The Seduction of the Conspiracy Theory

There has been a spate of attacks on cell phone towers due to a coronavirus conspiracy theory. Engineers have been attacked verbally and physically, one stabbed, one falling ill with coronavirus after being spat at. What is causing this irrational behaviour?

These are not normal times, with our lives disrupted in a way that hasn’t been seen since the upheavals of the second world war. However, there are a few differences between our time and that one. Although a scan of British newspapers of the 1930s shows that Mr Hitler enjoyed quite a bit of praise before the war, once it has started, we knew who the enemy was. That provided a clear explanation for the disruption to ordinary life experienced here in the UK and many other countries. What we are experiencing now seems to have no clear origin, no obvious enemy to blame. A sense of chaos is all that is needed to create the fertile soil for the conspiracy theory.

No doubt the passage of time has glossed the experience of the 1930s and made it feel far more black and white than it truly was. Yet we know that with invasions of other countries and the stories that spread of Nazi atrocities, we were facing a genuine existential threat. Yet even before the war began there was a sense of chaos. The first world war was a genuine shock, compounded by the Spanish flu. Add to that economic recession and depression, chaos was rising. Into that fertile ground was planted the early example of the conspiracy theory- ’The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.

The first conspiracy theory of the 20th century

The Protocols is a work of fiction that describes a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Purportedly claiming to report minutes of meetings of Jewish leaders. These minutes contain plans to manipulate the economy, control the media and foster religious conflict. The origins of the Protocols appear in a 1903 publication in Russia, but their reproduction by Henry Ford’s newspaper in the 1920s ensured its distribution to a wider readership.

Debunking the Protocols came soon after, with the London Times exposing them as a work of ‘clumsy plagiarism’. They were cobbled together from an 1864 work of political satire from France, ‘Maurice Joly’s Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu’. It also had copied elements from a Prussian novel, Hermann Goedsche’s Biarritz (1868). And yet this piece of conspiracy fiction is still disseminated around the internet to this day.

The Protocols’ creation in a pre-revolution Russia is no surprise – it was a country descending into chaos. Its reinvigoration in 1930s Germany was also no surprise. Hitler was dragging Germany out of its post-Great War malaise and he needed a threat and a focus for fear. If you want a populist method of bringing the masses together and pulling in the same direction, then having an external threat, real or imagined is a useful tool. To create that sense of threat, conspiracy theories provide the perfect vehicle. For Nazi Germany, it was the Jews (supplemented by communists, non-Aryans, the disabled, homosexuals and eventually anyone who disagreed in any way). For the UK, it was Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party.

The new millenium and new chaos

Fast forward the best part of a century and where have we got to? We can chart a decline from perceived order into chaos starting with the global financial crash of 2008. Of course, the reasons can be charted back much further, but I am only talking about public perception. We suddenly experienced a downturn in the economy. There was less money around. Many in the USA were left bankrupt and homeless. People feared for their savings and their jobs. Banks collapsed; others were bailed out at taxpayers’ expense. What had previously appeared so solid was revealing its true nature. Like an old car held together with body filler hidden by new paint, the global financial system revealed itself to be rotten to the core. Its appearance of sanity was maintained by symbols of wealth and success, its priapic edifices proudly standing in every city from New York to Hong Kong to Moscow. So-called credit agencies, who delivered knowledgeable verdicts on financial security, gave their stamp of approval to bonds that would sink the system. And the car fell apart.

What is more, only one banker was to face any kind of prosecution for this global misery. The perpetrators are seemingly untouchable. As the people got poorer, they paid more attention to the charts that demonstrated how wealth was channelling into fewer and fewer hands. The disparity between the rich and the poor was growing fast. There was starting to be an ‘us and them’. Just as the starving poor of 18^th century France must have gazed with hungry and resentful eyes upon the chateaux of the aristocracy. Without accountability, without explaining to people why this happened and what caused it, people will begin to feel exploited. Without knowing who to hold accountable, there is a vacancy for conspiracy.

Confidence in the global systems was in decline. We began to doubt the ability of our governments to tackle these problems or even their willingness to. In the UK we entered our period of austerity and our public services were slowly run into the ground. The European parliament remained distant and unrelatable. The American poor felt forgotten and ignored. In the UK we can add two extremely divisive events – an independence referendum for Scotland and the Brexit referendum. Great leadership unites, but the hunt for power divides.

When two tribes go to war

The problem with referenda is their binary nature. It automatically creates two opposing tribes. There is no nuance or middle ground. One could also argue that US politics is essentially a referendum each election, as they have a two-party system. We used to complain in the 1990s that you could hardly slide a cigarette paper between the political parties. Although this is not entirely true, it is demonstrative of the fact that politics was a scrap for the middle ground.

By 2001 the UK saw its lowest turnout for a general election since 1918 at 59.4%. There was political apathy. By the time of the Brexit referendum, there were 72.2% of us turning out to vote.  On the face of it, political engagement is a good thing. Yet taken as a whole, with growing social division, lack of trust in the political classes, a sense of insecurity with the systems that protect us, the increase in engagement also represents growing fear. And all of these narratives are fuelled by a global engagement with new forms of media – social media.

In 2010 there were 650 tweets per second In 2020 that is now 6000. People watch 2 billion videos a day on twitter. Facebook started in 2004 and now have 2.5 billion users (there are 7 billion people on the planet). This rise in social media is a really important factor in the psychology of the conspiracy theory.

Traditionally we would have consumed our news from television, radio and newspapers. The people who worked on the news in these outlets were trained journalists who understood the need to check and cite sources, cross-check facts and to defend a controversial position with corroborating evidence. There is a discipline in assessing information and establishing facts. Even if they were not exactly objective, we would have a reasonable idea of their bias, what their agenda might have been. We knew which news outlets were conservative and which were left-wing. If they genuinely committed outrages, then there are official bodies that could sanction them and order retractions. It was not perfect, but there was a system. By contrast, social media is lawless and ungovernable.

“Every time a newspaper dies, even a bad one, the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism…” – Richard Kluger

Posts on social media carry an equal weight. No journalistic qualifications are required. You do not even have to have a real name or picture. There are plenty of self-confessed fake news writers, who make a living from creating fictional news designed to produce emotional reactions. As the writing of individuals sitting in dark basements in their underpants began to carry as much weight as the work of teams of investigative journalists, the inevitable decline in traditional news began. Newspapers could do less and less real journalistic work. Journalism is like a man crossing the desert while social media keeps pouring tequila into his water bottle. Even if they make it across the desert and journalism survives, their messages still have to compete with the sea of ill-informed opinion and malicious fiction writers.

“Just because it’s trending, doesn’t mean it’s true” – Martin Schenk

The effect of this loss of specialism, or loss of respect for professional discipline, is also an increasing suspicion of every news item that a person reads. Unable to discern between the trustworthy and the untrustworthy, people view all media with equal suspicion. Whether a piece of news has been thoroughly researched or just dashed off after a couple of beers, equal suspicion applies. The burden of discernment has now fallen on the reader rather than the publisher. And this fuels the increasing sense of chaos in the general public. What do we believe?

Social media also provides the platform for malignant actors to purposely set out to influence public thinking. The UK government’s own enquiry into fake news concluded amongst other things, that our electoral law was outdated and no longer fit for purpose and that, ‘digital literacy should be a fourth pillar of education, alongside reading, writing and maths’.  The clear conclusion is that currently individuals and our political systems are too open to manipulation.

The fight against chaos

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that all systems will gravitate towards chaos – the process of entropy. This is true of the very bodies that we inhabit. We start as a collection of cells that grow into an amazingly complex organism that can do incredible things. Yet one day each and every human body must once again separate into its constituent molecules, returning to chaos. The houses that we live in will only continue to stand if we keep the system going, we have to repair the roof, change pipes that corrode, re-point the bricks when it starts to disintegrate. If we didn’t do this, the house would eventually collapse into chaos.

Order relies on maintenance, vigilance, repair, and innovation. We often know when someone is in bad shape mentally because they stop maintaining their bodies and the environments they live in.  Our political systems, our farming systems, our policing and legal systems will all tend toward chaos unless we keep fixing the roof, repointing the brickwork and cleaning them. In these systems that means rooting out corruption, maintaining rights and responsibilities, responding to new information and new science and keeping people accountable.

It is inherent in us to strive for order, we are quite rightly afraid of chaos. If we neglect our responsibilities in maintaining our systems, we will descend into chaos and death. In tribal society, to be ejected from the system of the tribe would almost certainly have meant death. When we are faced with chaos, we, therefore, strive to find a way to explain it. If we can explain it, find its source, then we can tackle it and restore order.

 

Following the crowd

There is another important psychological element in our tribal thinking that affects our belief in a conspiracy theory. If you see that your tribe believes it, then you feel you must also believe it, or else you face expulsion and death. Even the Romans understood the power of this psychology when they conquered new lands. Rather than impose new beliefs, they affiliated local Gods with Gods from their own pantheon, thus instantly creating shared culture and belief. A similar process is now affecting political groupings who have to adhere to common ideological beliefs.

What a conspiracy theory appears to do, is to provide explanations for the chaos that we are perceiving. In reality what they do is to take observable events, mix them with some fiction and link them causally to unrelated events to create an enticing and exciting narrative. They are essentially theories that are ill-disciplined in their construction and entirely untested by rigorous interrogation, but they make a good story. We are storytelling creatures and a conspiracy theory can be extremely seductive in that they appear to provide the order that we seek, yet like morphine for a man with cancer, it does nothing to cure his illness, it only takes away the pain temporarily.

The evil genius du jour…

It is no wonder given the many elements of chaos that have descended on us – the collective state of fear – that billionaires should feature often in conspiracy theories. George Soros has been a

favourite, who also happens to be Jewish. With the recent pandemic, Bill Gates has taken over as the ‘evil genius du jour’. On the face of it, it is because he provides a link between the virus – through his foundation’s work on vaccination – and he is a symbol of the wealth divide, given his immense fortune. This allows for a conflation of his vaccination efforts, with his vast wealth and the old idea of world government. Because reality does not provide all the missing elements of the narrative, fiction also has to play a role. So popular versions of the conspiracy also suggest he is planning to implant everyone with microchips. They have also placed him at the centre of an Indian court case over vaccination deaths which is also untrue. Other leaps of the imagination have included that Gates and Soros have owned labs in Wuhan and that they developed coronavirus as a bioweapon. None of which stands up to scrutiny.

Vive la difference

When assessing whether a billionaire is really malign or not, we should remember that people tend not to deviate much in their personalities. Bill Gates is not a politician, but an engineer, like Elon Musk. Engineers think mechanically and in systems, if a system doesn’t work, they look to find a solution to make it work. It is not their job, or in their capabilities, no matter how clever at engineering, to consider the potential human ramifications of their suggested solutions. That job falls to the social scientists, the writers, the creatives who can imagine the ripples on the pond created by the stones of technological progress. But for Christ’s sake don’t let the artists build bridges, hospitals or sewerage networks, or we’d be in a hell of a mess. We have different roles.

Systems are never perfect, and order is never complete. We exist in a tension between order and chaos. When we have just the right amount of chaos, it means that we can stay creative and improve systems.  An illness or accident that throws our lives into chaos, can often lead to us making positive changes, a dose of chaos improves the system.

The custodians of order

When we are children, most of us are lucky enough to experience relative order, and the custodians of that order are our parents or carers. They keep chaos at bay and step in when it threatens. As we move into adulthood, unless we have the opportunity to face chaos and overcome it, we often remain in this childlike state, expecting parental figures to step in when chaos threatens. This might be politicians, business people, church leaders or the boss at work. And while they do have responsibilities, so do we all. We have to take up that responsibility and help carry the load. That means educating ourselves, staying rational and not giving in to tribalism or infantilism.

A hallmark of many a conspiracy theory is that they point to a secretive plan being enacted by shadowy characters. The reality we experience is rarely a grand design, but the result of a melting pot of competing interests, rising and falling systems and natural, unpredictable events. It so happens that we have reached a point of multiple systems experiencing greater chaos. This destabilisation has created a polarisation of opinions to the extremes, which inevitably means the loss of reasoned argument that exists in the middle.

Guarding freedoms while accepting their curtailment?

If we are losing reason, what else might we lose? I would certainly be the first to argue that we have to continually safeguard our rights and liberties whilst acknowledging our responsibilities. The pandemic followed by the curtailment of our liberties raises many questions about the sort of power that we wish our governments to have. And yet we find ourselves in a cleft stick. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. We want the government to act in our best interests, but not to overstep their powers or sacrifice our rights in the process. Naturally, given the state of fear experienced by so many, there is great suspicion of governments exerting such control over our lives. Yet we have to try to remain rational in our assessment of their actions. My own sense is that we have to give people more responsibility for their own health. We know that over-weaning parenting is hopeless for the character and future of a child, the same is true of government. If you treat people like children they will expect a parent. Good parenting empowers just as much as it protects and so does good government.

As for the motives of our political masters, there is precious little evidence of collusion at the top political level to deny the rights of citizens (although that can certainly be a consequence of negligent government), but plenty of evidence of floundering and inability to get a grip on what is going on. Our UK government came in with one ideological purpose (Brexit), they have been knocked sideways by having to deal with something unexpected in a pandemic. Trump was counting on the economy to win him the next election and Covid-19 certainly threatens that. They don’t want to be blamed for deaths, nor do they want to be blamed for ruining economies. As ever, rational sense lies somewhere in the middle.

The perfect storm that has been brewing for years

We have stepped into a perfect storm, with outdated safeguards unable to protect democratic institutions, a new virus that is not fully understood provoking a response that can potentially compromise rights and freedoms, a general public afraid for their futures and governments exposed for their lack of leadership. We have a traditional media deprived of resources and falling back on to hasty investigative journalism on a tight budget.

All of this creates a vacuum, a vacuum of knowledge and understanding. Our equilibrium is gone, our systems threatened. Into that vacuum rush theories, opinions, hypotheses, and conspiracies. Often the conspiracies can be built on perfectly good observations, but with erroneous conclusions. There is an innate psychological principle at work, a desire to find a guilty party, a bogeyman, an anti-christ, some malign force that explains our current chaos. We also seek to explain the chaos as a way of discharging its threat.

On a macro level we are tempted to look for someone to blame, just as on a personal level, if we feel slighted, we look for malign action in the perpetrator. Yet the truth is people act pretty unconsciously and within the limited restrictions of their knowledge, experience and ability to empathise. The person who genuinely, with wicked intent, plans and plots the subjugation of others is very rare indeed. What paves the way for their success (they mostly fail) is a loss of faith in the decency of the human spirit and a concomitant loss of sober reflection. We may be utterly convinced of the righteousness of our own convictions, but so are the other people. If more and more people get involved in the blame game and fuel the polarisation, then the logical conclusion is conflict.

We have the solutions and they are ancient

Since the ancient Greeks in the west and Buddhists in the east, we have developed methods of reasoning and testing ideas that remove the emotional load from the argument, but we still struggle to apply them. We need that emotion-free, rational approach to understanding the virus and its potential fallout, along with sober reflection on the dangers of the cure. This is a huge and complex problem requiring many minds and differences of opinion. The best we can do is create the forums for that discussion and approach it with the desire to learn, not to admonish.

We need to remember Jung’s warning that we think we have ideas when actually they have us. This is a call to action. We need to educate ourselves, learn to be critical in our assessment of what we read. Not critical in the sense of insulting, but critical in the sense of testing, probing, and checking an argument. We need to understand the difference between researched argument and clickbait headlines designed to provoke your base emotions. Check yourself when you read anything – are you reacting emotionally or rationally? Are your fingers tapping in anger or in the search for truth?

This is a personal challenge that we all have to take on. If you are unfamiliar with scientific method, then teach yourself. If you don’t know how good journalists work then read up on journalistic discipline. If you find it difficult to control your own mind and emotions, then start searching for the answers and avoid things that provoke the worst in you – such as getting in to twitter arguments! We all have to seek the truth, but never be so egotistical as to think we’ve found it.

“Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.” Voltaire

The conspiracy theory is a fragile construct, a straw man that will fold with any degree of testing. Yet sometimes we choose to believe them because it satisfies unconscious desires: To be with a tribe, to direct anger at a known target, to provide order where there is chaos. But if you decide to find the order within yourself instead of the outside world, then you will see with clear, unclouded eyes. If you become the master of your mind, you become the master of your destiny. When you are master of your destiny you will no longer need a conspiracy theory to explain the world, as you will understand its true nature. And no one will stab telecoms engineers.