped away more and more the deeper you go.)
For related reasons, totalitarianism and conspiracy theories cannot tolerate intellectual activity. Conspiracy theorists often refer to themselves as free thinkers – largely free of logic, and commonly free of empathy. The hideous, wearisome irony in the fact that they refer to us unbelievers as ‘sheeple’ is entirely lost on them. (Try this question on them: if you weren’t a free thinker, how would you know?) Actual free thinking should mean objective thinking: thinking that tries to free itself as far as it can from the chains of preconception.
Conspiracy theorists cast off the preconceptions of trust in experts, and forge new chains for themselves in finding apparent patterns in events, like shapes in the clouds.
(GK Chesterton said: ‘The point of having an open mind, like an open mouth, is to close it again on something solid.’ And Umberto Eco in the wonderful Foucault’s Pendulum described the lower reaches of the conspiratorial labyrinth thus: ‘Everything proves everything else’.)
And, importantly, Arendt proposes that totalitarian regimes are unstable for this very reason. Unable to tolerate actual objective thought, they replace actual talented or capable people with people whose only merit is their loyalty to the regime, or at least to someone in the next level up in the regime. An insane bubble sort process thus filters out anyone who is any good at anything until only incompetent sycophants remain. (Reminds me of a couple of governments I know.)
Similarly, a person might be intrigued by conspiracy theories, but there will come a point at which they think: No, I’ve accepted these ideas so far, but the next step is a logical step too far. I would do anything for conspiracy, but I won’t do that. I can buy that the moon landings are fake (my favourite gag about that is that they hired Kubrik to film them, but he insisted on filming on location) but not that the Earth is flat. The deeper into the labyrinth you go, the fewer people will travel with you.
In a terrible irony, loneliness is a predictor of susceptibility to conspiracy theories – as it is for support for totalitarianism – but if you travel too deeply, you will be more alone than before.
Arendt describes the instability in totalitarian regimes as stemming from the top: the autocrat fears and mistrusts his inner circle; they fear and mistrust the circle around them; and so on. And in s similar way, deep in the labyrinth, conspiracy theorists turn on one another and begin to devour each other.
Finally, a simpler point: fear is exhausting. Trying to monitor the news and fit everything into your labyrinthine structure of lies is exhausting, like an infinite game of pseudo-intellectual Jenga. Arguing with your opponents is exhausting (believe me, it’s exhausting for us sheeple too. Although I’m more of a goatle myself). Monitoring your fellow conspirators for theory-purity is exhausting. You just can’t keep doing it forever.
Now the caveats.
First: none of this means that we shouldn’t resist conspiracy theories. It’s just part of a more general idea that it’s important to call out bullshit.
I would suggest, though, that it’s a good idea to pace yourself. Pick your battles. Assume you won’t convince anyone (though you might help spectators resist the lure of the labyrinth). If it’s making you miserable, don’t keep going – you haven’t lost, you’re just temporarily sick of their shit. Persevere if you can. Stay cool. And don’t sink to abuse (although I’m all for winding them up, deadpan).
Second (and you’re probably way ahead of me here): some conspiracy theories have proved dispiritingly durable. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory tropes have endured for centuries. They’re not as bad (in many ways) as they were, but they haven’t gone away either. I don’t have an answer to that other than I think that one will die too eventually; and that, to that end, we just have to keep fighting it, along with the others.
Overall, though, I’m hopeful. The top levels of the labyrinth keep growing, but far below us, the lower levels are collapsing under their own weight.
And it was ever thus.