Alex Jones’s Infowars. As the political philosopher John Gray wrote, “Modern political religions may reject Christianity, but they cannot do without demonology. The Jacobins, the Bolsheviks and the Nazis all believed in vast conspiracies against them, as do radical Islamists today. It is never the flaws of human nature that stand in the way of Utopia. It is the workings of evil forces.”16
Conspiracy theories are everywhere in our culture, and lots of people indulge in them. Ever since President John F. Kennedy (JFK) was shot in 1963, there have been dozens of different conspiracy theories about who shot him and why. Conspiracies have been hatched around Princess Diana’s death. Others claim that the moon landing was a hoax (see chap. 6) or that climate change science is a hoax by the entire scientific community trying to destroy capitalism. Just days after the 9/11 terror attacks, a large number of 9/11 “Truthers” emerged to claim that it was all a conspiracy, an inside job by powerful forces—pick your favorite conspirator here—for unstated motives. Of course, the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy—by nineteen Muslim men who hijacked the planes according to a plan hatched by Al-Qaeda. But this is not what the 9/11 Truthers want to accept. It has to be something bigger and more sinister, usually planned by the Bush administration.
High percentages of Americans (on the order of 25–40%) believe in at least one or more conspiracy theory, and studies have shown that those who believe one conspiracy tend to accept many others. Sometimes they are not even consistent. As William Saletan wrote,
The appeal of these theories—the simplification of complex events to human agency and evil—overrides not just their cumulative implausibility (which, perversely, becomes cumulative plausibility as you buy into the premise) but also, in many cases, their incompatibility. Consider the 2003 survey in which Gallup asked 471 Americans about JFK’s death. Thirty-seven percent said the Mafia was involved, 34 percent said the CIA was involved, 18 percent blamed Vice President Johnson, 15 percent blamed the Soviets, and 15 percent blamed the Cubans. If you’re doing the math, you’ve figured out by now that many respondents named more than one culprit. In fact, 21 percent blamed two conspiring groups or individuals, and 12 percent blamed three. The CIA, the Mafia, the Cubans—somehow, they were all in on the plot.17
Two years ago, psychologists at the University of Kent led by Michael Wood, who blogs at a delightful website on conspiracy psychology, https://conspiracypsychology.com/author/disinfoagent/, escalated the challenge. They offered UK college students five conspiracy theories about Princess Diana: four in which she was deliberately killed and one in which she faked her death. In a second experiment, they brought up two more theories: Osama Bin Laden was still alive (contrary to reports of his death in a US raid earlier that year), and alternatively, he was already dead before the raid. Sure enough, “The more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered,” and “the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive.”18
Conspiracy thinking is strongly self-reinforcing. Polls show that those who accepted the JFK assassination conspiracy were twice as likely to believe that a UFO crashed at Roswell (32% believed, versus 16% for those who don’t accept any other conspiracy theories).19 The people who believed in Roswell UFO stories, in turn, were far more likely to believe that the CIA had distributed crack cocaine, that the government “knowingly allowed” the 9/11 attacks, and that the government added fluoride to our water for sinister reasons.
Psychological studies have shown that conspiracy thinking is all about the need for control and certainty in a random, frightening world where everything seems out of control. Conspiracies are nice simple explanations for scary phenomena that we don’t want to believe are simply due to random events. Conspiracy believers tend to be people who have high anxiety about their lives, their jobs, and their futures and who need someone to blame for their troubles and failures. Various psychological surveys have shown that believers have a very low level of trust in their fellow human beings or human institutions, tend to have a high degree of political cynicism, and believe the worst about other humans. In broader terms, they are people who focus on intention and agency rather than randomness and complexity.
At one time, conspiracy believers were isolated, and conspiracy thinking was treated as a form of paranoia and mental illness. They had little way of reaching each other, getting feedback from like-minded individuals, or finding lots of new conspiracies to read about and believe in. But now that the internet brings any conspiracy theory to you in the touch of a few keys and mouse clicks, they are proliferating at a rate that has never been seen before, because now they can feed on and reinforce each other. For example, a 2007 poll showed that more than 30 percent of Americans thought that “certain elements in the US government knew the [9/11] attacks were coming but consciously let them proceed for various political, military, and economic motives” or that these government elements “actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attacks.”20 Thanks to relentless conspiracy mongering by the media, polls show that 51 percent of Americans think that a conspiracy was behind Kennedy’s assassination; only 25 percent agree with the demonstrated reality that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
One of the worst things about conspiracy theories is the fact they are nearly always airtight; they act like a religion or ideology that refuses to submit to testing and falsification. Every debunking piece of evidence against the conspiracy will be viewed as an attempt to “misinform the public,” and the lack of evidence for it is viewed as a government cover-up. In this sense, conspiracy theorists are very antiscientific, because they have the same closed view of the world that will not accept outside information that doesn’t fit their core beliefs as religions and cults do. Much about conspiracy groups resembles religious cults, including suspicion of the outside world, self-reinforcement with like-minded individuals, refusal to look at anything that does not fit their worldview, and an almost messianic devotion to the idea that they have the only truth and that everyone else is foolish or deceived or part of the conspiracy.
People have a much easier time believing that a huge operation of sinister forces is at work to do something they don’t like rather than accepting the idea that stuff happens. To a conspiracy theorist, the idea that evil forces are ruling the world is much more plausible than the reality that bad things just happen and we don’t really have much control over them. Conspiracy thinking is particularly prevalent among people with a deep hatred or distrust of the government, so it tends to be concentrated on the conservative fringe (as evidenced by Donald Trump and his embrace of a wide range of conspiracies and crazy ideas). There is also a strain in conspiracy thinking among leftists who view Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and so on as more powerful than they really are. We now know that Big Tobacco conspired to suppress antismoking research and that ExxonMobil and some other oil companies conspired to fund climate change deniers and suppress research, but they were not able to hide their conspiracy forever, and the truth came out eventually. As conspiracy thinking also declines slightly with more education, people who know more about how the world actually works tend not to believe in them as much.
So how do we know that the conspiracy believers are wrong and paranoid and that there is nothing really happening? The key flaw with conspiracy thinking is that it assumes a level of competence and secret keeping that has never happened in the history of humanity. People often get the idea from TV and the movies (from shows like The X-Files and hundreds of conspiracy-plotted movies, especially spy flicks) that secret government organizations are really powerful and very good at keeping secrets. But the opposite has been demonstrated over and over again. Watergate was a grand conspiracy, but eventually it was exposed. For fifty years, tobacco companies conspired to keep research about the death toll of tobacco under wraps. But whistle-blowers in the companies leaked their top-secret memos, and eventually they were indicted and brought to court and in front of Congress. Leaked documents have shown that ExxonMobil covered up its own climate change research
