Book Review & Analysis: Cracking Jokes by Alan Dundes

Cracking Jokes:

Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and Stereotypes

by Alan Dundes

       Back in the 1980s, teenagers used to tell dead baby jokes. “What’s red and squirms in the corner? A baby playing with a razor blade. What’s green and red and squirms in the corner? The same baby three months later.” We recited these jokes like catechisms. Being able to tell at least one or two of them meant you were part of the club. Sociologically speaking, that probably meant more than the actual jokes themselves. I’m not even sure if anybody thought they were funny. By the time I reached the age of 16 though, telling a dead baby joke would only be met with eye rolls and people telling you your jokes were old. You weren’t cool because you weren’t keeping up with the social trends.

The dead baby jokes were part of a joke cycle, meaning a cluster of jokes centered around a common theme. Other joke cycles are grosser than gross jokes, knock knock jokes, leper jokes, light bulb jokes, and jokes targeted specific ethnic or racial groups. Since these are circulated orally through society and their origins are unknown, joke cycles qualify as being a branch of folklore in sociology, particularly in the category of socio-linguistics. Alan Dundes, once one of America’s most prominent and controversial folklorists, examines offensive joke cycles in the collection of essays called Cracking Jokes.

Dundes approaches his subject matter theoretically through a Freudian psychoanalytic framework. That essentially dates his work and delegitimizes some of his findings from the start. But what this means is that he analyzes the content of jokes in order to understand what they reveal about unconscious processes and what the popularity of these jokes say about the society in which they circulate. I personally don’t reject Freudian thought outright since it does provide a framework and a language for making sense of the content of thought; it depends on what the researcher does with it. The most legitimate idea in this book is how jokes indicate symptoms of neurosis and insecurity through the process of substitution and sublimation, thus helping a folklorist to understand sources of anxiety in any given population Scholars who stick too closely to the Freudian method and accept the theoretical method without question tend to sabotage their own studies though. This is a problem I ran into with Dundes.

In one essay he writes about a joke cycle from the early 1960s centered around elephants. “What’s big and grey and comes in gallons? An elephant.” I have to say most of the jokes Dundes lists aren’t funny. Some of them I didn’t even get. Many of them are sexual in nature though in the way they compare the size of an elephant’s trunk to the size of a penis. Some of them aren’t though. The connection between elephants and sexual inadequacy is easy to see, but Dundes’ conclusions go downhill from there. His contention is that elephants in these jokes are symbols of African-American masculinity, something that represented a threat to white men in America at the time. Aside from the pairing of the trunk and penis, elephants live in the jungle and Black people come from Africa so Black men get paired with elephants (never mind that a large portion of Africa is desert). From there he makes an error in thinking that the link between elephants and Black men is legitimate because this joke cycle circulated at the time the Civil Rights Movement was happening. But that might be an error of linking correlation with causation. His analysis leads into the Oedipus complex where Black men become a stand-in for the father who has to be killed so the white male can possess his mother thereby inheriting the father’s domain. It just degenerates into Freudian psychobabble at that point. In Dundes’ defense, he isn’t trying to encourage racism here; he is trying to diagnose the neurotic symptoms of racist anxieties under the premise that the first step in curing an illness is understanding its pathology. His analytical method just leads to a dead end as far as I can see. He would have benefited more from providing data on the demographics of people telling these jokes and the social groups in which they circulated. Would these elephant jokes mean something different depending on context? Do we know that only white people told these jokes? Would their meaning change if they were told by Black people or some other ethnic group?

In a more successful essay, he analyzes the dead baby joke cycle. After analyzing some of the different reasons why these jokes might have appealed to teens, he arrives at the conclusion that the dead babies symbolize aborted fetuses. This might sound crazy at first but after following the train of logic it makes more sense. Puberty is marked by the onset of child bearing capabilities. Hormones begin telling adolescents to reproduce. However, in the context of modern society, they aren’t psychologically mature enough or financially equipped to raise children. So one consequence of sex for teenagers is unwanted pregnancy. One of the ways of dealing with this is abortion, an issue that became a prominent controversy after the passing of Rose Vs. Wade in the 1970s. So Dundes concludes that dead baby jokes are a social way of relieving anxiety around the problem of unwanted pregnancy.

If I could add my own thoughts to this, I would say that the disgusting images of dead babies in these jokes did not come out of nowhere. I remember anti-abortion activists handing out pamphlets on city streets in the 1980s that had photos of bloody fetuses in toilets and garbage cans. No doubt this shock value was used for propaganda purposes. Of course anybody who knows how abortions are actually performed would recognize this propaganda as nonsense as well as anybody who knows the difference between first, second, and third trimester fetal development. Third trimester abortions are performed less than five times per year and only allowed in cases of extreme danger. But once you’ve seen the horrific images in those pamphlets, you can’t unsee them regardless of what your beliefs about abortion are. Of course there is no technical way to prove that dead baby jokes result from sexual anxiety in teenagers, but at least the connecting thread from the joke to the explanation is clear and plausible.

The rest of the book mostly analyzes offensive jokes revolving around ethnic or sexual stereotypes. Joke cycles about the Holocaust, Polish people, Italian people, gay people, and so on and so forth get covered. Dundes comes up with the amazing insight that ethnic jokes are rooted in anxiety caused by the presence of people who are different from the ones telling the jokes. Well, I guess I knew that already. To build on that, I’d say there is an element of sadism in the telling of sick jokes. One thing I gathered from reading the Marquis de Sade is that when people feel superior to others, they feel like they are justified in doing anything they want to them. Outside of acts of physical violence, one means people have of expressing superiority over others is by offending them through the medium of humor. This might even appeal to ordinary people who aren’t necessarily capable or interested in committing crimes like physical violence to begin with. Other scholars have examined whether or not racist humor is a form of verbal violence.

Sexual jokes are treated by Dundes in a similar way with a similarly underwhelming effect. The cycle of jokes told by women about why cucumbers are better than men are little more than a laundry list of things about men that bother women. A cucumber is better than a man because you don’t get hair stuck in your teeth when you put a cucumber in your mouth. A cucumber doesn’t whine if you ask it to wear a condom. Haha. That’s so funny I forgot to laugh. It doesn’t take a Freudian sociological analysis to explain why this joke would appeal to the people who tell it and not so much to the rest of us. Of more interest would have been a discussion on why sexuality causes the kind of anxiety that needs to be relieved through humor in the first place. Actually, Steven Pinker has done a good job of that already.

Another subject the author overlooks is that of ethnic intra-group joke cycles. For example, when I was in Poland a few years ago I was surprised to find that Polish people were telling some of the same Polish jokes I heard when I was a kid. This isn’t any different than Jeff Foxworthy telling redneck jokes to a redneck audience. “You know you’re a redneck if you go to family reunions to pick up women.” He does address Jewish American Mother and Jewish American Princess jokes which he demonstrates are inextricably linked. These jokes are told in Jewish communities and especially appeal to Jews from second generation immigrant families. Dundes points out that they address anxieties about childbearing and growing up in a culture where family styles of childcare don’t match with the dominant host culture. On a side note, I was surprised to learn that Orthodox Jews tell jokes based on their own stereotypes of Reform and Conservative Jews. Now there’s something I never knew before. Over all though, Dundes doesn’t sufficiently deal with self-abnegating humor which, from what I’ve experienced, is common in Europe and especially the U.K. A stereotype of Americans that many Europeans hold is that we can’t laugh at ourselves because we have no sense of irony. An essay on self-abnegating humor would have made for a good point of contrast.

Of more value than the truisms presented about ethnically offensive jokes analyzed in this book is the taxonomic approach to categorizing types of humor. It should be obvious that there is a difference between story telling jokes and riddles, but observations about motifs and themes, when grouped into categories, work to undermine and neutralize the damage racist jokes can do. Dundes points out that common motifs are stupidity, linguistic miscommunications, and unhygienic habits. The last one makes me wonder if ethnic stereotypes about people being dirty are rooted in theories of eugenics and ethnic hygiene from the early modern era. Note how Hitler said that immigrants were “polluting” the blood of pure Germans or how some Americans tell jokes about Muslims not using toilet paper.

Dundes also rightly points out that many ethnic groups are interchangeable in stereotype jokes. “What’s the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish funeral? There’s one less drunk at the funeral.” (I first heard this joke told by an Irish man when I was in Ireland, by the way.) The slot filled by “Irish” in that joke could be filled with any other ethnic group you choose and the joke would still be the same. Knowing this exemplifies the way in which stereotypes work to create distance between the user of the stereotype and who it is meant to represent.

Another class of joke cycles refers to ethnic characteristics that are less general and refer to specific physical features, linguistic patterns, or cultural traits. Jokes about Jewish or Scottish people being thrifty are commonly used as insults, yet the author points out that there is nothing inherently bad about not spending excessive amounts of money. In fact, in many cases it shows virtuous behavior. People complain about excessive government spending constantly but if a Jewish person doesn’t buy a book for $100 because he can buy the same book at another store for $20 that is a cause for offensive humor and accusations of being cheap. It’s like some people think that person needs to be put down for asserting his self-control, self-restraint, and wise decision making. All this brings Dundes to raise the question of whether ethnic stereotypes arise from cultural patterns in specific ethnic groups or whether they just misrepresent such groups without regard for how they actually are. Dundes leaves this question unanswered.

Alan Dundes is at his best in this book when he doesn’t pursue Freudian cliches too far. Otherwise I feel that too many of these essays do little more than state the obvious. Too much of the time he sticks too closely to the formula of anxiety that needs to be relieved by telling jokes. I didn’t come away from this book feeling like he had provided any great insights. But I did get a chance to see how folkloric studies can work. Joke cycles reveal repetitive patterns that can be aggregated for drawing conclusions about the people who tell them whereas individual jokes that aren’t contained in cycles don’t give enough data to work with. I also think a shortcoming in these studies is that he mostly limits his analysis to the contents of the jokes and doesn’t say enough about who tells them. That social dimension is largely missing and it could have led to more significant insights. I give him credit for having his heart in the right place though when it comes to combating racism.

As for the dead baby jokes, looking back on it now I’m not convinced that the content of the jokes mattered all that much to us. Telling the jokes was like a social ritual that bonded our group of friends together. It worked by creating an in-group/out-group dynamic. The in-group was the teenagers telling the jokes and the out-group was the adults in our lives who we never shared the jokes with. Dead baby jokes were only funny because of their shock value. But they didn’t shock us though we thought they would shock our parents and teachers. It was our secret that bonded us closer together. I’m not convinced we were anxious about unwanted pregnancy. It’s true that we were a bunch of horny teenagers, but we were also too shy and awkward for sex, and far too young. We sure talked about it a lot, but at that age sex was still something that only adults did. But as Freud would have said, jokes make people laugh by making people uncomfortable.

We bonded together socially in our knowledge that our parents would be offended by sick jokes. The 1980s were the era of the latchkey kids. That meant that the cost of living had risen to the point where both parents had to work to support a family. So kids returned home from school to empty houses where they gathered with friends in the absence parental supervision. Working parents worried about what their teenagers might be doing at those times and their biggest fear might be that the kids turn out to be monsters. So dead baby jokes played on those fears since some of the worst crimes imaginable would involve the torture and murder of infants, the most innocent and vulnerable members of the human race. The thought that your kids might be thinking of or doing something of that sort in the absence of parental guidance could be quite distressing. Furhter, it is important that these jokes were not shared with adults because knowing how offensive they were is what made them appealing as secrets worth keeping. If we knew that adults knew these jokes, and actually a lot of them did as I found out later on, the spell would have been broken and they would cease to function as a social bonding ritual. It’s also interesting to note that, as far as I know, none of the kids telling dead baby jokes never turned into sadistic baby murderers so possibly the jokes also functioned by regulating and containing potentially harmful unconscious drives and desires.

After reading Cracking Jokes I’m not sold on the idea that this kind of folkloric research has much value, or at least not in the way it was presented by Alan Dundes. He was obviously a smart man, but these essays didn’t yield any significant insights and were a little too general in their scope and methodologies to be of much value. I still think there is a place for folklore in sociology, but this book just doesn’t convince me of that on its own.

 

Book Review: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

by Milton Rokeach

      It was the late 1980s when a group of my friends gathered in front of a TV set with a couple six packs, a bottle of vodka, and a bag of joints. It was a special occasion. The Sally Jessy Raphael Show was on. It’s not that we had any particular fascination for that kind of trash talk show. It’s just that her guests were a special sort of people and we tenuously knew one of them. He was the cousin of someone we knew from high school and he, along with the other two guests on the show, believed that he was Jesus Christ. What ensued was a shouting match between the three kooks, no doubt encouraged by the shows producers for its entertainment value. We were rolling on the floor with laughter. This was real John Waters kind of stuff. And that friend of ours, with his cousin the nutjob messiah, may never have recovered from this incident. Anytime we ran into him after that episode of of The Sally Jessy Raphel Show, he looked kind of sheepish as we teased him about it. He went on to become a college professor and then died about a decade ago. I guess that means he’s over it by now.

On a slightly more serious note, in the 1950s a psychologist named Milton Rokeach gathered together three inmates at a psychiatric hospital in Michigan. All three believed themselves to be God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost or some sort of combination of the trinity. He wanted to see what would happen when three people who all claimed to be approximately the same incarnation got together in a room to talk shop from a deity’s perspective. He wrote about his experiment in The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

Rokeach starts by introducing the three subjects. Clyde is an elderly Midwesterner who doesn’t have much to say aside from interjections meant to correct the false beliefs of the others. When someone says they are God, he gets angry and shouts at them because he is the one who is really God. Other than that, he mostly keeps to himself. Joseph is a bit smarter. A highly educated French Canadian and devotee of classic literature, he also believes he is God. Furthermore, he also believes the psych ward is a castle and an outpost of the retreating British Empire. He vows to fight in its honor, but often makes requests to be repatriated to the U.K. Aside from his delusions, he is functional on a day to day basis and can read Tolstoy and Flaubert, able to describe them, analyze them, and interpret them with clarity, accuracy, and freedom from delusional perceptual distortions. I actually took a liking to this guy. Then there is Leon, the youngest of the three. He was raised by his mother, a religious fanatic who was probably mentally ill herself. Leon is highly articulate, believes he is married to a yeti, and lives a life saturated in the muck of psychotic delusions. He is confused about his sexuality too and keeps insisting that people call him by names other than his own. Those names change according to what is happening in his life.

Rokeach’s expectation from the start is that, when the three Christs encounter each other, they will break free from their delusions of grandeur and realize they are not Jesus. His intention is to see what happens when the cornerstone of an individual’s identity dissolves and how that affects their beliefs and behavior. This, however, never goes as planned and the three patients persist in believing themselves to be God. In fact, instead of discussing their false identities with each other, they tend to avoid the subject altogether.

Rokeach’s brand of experimental psychology has two major components, one of which is more controversial than the other. The less controversial one involves daily soirees. The three paranoid schizophrenics gather around a table to chain smoke and talk. The more controversial one involves Dr. Rokeach impersonating different people in attempts to influence the patients’ behavior and beliefs. With Leon being the most articulate of the three Christs, the most interesting results come from him. The doctor writes letters to him claiming to be Leon’s wife named Madame Yeti Woman. By impersonating and manipulating Leon’s delusions, the complex, and sometimes confusing, nature of his belief system is revealed, involving an alternate race of yetis, hermaphroditism, first name changing, and ritual masturbation. Leon also begins constructing masks out of colored cellophane, cardboard, and rubber bands which he wears to avoid eye contact when in the presence of a female doctor he is sexually attracted to. Dr. Rokeach gets less spectacular, but significantly revealing results, when he writes letters to Joseph, pretending to be the director of the psychiatric hospital. The intention is to convince Joseph to embark on a writing project. This, along with another experiment in the use of placebo medications, ultimately leads nowhere.

While Rokeach’s attempts at persuading the three Christs to shed their false beliefs ends in failure, he does provide an interesting analysis of the content of their delusions. There are definite patterns as to when and why the delusions come out as well as a logical consistency, maybe even a symbolic role, that the delusions play. These three men suffer from problems of inadequacy, fear of failure, anxiety over social conflicts, and sexual frustration. Leon himself appears to be confused because he is bisexual. Rokceach finds that their delusions are all strategies created to help these men manage the turmoil of their inner conflicts. The difference between them and non-schizophrenics is that they construct false identities and delusional beliefs to avoid facing their problems whereas other people deal with similar issues in ways that are more in line with what is considered normal by society’s standards. Furthermore, these three men have weak and fragile egos that could easily be shattered when confronted with ideas that conflict or threaten their sense of self. Their delusions act as a bulwark against such threats and protect their egos from fracturing whereas people with effectively formed egos are able to withstand the stress of social pressure. This is also why these schizophrenic men spend more time alone than people with more well-adjusted ego formations.

Although this book is dated in its theory and methodology, it is still an interesting read. Rokeach is a talented writer and is highly successful in describing the personalities of Joseph and Leon. This is one of those narratives where the characters are so distinctly drawn that you feel as if you know them from the start. It is a perfect balance without any over- or under-writing and this is mostly accomplished through the use of dialogue. Rokeach, a sharp observer of human behavior and character, could have been a good novelist if he had chosen that path. It is also a great story. Based around a scientific framework, it starts with a proposition for investigation, gathers and describes the found information and data, interprets the data, and leaves us with a deeper understanding of human nature. What I found most important in the end is that Rokeach humanizes his subjects by showing that they struggle with issues that are common to many people. It is just that they depend on alternate ways of handling their problems that are idiosyncratic to the rest of us.

Otherwise, the theory and practice of this study are undoubtedly controversial by today’s standards. Rokeach’s theory of schizophrenia being the result of improper ego formation and psychological adjustment during childhood is ancestral to Freudian thought. I don’t keep up with contemporary practices in the field of psychiatry and therapy, but I do know that psychoanalysis has largely been rejected long ago. The ethics of Rokeach’s methods are questionable too. His intention of shattering the ego of a schizophrenic just to see how it effects their behavior and beliefs could be harmful to the subject and might even lead to permanent psychological damage. Why don’t we just crack somebody’s skull open with a hammer or break a couple ribs just to see what happens? Also, the three Christs are not violent or self-destructive and are actually quite high-functioning for psychologically disordered people. It is probably unethical to even be keeping them locked up in a psychiatric facility when living under care in the wider community would be more beneficial to them. Then there is the issue of impersonating people like wives and hospital directors to manipulate their behavior. I’m not convinced that encouraging delusions is the best way to help schizophrenics manage their lives, especially because there is more emphasis on controlling them than there is on curing them. The authoritarian overtones of the doctor’s practices are a little discomforting. But then again, Rokeach was working with the available theories, ethics, and knowledge that were available to him at the time he did his research so he can’t be entirely blamed for not living up to whatever standards we have in our present day. That is the nature of science and society at large so I’d argue that postmodernists who insist that a literary text be isolated from the author, time, and place in which it was produced are entirely wrong if we are to make a fair judgment about its value and meaning as a written work.

When taken as it is, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is a fascinating story. Despite being dated, it offers a working theory and framework of interpretation and, even if it is not congruent with current ideas, the relation between that framework and the information it explains makes for a neatly packaged story and set of ideas. And even though Rokeach did not get his intended results, he does demonstrate how a lot was learned along the way. In the end, I’m left with some interesting questions though. For example, why is it that so many psychotic or schizophrenic beliefs are expressed through religious delusions and what does this say about the nature of religion? And why are there so many psychological studies of the mentally ill and so few studies of the psychology of psychologists and psychiatrists? Finally, to what extent do we all use systems of belief to protect our egos? If beliefs and truths are separate ontological categories of knowledge, does that mean all beliefs are potentially delusions? How do we sort out delusional beliefs from legitimate beliefs? I don’t have the answers to these questions and I suppose you don’t either. Stay humble. Just because you’ve read Plato or Nietzsche that doesn’t mean you know anything. 

 

Book Review: Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational by Michael Shermer

Conspiracy:

Why the Rational Believe the Irrational

by Michael Shermer

      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 25^th 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.