Did you know that the September 11 hijackers were given visas upon arrival by high level CIA agents? And nobody knows where Robert F. Kennedy was on the day John F. Kennedy got shot. Hilary Clinton uses email to send coded messages about trafficking children through a pizzeria in Washington D.C. The moon landing was a hoax. Global warming is a hoax. The Jews are using space lasers to cause global warming to turn the public against the oil companies. Osama bin Laden was not a real person; he was an actor who lives in Miami. The airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11 were a hologram. Bigfoot is a man who escaped from the CIA’s MKUltra mind control program and the authorities are suppressing the truth by telling us he is only a legend. Princess Di was assassinated. Elvis Presley is still alive; people have seen him hitchhiking and if you rearrange the letters of his name it spells “lives”.
Sooner or later we all hear ideas like these and most of us roll our eyes and think ”How could anybody be stupid enough to believe this nonsense? They must be mentally ill.” Suppose somebody tells you that people who believe in conspiracy theories are neighter stupid nor insane and suppose that person is also a scientist and journalist with a background in psychology. The conspiracy theorists would invariably say that he is one of THEM and is trying to conceal the actual truth that the secret cabal that runs the world doesn’t want you to know. The rationalists, however, would would want to hear how he explains the psychology of conspiracy theorists and that is what we get in Michael Shermer’s Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.
There is a difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Conspiracies involve two or more people plotting to use deceit or dishonesty for a specific purpose which mostly involves making money or forcing some kind of political change. Shermer rightly points out that conspiracies are happening all the time and all around us. Two men making plans to rob a bank are conspiracists. It was a conspiracy when Donald Trump’s supporters spread disinformation to convince people that the 2020 election was stolen. A conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is a story told to explain inconsistencies or in real events. People make connections between things that aren’t connected or they fill in information gaps with fantasies. Sometimes contradictory accounts of events cause speculation that the official story as told by the media is a deception meant to suppress what is really going on. To be honest, there really are times when the media does that, sometimes it’s deliberate and sometimes it isn’t.
Michael Shermer doesn’t save the best for last. The most important and interesting part of the book where he examines the reasons why people believe in conspiracy theories is at the front. He draws on social and evolutionary psychology as well as the scientific method to make his case. Conspiracy theories are a form of backwards rationalization. The scientific method demands that we gather evidence and use it to draw a conclusion that explains the evidence. That conclusion is then subject to tests of veracity by other scientists. It isn’t a perfect system but it is the best we’ve got at this time. Conspiracy theorists start with a claim and then seek out or fabricated evidence to prove it. If the evidence doesn’t support the claim or legitimate counter-evidence is provided, the conspiracy theorists don’t abandon the claim or adjust it to fit their evidence as they should. Instead they defend the claim and seek out more evidence to support it. No matter how many times they get disproven they will never abandon the faulty claim.
Shermer points out that the human mind did not evolve to perceive reality and instead evolved for survival in a potentially hostile environment. This means our ability to rationalize is intact, but it is inaccurate and distorted. It is like saying a car with a damaged engine is still a car and it is a car that drives but it doesn’t drive as well as it should. Conspiracy theories are a form of rationality, but they are rational in a way that maximizes our fight or flight response rather than giving us a clear perception of reality. We don’t live in the jungle anymore and we don’t need those survival instincts like we once did. Learning to think scientifically, however, does not guarantee that we won’t draw false conclusions or believe in things that aren’t true, but it does increase our chances of reaching realistic conclusions.
Shermer outlines three main reasons people believe in conspiracy theories in the most interesting section of this book. One has to do with tribalism and group identity. When people think of belonging to a group as more important than individualism or truth, they tend to say they believe in things they don’t really believe. A lot of MAGA supporters don’t actually believe that the election in 2020 was stolen, but they say they do because they fear being ostracized by their group. Likewise, a lot of Nazis in Weimar, Germany did not believe the Jews were part of a plot to conquer the world, but they agreed to it because they valued membership in the Nazi party more than they valued truth. There is an overwhelming amount of sociological data that supports this thesis epecially regarding religious or political affiliation.
Another further problem is proxy conspiracy theories. A person who doesn’t trust the government is more likely to believe that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, Are 51 is secretly hiding UFOs, or that the Bush administrated orchestrated the September 11 terrorist attacks. The conspiracy theory acts as a localized substitute for the broad belief that the government is deceitful and can’t be trusted. Confirmation bias plays a large role in this error of rationality, especially since a person who believes one conspiracy theory is more likely to believe other conspiracy theories, specifically the ones that pertain to their particular preoccupations. Of course, most people would agree that our government is deceitful and corrupt but most of these same people are not conspiracy theorists. But what this proves is that most people have the potential to fall into the rabbit hole of irrational thinking. In fact even the most rational and logical among us probably already have at some point in their lives. No one is immune from believing in conspiracy theories.
Yet another explanation for conspiracy theories comes from evolutionary psychology in the form of constructive paranoia. During early periods of evolution, the human mind adapted to be overly cautious about encountering danger. It was better to be paranoid by mistakenly thinking a boulder was a grizzly bear than to not be paranoid and think a grizzly bear is a boulder. Running away from a boulder is harmless while running away from a bear can save your life so it better to err on the side of caution. In the modern world, people believe chemtrails are being used to brainwash us, black helicopters are spying on us, vaccines are being used to inject tracking devices into our bodies, and communists are poisoning our drinking water with fluoride. All of these theories are demonstrably false. Besides, why use black helicopters to spy on people when we have the internet that does a more efficient job at a much lower cost? Data mining isn’t even kept secret; tech companies openly admit to surveilling us. But the issue here is that conspiracy theories can acts as a defense against perceived dangers whether those dangers are real or fantasy. We live in a world full of dangers and your average person can’t always tell which ones are true existential threats. That is why people become paranoid over things like immigrants, unfamiliar religions, or new technologies.
Other topics covered in this book are the personality types of conspiracy theorists (usually people who feel alienated from the power structure), the history of conspiracy theories, the history of real conspiracies, and how to tell the difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. One thing to remember here is that the more people who are involved in a conspiracy, the less likely it is to be successful and likewise the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is the less likely it is to be true. Occam’s Razor is one of the greatest tools we have for the evaluation of reality. Furthermore, humans are story tellers and we use narratives to make sense of the world. Science and rationality are complex, abstract, and boring for most people so they fall back on the default mentality of story telling to make sense of things. If an explanation sounds like a mythology, a fairy tale, or a Hollywood movie, it is probably a conspiracy theory and not true. I would go as far as to say that conspiracy theories are urban legends, a modern form of mythology or folklore. People once used the invisible world of supernatural creatures to explain the workings of a world they didn’t understand; now people invent stories about the people in power, working secretly behind the scenes, for the same purpose. Religious people may be more susceptible to conspiracy theories than the rest of us. Anomalies get explained, confusions get cleared up, and that is done in a way that obscures reality and truth or ignores it completely.
As stated earlier, the initial chapters are the most interesting and useful. The case studies and histories are also worth reading. My only problem with the early chapters is that if you are familiar with Michael Shermer through his podcasts, columns in Scientific American, his Ted Talks and TV appearances, or his work as editor in chief of Skeptic magazine, there isn’t anything new to be found here. Otherwise the chapter on how to talk to conspiracy theorists is weak. It reads like the kind of advice you find in pop psychology self-help books like How to Win Friends and Influence People and doesn’t actually offer any helpful advice. I tend to avoid talking to conspiracy theorists anyways because it always ends up being a waste of mental energy. And while I can accept Shermer’s claim that conspiracy theorists are sane and rational people, the idea does have its limitations. When I hear from people that believe the world’s events are controlled by the Illuminati, the Zionist Occupied Government, the New World Order, or the Bilderberg Group who are actually shape shifting lizards from outer space or that the deceased John F. Kennedy Jr. will appear on stage at a Rolling Stones concert and announce that Donald Trump has been secretly reinstated as president according to a secret clause in the 25th amendment to the Constitution, I have to wonder if the limits of sanity and rationality have been crossed. Who would be stupid enough to believe these things? But as a book, it is well laid out and organized. It is clear in its claims and supporting evidence and works as a solid, comprehensive guide to the subject matter. As such, it’s probably better for someone who is new to this field of study since it is so accessible to the general readier.
Conspiracy is a good book and it definitely needs to be more widely read, especially in this day and age when the internet is being used to spread disinformation at an alarming rate. And for those who think that conspiracy theories are harmless, think again. A tradition of anti-Semitism has led to mass murders all throughout Western history. The Great Replacement Theory resulted in the riot in Charlottesville and a mass shooting at a synagogue in New Zealand. Pizza Gate led to a man shooting up a pizzeria in Washington D.C. because he thought there were children imprisoned in the basement. Donald Trump’s Great Lie resulted in an attempted coup in the Capitol to overturn a legitimate election. So many conspiracy theories have resulted in violence and in some cases extreme acts of mass murder such as the Holocaust during World War II. Hannah Arendt has said that conspiracy theories are a necessary condition for totalitarian governments to thrive. You might think it’s harmless to believe that Elvis is till alive or that UFOs are real, but if you get polio because you refused a vaccine on the grounds that vaccines are being used to brainwash and control the population, you might stop and wonder where you went wrong.
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